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I'm slogging through what's probably the last third of The Darkness for PS3 trying to get it off my plate of unfinished games and the game's technical shortcomings have made me almost give up on it more than once. It's enough for me to ding my earlier, brighter assessment of the game as I get frustrated. It has a lot going for it -- as the high 8 to 9.0 reviews for the game attest -- but I'm thinking reviewers were a little bit blinded to the problems with the game by its original, Rated-M, well-executed story.

As I said before there are several nice touches. Things like good to very good voice acting work together with a believable subway environment and gritty if far-too-empty city streets. I stepped out of a subway during my most recent game and walked past a couple chatting to themselves. I stopped to listen to one of them ask where his flying car was that was promised back when he was a kid. He said he could've been a millionaire if he'd created the flying car he wanted to as a boy. The woman with him cautioned him that his ideas were crazy, just like the robot he'd made -- the robot that needed a human operator inside and was made of cardboard. He argues back that it would've gone better had he used kevlar to protect Lenny, something less flammable, and that having to have Lenny in there was a design flaw that could've been fixed. I listened to the whole thing before continuing on.

When I reached the subway, I pushed Select to check my to-do list and glance at the absolutely awful map this game has. It tells you to go somewhere, but the map doesn't tell you how to get there. It hints that there are ways to get from one zone to another by showing little dashes, but it doesn't show where you are in that zone. It doesn't even reflect the shape of the zone either, so you can't guess. I ended up going to a guide to find out how to reach a zone, not even how to accomplish the next mission, that's how unhappy I was with the map. Sorry Starbreeze, but doing side quests is not fun if I can't find my way to them directly and getting there when I don't know where I'm going is certainly not half the fun of doing something.

I've read in a guide -- which I've striven to avoid completely as I play this game -- to use the transit information stations to find out how to get around. I didn't think of that, but then again, why artificially slow things down that way? A simple arrow pointing to where to go in a given area to get closer to selected, active objective would have made all the difference in this case. If we see a sequel, perhaps they'll implement that then.

Somewhere during the design phase of the game, someone met and decided to include a 2 minute conversation about flying cars and cardboard robots and possibly at the same time decided that this barely-useful map was all the game needed. Maybe they felt it would break the illusion of being in a big city, but the very empty streets and handful of locations you can visit already give a game that wants to be called an open-world game a much more restricted feel.

With luck, if we see a sequel, they'll make things easier to find and ramp up the challenges in other ways to make up for all the time I'm not wasting walking around confused.