You start the adventure off seeing a cow getting mutilated before feasting on a horse and killing it - so right away, the game goes for the jugular and doesn’t let up. The core game has you shooting the heck out of anything that moves while spilling as much blood as possible to feast on - with gory spectacles on display even by today’s standards. It’d be difficult to see at night, but thanks to his new vampiric tendencies, he doesn’t need perfect vision - he’s got wacky red and white x-ray style vampire vision! This is a cool effect because with a click of the right stick, the screen goes red and white, which makes it easier to see enemies at the expense of the environment getting a bit washed out. If this game was released in 2020 or if it gets a formal remaster, we can get some mask DLC that would resolve that problem by covering at least part of his face up and then he could get some shades as an unlockable. It’s like the Death Star having just a small opening that if hit could destroy it - leaving his face exposed. Oh, and if you’re bitten you start turning into a vampire and unfortunately Jericho manages to get bitten despite a giant hat, waistcoat and shoulderpads. Instead of gold or treasure, it’s filled with Lazaraus - a supernatural creature that has minions all over. Jericho Cross is a badass gunslinger (is there any other kind in fiction?) and he’s got one more train to rob, but this one is just a wee bit cursed. Some of that has to do with its premise, but a lot of it is how the shooting gallery-esque gameplay hasn’t been replicated and its mix of gameplay and cinematics blending into one another logically was far ahead of its time. It’s impressive with so many years of hindsight to see just how well Darkwatch holds up to the test of time – especially in a crowded genre like first-person shooters. And with so much time having passed since Hardcore Gamer originally debuted with a robust Darkwatch cover story - and a game undeniably similar being announced for next year in the form of Evil West - we thought it’d be a perfect time to both celebrate fifteen years of Hardcore Gamer and look back to see if a decade-and-a-half of a publication’s existence would be enough time to change our perception of the haunted western title. In the fifteen years since the game graced our debut magazine cover we’ve seen a lot of FPS games on the market, but nothing has quite managed to come close to Darkwatch.
Hardcore Gamer’s first cover story was on this game in 2005, and while the franchise may have fallen shy of its lofty expectations, the core experience remains a lot of fun. High Moon Studios, befitting their name, had high hopes for Darkwatch to become something big - but dame fortune wasn’t smiling upon them.
DARKWATCH GAME GUNS MOVIE
You had ideas like Bloodrayne that were B-tier games but wound up crossing over to horror movie audiences thanks to the films - so a game in the franchise now had two potential fanbases to draw from. A lot of early-aughts franchises were getting turned into movies, albeit largely bad ones, but movies nonetheless. Darkwatch came about at an interesting time in gaming history.
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