Featuring a range of impressive lighting and shader effects along with extensive use of post-processing, Digital Extremes’ proprietary Evolution engine is a great fit for The Darkness 2, thanks in no small part to a superb cel-shaded art style that brings Top Cow’s comic to life in a beautifully vibrant, violently gory manner. After the disappointments surrounding the PS3 version of the original game – with its sub-HD resolution, pared down effects and lower quality textures – the good news is that the standard of the cross-platform development work this time around is hugely improved: The Darkness 2 is very, very close on both consoles.
To be honest this isn’t particularly surprising given that Digital Extremes’ custom Evolution engine has clearly been optimised for both consoles for quite a while now. 2007′s Dark Sector was an early example of impressive cross-platform conversion work done right; fairly closely matched in terms of performance, the main difference resting with the sub-HD framebuffer resolution of the PS3 game.
The Darkness 2 pushes both consoles thoroughly with an extensive range of visual effects. Dynamic light sources are scattered about the environments and post-processing is abundant throughout, making for an expansive range of impressive graphical effects. However, this all comes at a cost: there have been some compromises made on both consoles to accommodate these features while working within a 33ms rendering budget necessary to maintain a steady 30 frames per second update.
