Genre: Strategy RPG
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: Success
Release Date: June 24, 2008

Who doesn't love a good pulp-action movie? Considering the recent release (and box-office success) of "Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull," it's difficult to deny the appeal of a pulp story. As the first three "Indiana Jones" films demonstrated, one of the most powerful and prevalent themes for the pulp fiction genre is World War II. Considering the events of that war, the supernatural and realistic stories that stemmed from the events within, and the fact that there are few real-world enemies as satisfying to punch as a Nazi, and you've got a ripe setting for good old-fashioned cheesy action. Surprisingly few games take advantage of this sort of setting, with most war games being brutally realistic or overly comedic. Atlus' Operation Darkness is one of the few titles that realizes that pulp comics are the perfect fuel for a video game, and to top it off, it's a rare oasis in the desert that is the Xbox 360's role-playing game selection. The only problem? Unlike "Indiana Jones" and more like far more forgotten pulp comics, Operation Darkness never manages to rise above mediocrity.

Operation Darkness opens in the early days of World War II with two British army soldiers, Edward Kyle and Jude Lancelot. When their first mission goes sour, Edward and Jude are the only survivors of their unit, and Edward is critically wounded by a surprise attack. At the last minute, he's saved by a passing Major James Gallant, who gives Edward a blood transfusion to save his life. However, Edward's salvation comes with a side effect because Major Gallant is a werewolf. Gallant is part of Winston Churchill's elite supernatural task force, the Wolf Pack, that's been assigned to counter Hitler's own supernatural forces. Since Edward has a bit of werewolf blood in him now, he also gains a bevy of supernatural powers, and he and Jude are promptly assigned to Wolf Pack. Before long, they end up battling their way behind the scenes of the biggest events of WWII, doing everything from stopping Victor Von Frankenstein III from helping the Germans launch an atomic bomb to preventing Hitler's elite vampire squadron from resurrecting the deceased Count Dracula.

Operation Darkness' plot is really pretty weak. Most of the cast is completely expendable, so they rarely talk and almost never appear in cut scenes, leaving the primary plot to revolve around Edward, Jude, Cordelia and James. Most of these characters also end up incredibly underdeveloped and boring. The most interesting moments come when you wander in during historical events, such as the Stauffenberg assassination attempt, the Battle of the Bulge, or Hitler's last days in his bunker. When the title descends into its supernatural aspects, it gets boring. The vampire enemies are basically non-characters, their few plots are either painfully trite or deeply predictable, and more than once, I found myself wishing I could get away from the boring vampires and return to the historical areas.

The game does offer a slightly altered plot if members of the Wolf Pack die, but not enough to really justify playing through it again, and certainly not enough to make you care that one of these characters died. A number of the characters in Operation Darkness have literary or historical counterparts, but bear little resemblance to those characters. Instead of being a creepy Reanimator, Herbert East is just your team's generic healer. Elisa Van Helsing is supposed to be a professor and daughter of the character from Dracula, but she comes off as a bouncy swordswoman with a total of five lines of dialogue. Perhaps strangest of all, infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper ends up giving a heroic speech about the sanctity of life!

Operation Darkness isn't too different from your average strategy-RPG, although the World War II setting adds a few twists and turns to the concept. The battlefields are fairly large, and attack ranges are adapted to match both the battlefield size and the fact that your team can equip guns as a default weapon. Aside from your guns, Operation Darkness gives your team access to a wide variety of supernatural powers. Each member of the Wolf Pack, besides Jude Lancelot, the token human, has a supernatural skill that he or she can put to use. Fire Starter Cordelia can launch deadly barrages of magical fire, Reanimator Herbert East can revive dead allies and cure bad status effects, and heavy fighter Frank can launch devastating magic-powered punch attacks. Two of the members of the Wolf Pack can even live up to the unit's name and transform into werewolves, which massively boosts their strength and speed while their magic-fueling Military Spirit (MS) bar lasts. It's a rather bizarre mix of realism and supernatural elements that is surprisingly fun once you get used to combining the two.

However, the real twist comes in the form of the Cover system, which consists of special stances that your character can take by sacrificing his turn: Cover Move, Cover Attack, and Cover Ambush. Cover Move allows you to move significantly farther across the battlefield in exchange for tying your movement to another character's action, Cover Attack allows your character to attack when another character attacks, and Cover Ambush lets your character ambush any foe within his range if that enemy moves. By learning these systems, you can easily turn the tide of battle early in the game, giving your sniper character four to five turns instead of one, allowing your melee fighter to zoom across the battlefield, or having your heavy-weapons character tear enemies to shreds. Mess it up, and you'll wasted a lot of turns and ammunition, which you can't afford to do, as Operation Darkness features a fairly unforgiving death system.

Dead characters in Operation Darkness remain dead if they're not revived by Herbert East by the time the stage is over. The exceptions are your four main characters, who cause an instant "game over" if they die, even if Herbert is a few steps away. This may sound fairly frustrating, but dying in Operation Darkness is pretty difficult. The very first ability you get in the game lets your character automatically heal himself with potions when he gets low on health, and as long as that character has a health potion, he will never drop below 1 HP. Since you can grab more healing potions off enemy corpses, the only real way to die in Operation Darkness is to screw up your tactics beyond belief or get run over by a tank. A tank's treads are an instant-kill, no matter how many potions you have. Furthermore, your characters end up with fairly inflated hit point statistics — even Cordelia, who is probably the squishiest of your party members.

The problem with all of Operation Darkness' neat systems is that they kind of fall by the wayside by the end of the title. Once you start encountering enemies who resist bullet damage and your own team begins to ramp up in its supernatural power, there is little reason to really bother with advanced tactics. Sure, you can set up a string of Cover Ambushes to weaken regular soldiers, but you're just dropping most of your guns and ammunition to boost your speed to the maximum, doubling or tripling your turns, and going to town on enemies with magic or werewolf punches. By the end of Operation Darkness, I was mostly using Cover Attack to have my two werewolves use their bare fists to do 20,000 hit points of damage to some really durable enemies. The rest of my cast was using their seemingly limitless supply of MS to slaughter anything weaker than a dragon. Even my melee fighters were outdoing everything, since the Dragon Slayer sword does 30,000+ damage to any dragon-type enemy, and most of the other difficult foes in the game only take full damage from melee weapons. It feels rather pointless to have so many weapons designed for doing massive damage when the best tactic is to go unarmed or with melee weapons. Even the incredibly useful Bazookas start to lose their punch towards the end of the game. The heavy weight of a bazooka isn't worthwhile when you have five or six characters who can obliterate a tank with long-distance magic and two werewolves who do bazooka-level damage with their bare fists!

Outside of the 27 primary campaign missions, there is also a healthy dose of optional missions, include a number of which that can only be accessed by finding hidden Valhalla Reports on enemy corpses during the story missions. These missions are fun, but not particularly more challenging than the main story line. Doing these missions often nets your characters new skills and special weapons that can't be found elsewhere because if there is one thing your cast needs, it is to become even more ridiculously powerful.

Beyond these sub-missions, the only other real thing to do in Operation Darkness is go on Xbox Live and play co-op missions, which are, sadly, the exact same sub-missions you face in the primary mission mode. The difference is that you and a few friends can each bring a few of your party members to take them on, instead of 11 of your own hard-trained troops. The benefit here comes from the fact that completing a mission online unlocks new weapons for your offline team, which can be purchased from the in-game shop. It's not enough to make you keep going back and playing Operation Darkness' online play forever, but it's a nice little bonus for you and some friends who also own the title.

One element of Operation Darkness that is almost completely irredeemable is the graphics. There really isn't anything good that can be said about them at all. The character models are just atrocious. They're poorly designed, completely lacking in detail, and would look bad on a PlayStation 2, let alone an Xbox 360. The battlefields are fairly lame and unmemorable. Every city looks identical, every forest roughly the same, and there's very little to separate a quiet little European town from Berlin itself. Even in areas that are supposed to be bland, there are issues. A character's feet vanish from time to time, weird clipping or animation errors are common, and the camera goes insane at the slightest chance, turning upside-down or staring in the wrong direction.

Even the special effects are lame. Most of them involve incredibly unimpressive and boring animations, as well as a shocking number of pallet swaps. One of the final bosses' ultimate attacks is exactly the same as Frank Gaunt's Mjolnir's Blow, only red instead of blue. While the rest of Operation Darkness has good moments to balance out the bad, there is nothing good to say about its visual aspect. Even the few FMVs sprinkled throughout are terrible. At first, I thought they were actual in-game animations simply because they looked so bad … but no, these PlayStation-2 quality videos are supposed to be impressive. If there is one thing that is going to turn you off of Operation Darkness, it will be this.

The sound work is better, although absolutely rife with cheese. The voice-overs range from rather good to absolutely terrible, but generally remains on the "okay" level of the spectrum. The one element that might make you take pause is that Atlus remembered that this was an international coalition of troops made up mostly of foreign individuals, so they remembered to give everyone in the game an accent. For some, this works, particularly the British soldiers who sound quite charming, but for others, like the Irish Sniper Cynthia, it can just be silly to hear them try to force an accent. There are a few musical tunes, but they were neither notable nor interesting, so I can't remember a single one without re-checking the game. The kindest thing one can say is that they didn't intrude on the game either; they just existed and did little to add anything to the overall gameplay.

Operation Darkness isn't a bad game at all. It has its issues, but they don't ruin the experience — with the possible exception of the absolutely shameful graphics. The problem is that it doesn't really rise about mediocre. You'll play the game, you'll probably enjoy it, and then it will be tossed aside or traded in, and you'll probably forget that you even played it within a month. Not even a lackluster Xbox Live mode or optional missions can make the title something that will keep your interest past the story mode, especially once your team becomes so ridiculously powerful that you'll be able to slaughter everything in your path without tactics. Operation Darkness is another Xbox 360 title that will probably sate a desperate RPG gamer's fix, but it will do little to improve Microsoft's poor standing among Japanese RPG fans. This is for hardcore fans only, and even they may want to look twice at the game's $59.99 price tag.

Score: 6.0/10