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Capcom's Darkwatch is a first-person shooter with a western/supernatural setting. This means that while you can expect to ride horses, fight Indians and use the normal assortment of weapons you would find in the archetypal Western movie. You'll also encounter supernatural elements such as zombies, demons and skeletons throughout your adventure.

You are Jericho Cross, a disfigured outlaw who hopes to retire from his life of crime with one last big score. Unfortunately, things don't go as planned, and Jericho instead mistakenly releases a vampire named Lazarus from captivity. Lazarus then proceeds to "reward" Jericho by making Jericho a vampire. The rest of the game revolves around Jericho's quest to escape from his curse, and at the same time seek revenge on Lazarus.

While Darkwatch's setting may be a departure from that of a normal shooter, its play mechanics are not. Any FPS veteran will have no problem getting acclimated within the game quickly. Darkwatch is, nevertheless, very challenging. No matter how careful you are, you can die at any moment. That's not to say, necessarily, that the game is unfair or unduly hard overall. While it may seem that certain sections of the game make it ridiculously easy for you to die, checkpoints are given very liberally, and you never have to repeat too much of what you've previously accomplished. This avoids creating too much frustration for the player, and allows the game to keep moving. This fast, sometimes frantic pace is what makes Darkwatch, in the end, a very enjoyable game. Darkwatch creates a constant sense of desperation by combining a quick, constant-action pace with enemies that are, for the most part, individually easily dispatched, but come in continuous waves and cause lots of damage.

I often felt that my gun would never shoot fast enough, or I was always getting stuck in some corner surrounded by skeletons and finding myself unable to escape. Darkwatch's wonderful balance is in making you feel pretty confident one moment, and then fearful and desperate the next, where you then find yourself almost yelling in your mind, wishing you could escape, mashing on the controller just to survive for one more second in hopes of escaping the mad throng surrounding you.

Aiming control is precise, though at times I felt the aiming help impeded me, steering me towards the wrong target. This was never more than a minor irritation, however. For those picky about their control configurations, they'll be happy to see selectable profiles based on the controls of other popular FPSs, and adjustable reticle sensitivity.

One of the intriguing aspects of Darkwatch is its emphasis on the player's choice to be good or evil, but this is not done particularly well. All your choices will be obvious - you are explicitly presented with good and bad options, and your decision only affects gameplay in determining the special vampire powers you develop and the game's ending. The powers, unfortunately, are not that special. While they are somewhat useful in gameplay, their subtraction from the game would not negatively affect it. At best, the special powers and decision to go good or evil add slight replay value to the game.

The plot in Darkwatch doesn't stand up well on its own, but it is good enough to keep the player interested in continuing from one level to the next. A lot of that has to do with the strong voice acting in the game. The soundtrack is another positive, properly reflecting the supernatural atmosphere of the game and the pace of the gameplay.

With so much action going on on-screen, I would often find myself lost, looking around aimlessly, struggling to find my next attacker. Darkwatch, though, has some of the best positional surround sound found in any game- I grew to depend on it as a gameplay aid as I progressed in my adventure. Darkwatch is one of the rare games where sound actually improves the gameplay for a title, rather than merely complementing it.

Darkwatch features excellent graphics as well. I remember being amazed one particular moment upon seeing a ceiling reflection in a water puddle in an underground tunnel. The reflection wasn't part of eye candy that games will often deliberately put in plain sight to impress you- this was just a subtle thing that I picked up, pretty much on accident, but this example highlights the level of graphical detail found within the rest of the game. Both on an artistic and technical level, everything looks great.

Darkwatch at its core is a frantic action game with supernatural and adult undertones. It is somewhat on the short side, with limited replay value, but it is still an outstanding game. It's hard to recommend the game as a purchase because it can easily be completed over a weekend, but you won't be disappointed with Darkwatch if you do decide to buy it. Excellent production values and strong adrenaline-filled gameplay make Darkwatch a game well worth playing