Twenty-first birthdays are oftentimes celebrated with massive amounts of alcohol, but for hit man Jackie Estacado, his 21st isn't nearly as enjoyable. He's inherited an ageless power known as The Darkness, an evil force that predates human beings. Passed down from father to son (the father dies the moment the child is born), it's both a curse and a gift, a way to manipulate the world to someone's advantage. This is the backstory to 2K Games' and developer Starbreeze's latest title, The Darkness, an eerie looking first person shooter that combines frenetic fire fights with survival horror, and thus far, it looks phenomenal.

The Darkness is actually a comic published by Top Cow productions that blends modern day mafia shenanigans with the supernatural, so there's plenty of gun fights and scenes of mass death, all of which have apparently been carried over to the videogame. Starbreeze (who previously worked on the exquisitely delectable The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay) is keeping with the comic book's back story while at the same time injecting it with various scenarios that should further immerse the player.

In the game you play as Jackie Estacado, a hit man who's seemingly been double crossed by the Francetti family Don, Uncle Paulie. Extremely pissed off, Jackie sets out to eliminate Uncle Paulie while at the same time slaughtering anyone who gets in his way.

Similar to most first person shooters, you're going to have an assortment of nasty toys to play with, various types of guns that'll do a good job blasting holes through people. ut you can also call on the power of The Darkness, and there are some pretty interesting and downright mean things to do.

In the all too brief E3 demo, The Darkness begins in an alley. Jackie's helping this large, bearded man dump body bags full of corpses into the back of a car, and right from the get go, it's apparent that the developers are doing impressive things with the hardware. Starbreeze has implemented what they call Vo-Cap into each character, and basically what that means is they put motion capture equipment on the faces of the game's actors so that all of the lip synching matches up to the words that their mouths are forming. I only caught a small glimpse of it as I stared into that bearded man's face, but the effect is definitely impressive.

After a few moments, the man stops and instructs Jackie to get the hell out because the police are advancing on their location. Estacado leaves his "friend" to handle the rest of the job, enters a building, and immediately harnesses the power of the The Darkness to do his bidding. Suddenly, these two black snakes (one over each shoulder) appeared and Jackie made them do things such as pick up and fling objects. But they can also be used to sneak around corners, slither through vents, and eat unsuspecting police officers, as I saw in the demo. He can also call upon these scary creatures known as Darklings, Gollum type monsters that have a penchant for destruction.

After a few moments the police arrived in style. A plethora of cops surrounded the building and within a few seconds began breaking into the joint, and I'm not talking about just busting through the front door. They smashed windows, splintered wood, and even went so far as to take out an entire wall, but unbeknownst to them, Jackie wasn't the only dangerous being awaiting them. The Darklings quickly leaped on their prey, clawing the policemen and, in a rather dramatic scene, using a large drill to bore into their heads and chests. And all this was happening with Jackie doing absolutely nothing.

It appears that Jackie will always be able to use the Darklings, though Starbreeze mentioned that the number of creatures that can be called upon will vary depending on the situation, so you may be able to use several or just two. Either way, it's cool having some help defeating enemies and I'm looking forward to uncovering the different types of Darklings and sending them out to do my bidding.

At this point, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about this game. The demo, while impressive, offered a small taste of what's to come, and with that being said, if evil creatures, detailed graphics, destructible environments are what we should expect from The Darkness, then we cannot wait to actually get our hands on it. It's just a shame that it's not coming out until 2007, but we'll have more info as soon as it becomes available.