Darkest of Days does have a lot going for it; unfortunately it also has a lot going against it. Frame rate issues were experienced constantly throughout the game and even though the Marmoset Engine allows for swarms of enemies on the screen at any given time, the game was still choppy even when there were only a few enemies on screen. There were other issues with the game as well such as hit detection, where shooting an enemy point blank wouldn’t even faze him.

To spice things up a little, throughout the game there are enemies that have a role to play in the future and these enemies are highlighted with a blue aura around them. If you kill them, sometimes agents will teleport in and make life difficult and you will also be deducted points that you can use to upgrade your weapons between missions. While you can still incapacitate these enemies by shooting them in the leg or using “chasers”, little balls that seek out the blue aura enemies and neutralize them, those that you are fighting along side have no such moral dilemmas with the future duty of those enemies and can gun them down willy-nilly with no repercussions.

Invisible walls still seem to be a game design detriment that even when spread out across various time frames you cannot avoid. While not that big of an issue for the most part, there were more than a few times when trying to retreat from a firefight was useless. You would simply not be able to move further, although there was plenty of land ahead of you resulting in a quick death and a painfully long load screen.

Another small issue was that the default color for subtitles and the HUD is a faint yellow, which immediately needs to be changed in the options menu as more times than not, the text is lost in the environment. When reloading your weapons, each gun has a reload meter that is displayed with a green sweet spot. If the button is tapped as the meter passes it, the weapon will reload faster and if missed, the gun will jam a la Gears of War, which makes reloading incredibly frustrating if you can’t see the meter.

Darkest of Days has its ups and downs. It’s a novel concept that is hampered by technical difficulties on the Xbox 360. (We’ll see how the PC edition fares in our separate review.) Those technicalities take a pretty good game and drag it down into the realm of mediocrity. Still, automatic weapons during a Civil War battle…it’s hard to pass that up.

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