Darkwatch Preview

GameCore is a weekly column by CBSNews.com's William Vitka, Chad Chamberlain and Joey Arak that focuses on gamers and gaming.

Sure, there are the Silent Hill and Resident Evil franchises, but the boys behind Silent Hill have been plundering H.P. Lovecraft's tomes for eons and Resident Evil 4 owes so much to John Carpenter's The Thing that Capcom should be sending him royalty checks.

So, when High Moon Studios sent me an Xbox beta copy of Darkwatch, a Horror Western shooter, it cheered me up. And I needed cheering up after I saw that Hillary Clinton's railing against violent video games, a politically motivated slam against 18-to-34-year-old voters.

Darkwatch's gameplay isn't original, but this kind of genre amalgamation is and it's got something that the cookie cutter crap doesn't: inspiration and a true love for the source material that came before it. Blade, Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Tombstone, The Professionals, Dawn of the Dead, Hellraiser, From Dusk 'Till Dawn, the Evil Dead films and, I'm earning major geek points here because I doubt ANYONE remembers this flick, Bruce Campbell's Sundown: Vampire In Retreat -- which is, itself, a vampire western.

In Darkwatch, you play as outlaw Jericho Cross. He's lanky and menacing like an evil version of Vash the Stampede or Spike from Cowboy Bebop mixed with Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name.

A robber by trade, Cross hits the wrong train one night and awakens a vampire lord.

Now he's been bitten, turned into a half-breed and is none too pleased about it. Cross is taken in by a Men In Black, or Nocturne, type organization called Darkwatch and does what any rational guy worth his salt in Badassery -- Badassage? Badassosity? -- does: he declares war on the forces of evil responsible for his plague.

And what a glorious war it is.

The art design in the game is fantastic. It's the Wild West, but infected with a kind of wicked art nouveau. Your guns, for example, look like antiques that H.R. Geiger spent too much time fooling with. They're pointy and deadly and make quite an impression.

The demo that I played contained two levels, enough to get a good feel for High Moon's love child.

One level took place in a cemetery. Being the paranormal exterminator that you are, your job is to beat the living crap out of the living dead that have infested it. There are few things I could love more than going full-bore into a zombie-ridden graveyard while I hear the click of my spurs and the eagerness of my sidearm.

The cemetery is barren, small, and though it's an open space, once the zombies start pouring out of their graves it feels awfully claustrophobic. Tombstones break as bullets shatter them and the Havok engine does a wonderful job throwing Ray Harryhausen-esque skeletal carcasses into the green-grey sky after I've shot an explosive arrow through their undead chests.

The second level starts you off chasing a moving train on your vampiric steed. You control the horse while trying to split the skulls of zombified sharpshooters keeping you from boarding. Once you've gotten on the rails, you pick up my favorite weapon: the shotgun.

Nothing says "Good Morning!" like double-ought buckshot.

Darkwatch controls like Halo, the standard for console shooters, and runs smoothly. The only time the frame rate dropped was when I unloaded on an enemy with my shotgun at super close range and overloaded the screen with fiery bones a la the vampires' deaths in the Blade films. Other than that, it was like butter.

The sound was pretty good, but when something exploded -- via dynamite or killer crossbow -- into fragmented unhappiness, my speakers crackled like the in-game treble was off the charts. That could have been a problem unique to my sound setup, but it's worth mentioning.

There is also an RPG aspect to Darkwatch. Throughout the course of the game, you'll have to make certain choices that will either lead you down the "good" or "evil" path. Both routes have their pluses. For example, in one level, you can either save a woman who's been recently infected by sucking out the bad hemoglobin, or feed on her. Feeding on her, the "evil" choice, grants you super melee attacks. Saving her gives you powered-up weapons. I can't say if I love it or hate it since I don't know it's long-term effects, but it's interesting.

And it's got zombies…lots and lots of zombies. GameCore is pro-zombie, so we see this as a good thing.

I'm looking forward to seeing a completed Darkwatch. It's a good-looking title from an independent studio. We'll see what happens in September when High Moon expects it to hit store shelves.

I can't wait.
By William Vitka