“ Have you ever wondered what could happen if time travel was a reality? Have you ever thought about the possibility of going back in time to rewrite history for the better? That possibility is a reality in Darkest of Days. In Darkest of Days, players will travel back and forth through the annals of time to relive some of mankind's most dire hours, when human society was at its lowest points. By fighting through terrible events such as The Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest conflict of the Civil War, and both World War I and II, the player will attempt to save certain key individuals who were never meant to become involved in these truly monstrous events and thereby change human history for the better.”

This is the premise for the new tittle published by Phantom EFX and developed by 8Monkey Labs, Darkest of Days, is a game that promises interesting ideas in the well saturated FPS market.

Darkest of Days is a first-person shooter that revolves around the concept of time traveling and its consequences. Do you remember Back to the Future? The idea is similar, bending the rules of time and space in the past will cause changes in the present. But an important difference is that Darkest of Days offers historically accurate settings and events.

You will fight in five different time eras: Pompeii, Antietam, WWi, WWII and Little Big Horn, using real weapons from that specific period, or why not bringing some from the future to help you with your quest. There are over twenty weapons to fight with, both from the original time period as well as those brought back from the future.

The games’s history puts you in the boots  of Alexander Morris, a soldier that is fighting in a particularly bloody historical American battle form the XIX century,  During the Battle Alexander is close to death, when he is saved by one man that push him thru a mysterious portal that sends him directly to the future. Here the plots begins, we learn about an organization that wants to change the future by eliminating people or affecting events in the past by making slight changes in history so their murders and sabotages will look like accidents. That’s when we discover that Alexander himself is a target chosen in order to wipe out an entire bloodline from the future. In vengeance, and also because who can say no to a offer to save humanity?, Alex decides to become a time traveler agent focused on thwarting the plans of the evil time travelers terrorists.

The player will have to adapt to the different strategies based on the time eras, sometime you will be in the midle of a big battle, but other times you will have more discret missions. The strategy and weapons change from era to era so you will have to adapt quickly to the environments, since it’s not the same a battle in Pompeii to a battle in WWI.

8Monkey Labs designed the Marmoset engine specifically for the game. This engine can handle over 300 characters on the screen at one time, enabling the game to have densely populated battle scenes, all with their own AI, giving interesting and very unique outcomes to every battle depending on the variables present in the battlefield.

This means more replay value, since if you replay the battles, you will have different responses form your enemies. Another interesting twist in the game is that you will have to travel back to the past and fight on the other side of the battle, to fix other problems created by the time travel terrorist.

From what we saw, we can say that Darkest Of Days, offers beautiful graphics, an interesting story and a lot of gameplay hours (20-25). Put this game in your radar, It will be released on PC and Xbox 360 in the Fall 2009 season.