If you’re a rabid fan of vampires, the Wild West, or vampires in the Wild West, then Darkwatch might just tickle your fancy. Developed by High Moon Studios (formerly Sammy Studios), Darkwatch is a no nonsense run-and-gun first person shooter that takes a lot of its queues from similar FPS games like Painkiller and Serious Sam in terms of mechanics and frantic gameplay. The result is a game that almost gets everything right, but offers an otherwise enjoyable experience.

Darkwatch follows the story of a train robber named Jericho Cross who during one of his robberies manages to accidentally release Lazarus, also known as the son of Satan who makes sure to turn Jericho into a sort of half vampire before making his escape. A woman named Cassidy witnesses all of this and insists that you help her to undo this mess that you’ve caused. Cassidy belongs to an organization called Darkwatch who specialize in this type of thing (like the undead and demons for instance). Jericho spends the early portions of the game making his way to the Darkwatch headquarters and attempting to prove his loyalty to them. After loyalty is proven, Jericho must set out in search of Lazarus and retrieve what’s left of his soul.

The story mode in Darkwatch is a hybrid of linear strings of levels and choose-your-own adventure style mission selections. You’ll find yourself following one story point for a number of levels, such as reaching the Darkwatch citadel, and then have to visit the local scientist to choose between a handful of missions that are all required, but can be done in no particular order. Typical missions are divided into multiple sections by checkpoints which makes things such as dying or turning the game off and coming back at a later time a little less tedious. Some checkpoints require load times, but they’re relatively fast and thankfully don’t get in the way too much. No matter what kind of a mission you’re on you’ll always find yourself gunning down hordes of undead minions while trying to accomplish small goals to get to your overall objective. The gameplay tends to wear thin when playing for long amounts of time since mission objectives are all similar and there isn’t much in terms of enemy variety, so small doses are recommended. There are some missions where you'll be riding on horseback to get on a train or ride to an objective while gunning down deadites on horseback which helps to break up the action a bit. Boss battles are virtually nonexistent and tend to focus on shooting down seemingly endless waves of foes for a predetermined amount of time or governed by a life bar at the top of the screen.

There are a couple of boss battles at the end of the game which may start off as being frustrating, but eventually become enjoyable once you find out how you’re supposed to be doing things. The borderline overuse of checkpoints are in full effect during the boss fights and you’ll be able to restart the battle in mid fight which works since boss battles can run a little long depending on what strategy you use.

Jericho doesn’t come to a fight ill equipped since he has a variety of weapons at his disposal such as dual pistols, shotguns, rail rockets, crossbows that fire explosive bolts, and carbines. Though the overall selection is pretty lean, weapons are all pretty satisfying to use especially given the way enemies will lose their limbs and crumple to the ground differently depending on where you shoot them. If you’re in the middle of a reload or out of ammo all together, you can also give your foes a butt in the face – with your gun that is, by means of a very powerful and effective melee attack. You can also enforce crowd control with sticks of dynamite and splitter bombs, which explode and release a few smaller bombs to clean up what the initial explosion didn’t take care of.

Conventional weapons aren’t the only order of the day thanks in part to Jericho being half blood sucker. He can gain special abilities that will give him increased firepower, mystic armor, more powerful melee attacks, induce fear in enemies, or just blow them all up. Abilities are divided into good and evil and more can be earned based off of actions that come up at certain points of the game where you’ll find a dead body or injured comrade and you can choose to mercifully kill them, save their lives, or fiendishly take their essence for yourself. Each of the actions will give you a certain amount of points towards the good or evil categories. You can charge up your abilities as well as increase your health by collecting blood essence which is left behind by enemies. The good news is that blood essence is all over the place, so you should never have to feel like you should save your special abilities for any really hairy moments.

By default, Jericho remains alive with his blood shield which allows him to take more punishment than his more human Darkwatch brethren. The blood shield works just like the shield in Halo where if you manage to stay away from danger for a second, the shield will recharge. There’s also blood vision which will let you see hard to find enemies and items. You can also perform a double jump to get to hard to reach places though Jericho has a tendency to float over certain platforms at times. Take heed since daylight will null out these abilities and some levels require you to strategically hide in the shadows to stay alive.

The game doesn’t end when you beat the story mode. You can always revisit earlier levels in Gunslinger mode and try to unlock extras by playing on different difficulties and under certain amounts of time. Given the short story mode, this will at least add a couple hours onto your play time.

There’s also a multiplayer mode available, but it’s barely worth mentioning for the PS2 version of the game. While the Xbox version has online play for sixteen players, the PS2 is limited to split screen mode. The usual multiplayer modes are here like deathmatch and capture the flag, but really aren’t that much fun to play.

The visual presentation in Darkwatch does a great job of conveying the mood and feel of the game making it a perfect melding of gothic and old west styles. Levels (save for a few) are dark and brooding and make you feel like something is bound to jump out at you at any point. As mentioned earlier, the location specific damage on enemies makes shooting them down feel rewarding despite the lack of variety of what you’re killing. Given the amount of enemies onscreen, the game never skips a beat which is a plus. Jericho also looks great, when you can see him that is, and his Darkwatch cronies as well as his female partner Tala are all well done.

The voice acting in Darkwatch is top notch; even characters voiced by those not named Rose McGowan or Jennifer Hale are all superb. I’m not dogging the celebrity voice acting, mind you; they did a great job as well. Unobtrusive and pretty forgettable western-themed music sets the backdrop for the story and managed to fit in nicely and set the mood at key moments, which is really the only time you’ll notice the soundtrack.

Darkwatch manages to be a really good time when taken in moderation and just when you really start to get some enjoyment out of it, it’s all over. Thankfully, the gunslinger mode and unlockable extras will keep you coming back for a little while. Sure, the story may be a little thin and there are some shortcomings in the gameplay, but Darkwatch definitely earns the title of "just plain fun" and in the end, that's all that really matters.

- Brad Hicks (Dr. Swank), SwankWorld Media