It’s rare that a game manages to be so inept and with so many insulting flaws in its design that I’m reduced to slumping in my chair, sighing, and wishing I had a large stock of liquor handy, but Darkest of Days managed that with ease. I tried to cut this game some slack because it’s from a small developer, yet this time travel FPS is a perfect example of wasting a great idea on a bad game. It starts off with a tutorial battle putting you as a soldier in Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn, and just before you’re about to die a ripple in time opens; a futuristic agent comes out of it, pulling you to safety and effectively recruiting you to the group he works for. From here, you’re tasked with protecting history and finding certain individuals in some of history’s famous battles. That sounds awesome, right?

The problem is it only sounds good. Darkest of Days starts with tons of potential, then throws it away because the developers insist on making game design errors we learned not to do a decade ago. The first problems come up from the map layouts, which require you to run from waypoint to waypoint across a huge area in order to get anything done. The vast majority of your time in this ’shooter’ will in fact be spent sprinting across long distances, and not shooting. Worse, the most sensible routes to many waypoints don’t work; you’re often unable to traverse knee-high obstacles and areas that appear to be open fields instead tend to be invisible walls. This often means you’ll have to do some side-tracking to find the right path, and you’ll be doing so much of this that it’s entirely possible to beat some levels without firing a shot; just keep running!

When you do get into a fight, expect tons of other problems to come up. Questionable physics are just the start, as enemies run through trees. Not into them, but through them. I’ve also seen allies randomly spawn out of thin air to replace fallen troops like this were some kind of deathmatch game. Worst of all is how you reload since it normally takes a very long time, though if you pull the trigger at just the right time during the reload you can speed it up; failure makes it take even longer however. You can also earn upgrades that speed the reloads up to something reasonable, but this means you’re not upgrading some other feature of your guns instead.

Things get worse, ironically enough, due to your character usually being issued period-appropriate weapons. This means you’re using bolt action rifles for most of World War 1, and you may be using a musket for parts of the Civil War until you find something better. This is a problem because it’s combined with the reloading issues above to create very tedious combat. Certainly this idea can be done well, there are some multiplayer FPS mods that manage it, but it’s not fun in a singleplayer experience and if I wanted to spend lots of time reloading I’d go to a gun range rather than play a video game.

Tedious cross-map treks combined with the weapon selection add up to a game that will quickly bore you, and various minor to moderate glitches along the way don’t help. Nor does the plot, which goes out of its way to insult your intelligence as the time travel agency you work for repeatedly tells you to not disrupt history. That would be fine, but then they will do completely insane things like replacing your Civil War musket with a modern assault rifle and turn you loose on an unsuspecting Confederate firing line; I’m pretty sure history books would make note of the super soldier that raked an 1800s combat formbation with forty bullets in just a few seconds! And incidents like this are really just the start of the nonsense, sadly enough.

The single biggest problem I came across was a section where the game takes control away from you, forcing you to march in lock-step with several Union troops and get into a static firing line with them and reducing an FPS experience to a shooting gallery. If I wanted that, I’d play Duck Hunt! ...Actually, Duck Hunt sounds pretty good right around now, certainly more fun than this game. Especially when Darkest of Days loves to hit you with artillery blasts for doing as your allies demand; they’ll yell things like "Go! Get up the hill!", and if you move at best possible speed for the hill you will be hit by scripted artillery; it turns out you need to move at about half that speed in order to get past the blasts unharmed. The game also likes pelting you with artillery just for starting the map and moving along the only possible route you can take, resulting in a lot of frustrated yelling. Here’s a hint to the developers: Don’t punish the player for doing the only thing they can possibly do to advance in your game, it’s unintuitive and makes for an angry player.

While Darkest of Days does manage to deliver a few interesting encounters and mixes things up some by introducing various time-traveler antagonists, it gets almost everything wrong. Serious drops in framerate happen often, there are significant glitches, combat is usually very boring and involves lots of reloading, and most of your time will be spent marching from one objective to the next. Then you’ll be punished for doing what the game told you to, meaning that even normally obvious activities will have you worried a trap is present. Even accounting for the fact this is a game made by a small studio and they just won’t have the resources to pull out all the stops on an FPS title, there is no way this is worth anything near retail price. It’s not even worth renting.

To make this as clear as I can: Darkest of Days managed to provoke almost nothing but depression, anger, and cynical laughter in me. I urge you to avoid it at all costs.