When we received a showcase invitation from Phantom EFX, a highly successful online casino game publisher, it struck me as odd. I knew them only as focusing on online casino game publishing, with two of their games placing in the “Top 10 Sellers of the Year” in the PC gaming category in both 2006 and 2007. We didn’t know what to expect when we approached their meeting room.
Our expectations were turned 180 degrees almost immediately as we stepped in Phantom EFX’s E3 2009 booth. The CEO/Director Aaron Schurman of 8 Monkey Labs (the game’s developer) gave us a presentation of their latest project, Darkest of Days, and as we took down information about the game, we could understand why Phantom EFX decided to take a chance and push toward this new and challenging path.
Darkest of Days is categorized as a Historical First Person Shooter (FPS). The player would be in a total of five different historical events–if we have our notes straight: The Battle of Antietam, Civil War, World War I, World War II and Pompeii. How can you be at all of those events? Simple: time travel.
You’ll usually start with a simple objective, like saving a certain person to somehow better the history of humankind. But as you can only imagine, the time traveling doesn’t always end up how you might have expected. Sometimes, you’ll have to be on the German side, and the next second, you have to help the Russians survive. The events and storyline can be altered quickly as the player progresses through the game. On one mission, you thought that accomplishing Objective A would help you, but later you’ll find out the decision you made before would work against you. Sometimes you won’t even know why you’d have to do certain things until the last minute, the last remaining seconds. Not only that, the AI acts in such a manner that a wide variety of results is possible even if you’d experienced the battle differently before.
And did we mention the time traveling? Yes, it means that the player can bring his/her own future weapons to the old historic events and vice versa. Just imagine bringing BFG to the World War I battlefield. The possible weapon combinations are limitless.
Sounds too good be true? Well, the demo that we witnessed worked smoothly, and they were able to represent the gameplay very well. And 8 Monkey Labs’ own game engine, Marmoset, didn’t look bad at all. To be honest, I might have seen a better game engine or two, but 300 people in one map with their own animations is interesting enough to be compared with some of the leading engines today. Developing and creating their own IP and their own game engine, we could really see their ambition.
The one possible downside is that it might have been fun if the game had multiplayer. When we brought this up, Aaron hinted that it could be in the sequel of the Darkest of Days. We certainly like the idea.
The title is expected to be released in Fall 2009, on PC and Xbox 360.
