Darkest of Days (v105)

A time-travel shooter built around history’s bloodiest turning points, Darkest of Days lets you charge into Civil War battlefields, the trenches of World War I, and the chaos of World War II with the fate of the timeline hanging over every trigger pull. You play Alexander Morris, a man pulled from Custer’s Last Stand by a secret organization that sends him back to protect people who do not belong in these conflicts. The mood is knowingly pulpy rather than solemn: one moment you are firing period rifles beside hundreds of soldiers, and the next you are turning a futuristic assault rifle on an army from the past. Its alternate-history premise gives familiar wars an enjoyably strange science-fiction edge.

Combat follows a straightforward first-person-shooter structure, but the enormous battles are the central attraction. Missions place you amid cavalry charges, mass infantry assaults, and trench pushes where friendly and enemy soldiers fill wide-open terrain rather than appearing in tiny scripted squads. Era-appropriate muskets, revolvers, rifles, and machine guns make many fights feel deliberately cumbersome, with slow reloads and limited accuracy forcing you to pick positions carefully. Advanced weapons arrive at key moments and radically change the balance of power, while blue-glowing historical targets demand restraint; killing a protected person can compromise the mission and the timeline itself.

What makes Darkest of Days memorable is its scale and contrast: few shooters let you witness Antietam-style slaughter one minute and use experimental future hardware the next. The Marmoset engine aims for crowds well beyond the usual shooter spectacle, and even when the AI, visuals, and gunfeel show their age, the ambition remains easy to appreciate. Linear missions and uneven checkpoint design make it more of a curious late-2000s campaign than a polished modern FPS, but its unusual historical settings carry it through. Players who enjoy the oddball alternate-history energy of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty or the large-scale battles of classic Battlefield campaigns will find the most to like here, especially if they can forgive some rough edges.