We tend to think of our lives as set. What is going to happen will happen regardless, whether it be through nature or nurture or some divine intervention. There’s no halting the master plan. In 2009, as the shooter genre was entering a crossroads in its rapid development, one game told an interesting story that swept across time and asked how permeate our chronology is in Darkest Of Days.

You play as Morris, a soldier for Custer during his infamous last stand, snatched out of time, R.I.P.D. style, into a futuristic agency. Time travel has put history out of order, and it is your job as one of the recent to go through the most chaos and try to save soldiers from an early grave. They do their best to try to put you back into yours. Armed with weapons your opponents could only dream of, you must go through some of the bloodiest battles of recent history, saving who needs to be saved, and dealing with the politics of time-travel. As you try to work out whose side you are really on?

The gameplay of Darkest Of Days is simple, but enticing. You are thrown into a battlefield, and among the carnage and the terror are some targets highlighted blue (kinda like that one Twilight Zone episode). These shouldn’t be killed, and it is your task to incapacitate them, throwing special pellets, keeping them out of harm’s way. There are other objectives, too, as is standard for a shooter of the time, but with the smoke and terror of the battlefields of the past. This should keep you more than occupied as you try to piece together the time-crossing storyline of the campaign. The game boasts a custom engine to help live up to Darkest Of Days premise. The game’s strong suit is taking full advantage of physics engines and the like to help sell the experience.

The game gives you a wide arsenal of weapons, and yes, it is a lot of fun using M16S on opponents from antiquity, almost like messing around with some cheat codes in shooters of days gone past. While the levels are broad, your path through them is are pretty linear affair with little opportunity for you to get lost. You do have a map, and that can be useful, if not just fun to look at. The game is smart on bringing the set pieces, though, from the snowy Russian front to the final days of Pompeii, Darkest Of Days knows how to provide a compelling setting.

We can talk about the homogenisation of genres until the cows come home. Darkest Of Days throws many interesting ideas into the mix, and while the path of fate seemed firmly laid out for the genre, it showed there was still a breath of ingenuity left. Unfortunately, the developer folded before any sequels could be realised, proving the adage about the candle burning brightest burning the quickest. But on the other hand, you don’t need a time machine to see that coming, though.

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