Darkest of Days: What if you could travel in time?
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Discuss
Categories:
Software Review
Tags:
gpu
nvidia
cpu
games
wwii
physics
realistic
physx
You can, and enjoy physics and cinematic visions whilst doing it: the first serious implementation of GPU-based physics.
During wars and natural catastrophes people go missing, MIA in the case of wars, simply missing persons in disasters. They could be alive, they could be dead, the ambiguity of their status is the basis for the time travel in the multi-era, Darkest of Days FSP from 8Monkey Labs. In order to avoid conflicts with the time-continuum and prevent you from killing your own grandmother, you have to be in never-never land, or so the game’s story premise goes. I buy it, it works for me, I want to shoot things not contemplate philosophical paradoxes.
So just as you are about to become a statistic at Little Bighorn (or not) you are snatched away by time travelers and taken to Time Traveler lab’s HQ for briefing. OK so far? At HQ it’s explained to you (by a virtual Mother) that Dr. Koell discovered how to time travel and was very strict in his admonishments and rules about how no one should make any changes. But, the good doctor’s gone missing and now there are rips in the time line that have to be repaired. Seems some rouge time travelers are knocking off folks who should have lived—we can’t have that now can we? You’re mission, Mr. Morris, should you choose to accept it, is to go back in time and protect those folks so they can fulfill their historical responsibilities.
For openers you’re offered two missions, find and protect a soldier during the U.S. Civil War battle of Antietam, or protect a Russian general during a WWI battle. As you progress through the game you’ll be offered other theaters like WWII and Pompeii before the pop.
You enter and exit the missions through a large (~ 2m) shiny rippling blue sphere that you run into, and they teleport you through time, and it sounds like you’ve jumped into a swimming when you’ve done it. It’s a clever VR portal concept, just one the many creative and interesting aspects of the game.
One of the highlights of the game is the atmospherics and physics, it has dynamic leaves and flowers, wind, ground fog, smoke, volcanic ash, and debris from weapon damage such as wood splinters, rock chips, broken glass and more.
The game does an excellent job on smoke and fog. Smoke is fully interactive—it drifts with the wind, responds to explosive force fields, and swirls behind the AI characters as they run through it. The fog is interactive, it and leaves are blown around gently by a slight wind, the fog is also pushed aside as the horses ride through it. Wood is thrown up as a bullet impacts the fence and impacts are left on destructible objects. On non-destructible objects (like some windows or walls), a decal is left.
All the destructible and the particle stuff (i.e., fog and smoke) is done via Nvidia’s PhysX engine and accelerated via the GPU. It can be part of the main GPU if you only have one, or it can be a dedicated PhysX GPU, and the physic GPU can be any Nvidia GPU, you don’t have to match GPUs as you do with SLI.
When you complete a level, which may or may not the mission, you jump back to HQ (sometimes just in time) via the big blue sphere (reminded me of The Prisoner a bit). If you did a decent job, Mother tells you so and gives you a few points that you can use to upgrade your weapons.
Also, you have a guide, the Scout. He’s from HQ and goes with you on missions, advising you on where not to go, and occasionally loaning you a modern, sometimes future weapon—nothing like a M16 for taking out too many rebel soldiers. There are other goodies too, but I don’t want this to be spoiler or a do walkthrough.
What do we think?
We love it. It’s a reasonably easy game, pretty linear, but you can wander around, and you have limited movements (you jump and crouch, that’s it), the weapons work well and are accurate. The story line is very good and the scenery is great. The physics aren’t in your face—it’s not physic effects for the sake of demo’ing physics. The engine is well used and appropriately—kudos to the designers. Due to a burdensome travel schedule I wasn’t able to finish it and I am looking forward to getting back to it. I hope this game get’s mod’ed because the environments and theaters are great and I’d like to spend more time in them.
Curiously, there was a game in 2002 (Darkest Days) with a similar tile but none of the features or characteristics of the Darkest of Days.
BUT WAIT! There’s more. The game coming out this week is Batman: Arkham Asylum which takes advantage of graphics plus physics to give it extraordinary realism. So the days of boring games are over, physics and cinematic effects are here now, today!
