Darkwatch

A train robbery that goes badly is a fine way to start a western. Jericho Cross cracks open the wrong armoured car, releases the ancient vampire Lazarus Malkoth, and wakes up cursed himself — which is how a Capcom-published shooter from 2005 ended up handing you a revolver in one hand and supernatural powers in the other. The premise sounds like a pitch-meeting mashup. The art direction is what sells it.

High Moon Studios, formerly Sammy Studios, built this thing around silhouette and colour: bone-white moonlight, hard black rock formations, dust and blood reds. Ghost towns and mining camps look designed rather than assembled, and the enemy roster leans on skeletal gunslingers and bloated undead that read clearly at distance even when the PS2's frame rate starts to sag. It does sag. The console version runs softer and lower than the Xbox release, and busy encounters with a dozen bodies on screen show the strain, but the compositions survive the compression better than most sixth-generation shooters that aimed for realism instead of style.

The combat loop is more disciplined than the setting suggests. Jericho carries two weapons and a set of vampire abilities that recharge from feeding, and the game keeps pushing you toward aggression rather than corner-camping. Where it gets interesting is the karma system: helping the ghostly Cassidy or giving in to the succubus Tala pushes you down separate power trees, so a redemption run and a damnation run genuinely arm you differently. Shadow shielding and a hovering leap for one side, life-draining brutality and a blood-fed rage for the other. Neither path is a moral lecture, which is a mercy.

Between the corridors there are mounted sequences on a spectral horse and turret defence stretches that break the rhythm without ever really justifying themselves. Those are the weakest stretches, and the level design occasionally falls back on wave-clearing when it runs out of ideas. But the shooting has weight, the checkpointing is fair, and the campaign knows when to end rather than padding itself to a target length.

It landed in a crowded year for shooters and never got the sequel it was clearly angling for, which leaves it as one of those PS2 titles that people remember by its images before its mechanics: a gunslinger with red eyes standing on a ridge, waiting for the dead to come up out of the sand.