Darkman (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Ocean's 1991 license-based action game for the NES, Darkman.

Darkman is an NES game that lets you play as Liam Neesen as a mummy. If that thought excites you, you can stop reading right now: you've found your game!

In Darkman, you play as Dr. Peyton Westlake, a scientist-turned-vigilante. A gang led by the criminal kingpin Durant left you hideously disfigured after a botched hit, and you're on a quest for vengeance.

The quest to take down Durant is comprised of five levels spanning sixteen rapid-fire stages that cycle through multiple gameplay modes.

After clearing the initial warehouse stages, Darkman will snap some photos of his first target, Pauly, and create a mask that will allow him to assume Pauly's identity. Wearing this mask, he'll fight through Pauly's set of Central Park-themed stages, and once Pauly has been dealt with, Darkman will repeat this process as he hunts down Skip at the fun fair and Smiley in Chinatown. After killing all the henchman, Darkman can finally head to the skyscraper construction site for the showdown with Durant.

Like Robocop 2 (   • RoboCop 2 (NES) Playthrough  ), Darkman was developed by Painting by Numbers, and the two have a lot in common. They both feature bright and colorful graphics, C64-style soundtracks dominated by arpeggiated chords, first-person point-and-shoot minigames, and an endless parade of insta-kill stage gimmicks.

But Darkman isn't quite as terrible a game as Robocop 2 was. It suffers from many of the same issues - the platforming controls are obnoxiously slippery, the time limits are too short, most stages require tons of trial-and-error and memorization to get through, and the collision detection demands you to be pixel-perfect in your timing - but the stages are more varied and better designed, the difficulty level has been toned down, and because the game isn't a port of a C64 game like Robocop 2 was, the presentation better plays to the strengths of the NES hardware. It looks and sounds much better overall.

Mediocrity isn't usually something to celebrate, but Painting by Numbers at least deserves credit for trying to do better. Darkman isn't great, but it is far more competently put together than Robocop 2 was.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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