When the reviews hit next week you will be lucky if I let you polish my shoes with your tongues.

With this kind of setup, you may be expecting a full-on shooter, and while that description isn't terribly inaccurate, The Darkness features more downtime than you might expect. Moments like taking the time to sit on a couch and snuggle with your girlfriend and visiting your aunt remind me more of something like Indigo Prophecy than anything you normally see in shooters, and the open city requires you to spend a decent amount of time traveling through different parts of town using the subway system.

Like Riddick, the main story here won't take you long to get through (it's in the 10-hour range), but because of the game structure, you can spend time getting lost and messing around in the wrong parts of town if you choose. There's not a ton to do besides receiving "track this item down" missions from characters in subway stations and using your tentacles to pick up objects and mess with the game's physics -- this isn't the easiest thing to do if you're the type who likes to stack objects in piles and then use those to climb to secret areas, but it works and occasionally rewards you with bonus collectibles. But the feeling of running around town works pretty well, and you really get to know this version of New York by the end of the game.