10 Video Games With Utterly Pointless Multiplayer Modes You Ignored

5. The Darkness

The Darkness was pretty much your standard first-person shooter, except of course for the supernatural powers you could use in conjunction with weapons that are more traditional. Over the course of the story you take the role of Jackie Estacado, a hitman for the mafia, as he seeks vengeance for a failed assassination attempt. Okay, so it didn€™t have the strongest plot, but overall The Darkness offered a unique and satisfying form of gameplay; combining the use of guns with demonic powers, such as the ability to summon imps or use blackened tentacles to impale, to overcome enemies. It was all rather refreshing compared to the usual Call of Duty clone that saturate the genre so much. The multiplayer though brought back everything that is bad in first-person shooters. The goal was simply to run around and try to kill as many enemies as possible, although this was next to impossible most of the time thanks to way the online modes worked. Many of the mechanics were broken while the network code was horrendous, making lag a permanent fixture regardless of how good your own connection was. It was like the developers had made it deliberately terrible so they wouldn€™t have to add it in to any of their future products. So bad was it that most reviews actually recommended that their readers avoid it completely, guaranteeing that the vast majority would simply ignore it altogether. It was no surprise then when the developers decided to drop the competitive multiplayer aspect altogether in the sequel, instead focusing on a less than stellar co-operative mode.
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Contributor

A sport, gaming and fiction enthusiast, I particularly enjoy Formula 1, rugby, tennis, athletics and football.