Do you know how many soldiers died at Little Big Horn? Neither do I. (Editor's note: about 270 US soldiers.) The story of the battle may be rattling around in our brains, but the specifics? Forget about it. If you have mastered time travel and are looking for someone to do your dirty work, why not zip back to that fateful day, grab someone who would have died, heal their wounds in the future, and then put them to work stitching up the ripped fabric of time? That's the premise of Darkest of Days, and while it's interesting on its surface, the game itself doesn't seem to want to explore the concepts it's built around.

Title Darkest of Days Developer 8monkey Labs Publisher Phantom EFX Price $39.99 (PC) $49.99 (Xbox 360) Platform Xbox 360 (reviewed), PC

The first issue? If you actually did have a man in futuristic armor pop into a battlefield and grab someone, what would that person think? Would their mind break? What would they think of the view screen through which they get their orders between missions? Darkest of Days keeps your character mute, and he seems to simply shrug and accept everything that's happening to him. He's sent to various wars to rescue people who can't die in order to keep the timeline safe, and the specifics of each conflict are explained to him as if he has our working knowledge of geography and politics.

It would be interesting to see our hero's newfound bosses explain what a shotgun is, talk about what led to each conflict and where they took place, or help him deal with the fact he's alone in a world he has no understanding of. Instead everyone treats the setup like this sort of thing happens everyday. The dialog itself sounds as if it were written by someone who speaks English as a second language, and if you turn on subtitles you'll be treated to a number of misspelled words and typos. Classy.

The game uses the brand new Marmoset engine, written specifically for this title, and the main feature seems to be the ability to show many enemies onscreen at once. The problem is the graphics, to put it bluntly, are ugly. On the 360 version the framerate is inconsistent, with a good amount of screen tearing and tiny pauses when you do something as simple as pull up the map or look down the barrel of your gun. This would have been impressive on the PC around five years ago, but doesn't get the job done these days.

Invisible walls also make an appearance; it's not rare to be stopped dead in your tracks while moving over the countryside towards your goal because the developer wanted you to go the other way. In one scene you're asked to hold off an advancing force, which proved rather easy. I thought it would be fun to head a few feet in front of the fortified position in order to make the battle a little more interesting, but I was stopped dead in my tracks by an invisible wall.

In another case, I was following a path, walked through a flowing creek while the water effects glitched once or twice around me, and then hit an invisible wall on the other side. You see, even though they told you that you can move forward and use any path to reach your goal in the missions briefing, they didn't mean that one.

I could go on. No one seems to be bothered by your futuristic weapons. The animations are clumsy, and running is more like a scurry as your gun bobs comically on the screen. Get behind a turret and marvel at the lack of rumble and the sound effects that make it sound like a peashooter. There are entire sections where you can simply run through groups of enemies... and those ever-present invisible walls.

In one nod to the time-traveling story you'll have to avoid killing enemies with blue auras around them; these are people that are supposed to live. You are given a weapon to take them out, or you can shoot them non-lethally, but you have to avoid killing them. You'll also bump into other groups of time travelers and... well, let's not give away too much of the story. A reference to the events of 9/11 may have seemed like a good idea during development, but it just comes off as vulgar in the main game. If you lost someone in the attacks, don't worry, they may simply be fighting their way through time.

The concept is great: take a rescued soldier from the past and send him around time to fix what's broken. But no one seems to take the situations that would result from that decision seriously. Turning the hero into an actual character instead of keeping him a mute nobody who never reacts to the extraordinary circumstances around him and making the enemies more than cardboard cutouts that exist only to run around and die might have salvaged this game, but that still wouldn't have helped the engine.

Even in the bargain bin, which is where you'll find this in a week or two, this is an easy one to pass on.

Verdict: Skip