Starbreeze Studios released one of the best movie based games ever in 2004 with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, a first person action game that brought real character, plotlines and innovation to the genre (OK, the movie itself was bad but you can't have everything). Now Starbreeze is working on yet another adaptation, this time based on Top Cow's comic book The Darkness. At E3 last week we got a chance to check out a brief demo of the game.

Both the comic and game focus on a mob hit man who has acquired some extra special abilities; powers from a dark dimension that in the E3 demo were put to good use. The demo started with our "hero" being surrounded by the police and a SWAT team going after him. Big mistake. The powers that our character demonstrated during the demo were varied, including tendrails coming out of his body that can lift and throw people and even entire cars around, even spirits that come out and do some serious head chompping and even the ability to move through places that normal humans cannot. Of course you are a hit man so you can still shoot things with a gun if you want to. However you also have to deal with the evil demons who are apparently not too happy that you have their abilities. In the E3 demo they appeared and dissapeared at will trying to attack you.

Starbreeze created some of the best graphics ever for a game with Riddick and The Darkness also has some incredible looking visuals as well, from the normal human perspective of our hero and switching to his demon side. Lighting, visuals, character models and more are top notch. At one point the demo even showed us something that we have rarely, if ever, seen in a game. In one room a television came on and there were the head folks at Starbreeze explaining that they had incorporated real video inside the gameplay and plan to use it in some fashion in The Darkness. The game will also apparently have multiplayer options but so far the development team isn't saying yet what they have planned.

While the game is still early (its not due out until 2007) we are hopeful that The Darkness will do for comic book games what Riddick did for the movie game genre. Look for The Darkness to be published by 2K Games for next gen consoles and we hope to have more info on the game soon.

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