The Darkness II

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!!!

I decided to write a small guide for the campaign, giving brief details on each level and an estimated time. Please note these times are for EASY and may not apply to harder difficulties, especially Don!

The character I found most efficient was Shoshanna.
a) She was recommended to me and
b) She receives some extremely useful skills.

More information on Shoshanna here.

Overall, the campaign took around 1.5-2hrs and has a grand total of 8 missions.

WARNING!! - Once you complete the 8th mission, do not quit out or leave the table. You may not receive your achievement for completing the campaign otherwise!

Mission breakdown -


Mission 1 – Here’s Johnny

This mission consists of progressively fighting your way through a junkyard in order to find Johnny Powell. The enemies here are straight-forward mobsters which are easy to kill.

There are large floodlights placed about the junkyard – if you find their large green generators, a couple of LT whacks will break them up. I wouldn’t bother specifically hunting the generators down however, as you can easily work round the light.

Once you reach the garage where Johnny is being held captive, look down and shoot the lock to open the door. You’ll have one more wave of basic enemies to fight off before you untie Johnny and end the mission.

Estimated time: 10-15 minutes


Mission 2 – Stop the Press

In this mission, you fight your way into a warehouse in search of the source of dark essence. For the most part, you are again fighting basic mobsters.

After killing a wave, you have to overload one of the systems on the left or right side of the room. It does not matter which, because once you’ve fought off yet another wave of mobsters, you overload the system on the opposite side of the room. The large machine in the middle of the warehouse explodes and you find the dark relic.

Once you pick up the relic, your screen will filter red. I thought at first this was a glitch, lol! You should have initiated a small wave of around 4-5 Hell Spawn carrying a tool they will happily bludgeon you to death with. I simply shot them, backing away from them to ensure they never got behind me – it’s hard to distinguish whether you’re low on health or not at this point.

Estimated time: 5-10 minutes.


Mission 3 – Dead-End Job

The objective here is to fight your way through backyards into a trailer park, where you shall eliminate Luigi Palladino.

Same old with the mobsters, there aren’t too many in this mission. Keep wiping them out as you progress to a point where Dolfo shows up, passing a bomb to you and instructing you to use it to blow up Luigi’s trailer.

Once you reach the trailer park where Luigi is hiding out, there will be enemies practically surrounding you. They are still weak, and there is plenty of rubble you can hide behind. If you’re using Shoshanna like I was, one use of Gun Channelling should wipe every one of these guys out. Easy as pie, right?

Hook the bomb up and back away. Once inside, kill Luigi however you please and grab yourself a nice surprise; another dark relic.

As with the first dark relic, we enter a red filter and have a wave of Hell Spawn to fight off. This time, I counted around 8-10 of them. Again, don’t allow yourself to be surrounded and keep your back protected.

Estimated time: 10 minutes.


Mission 4 – No Brothers of Mine

In this mission, you are to hunt down Cedro Valdez – the big man behind little names such as Luigi and Swifty. You fight your way through a warehouse into a large parking lot where you finally come head-to-head with Cedro, who cowers and whimpers in fear!

The warehouse section in this level is tiny. You fight a wave of enemies and you’re straight back out the other side. This time, however, you’re not fighting mere mobsters but members of the Brotherhood. There are a couple of the larger melee enemies, but again the fighting is very easy.

Once you ride the elevator up and out of the warehouse, you walk down onto the street where there are a lot of parked cars and around 12-15 Brotherhood enemies. Again, a couple of melee guys – Shoshanna can obliterate almost all, picking of the remainder with her LT attack.

You’re then begged and pleaded with by Cedro, who is hiding a little secret of his own. He jumped out of the back of a van wearing rather tough Brotherhood armour. It does take a couple of clips to break – but once it’s gone, you can destroy his health as he is practically just a mobster at this point.

No relic here and therefore no red filter / Hell Spawn. Whoopa!

Estimated time: 5-10 minutes


Mission 5 – Hostile Takeover

This mission entails fighting through the News cast buiding in order to find the Spear of Destiny or find out where it is located. This is by far the biggest mission up until this point and the majority of the mission consists of a rooftop battle with numerous Brotherhood enemies.

You start off in a car park, where there are plenty of cars with their lights stuck on. You will face weak Brotherhood gunners, followed up by the stronger, teleporting shooters and bludgeoners.

This is the one part out of the whole Darkness 2 campaign and all Hit List / Vendetta mission that scared the crap out of me. I was standing near some ammo, happily destroying dead goons’ hearts when I heard a SWISH SWISH SWISH – I turn round and there’s 2 of these massive Brotherhood enemies towering over me!

Once you clean up here, you progress through the building with more weak enemies and a couple of shield-wielding guys. Playing as Shoshanna, these guys are a pain in the backside. Otherwise, the fights are restricted to corridors and therefore the enemies are generally exposed and more vulnerable.

You finally reach the rooftop, where Graves is escaping in a helicopter. This is a large fight with around 30-40 enemies, with the final waves consisting of heavily-armoured, teleporting shotgunners. Make use of Shoshanna’s special here, A LOT, to hurry things along and take out the later enemies without breaking a sweat.

There are plenty of ammo crates lying around. The enemies comes from every direction – it’s literally a game of kill, kill and kill some more. I was beginning to wonder whether I was supposed to do something and the enemies were infinite but no, it’s just a very big battle!

Estimated time: 10-15 minutes


Mission 6 – A Real Rain Has Come

In this mission, we are headed down the docks in search of the Spear of Destiny. The map is very small and packed with cargo containers and another warehouse. Yippee!

You start off at the back of the shipping yard and have to fight your way through a couple of waves of.. yup, you guessed it! More Brotherhood goons. Mostly weak, a couple of tough bludgeoners and some more shield dudes.

You fight your way into an area where you meet Jean-Luc Lambert and Amelie Dubois, brother and sister who worship the Brotherhood. Knocking health off of them, you pursue them through the shipping yard and into the warehouse.

The fight takes place upstairs in a small “arena” they create with their Darkness powers. They move quickly, teleporting after receiving little damage to their health bars. They also come prepared in some Darkness armour which, once broken, won’t slow you down any. Make sure that once again, your back is covered as they do carry shotguns which can annihilate you very quickly on harder difficulties.

Estimated time: 10 minutes


Mission 7 – Forced Entry

This mission.. is basically an escort mission. You’re escorting Dolfo to blow open the bank's front doors. You will progress through the subway, across the street and into a large courtyard.

As said above, you start off in the subway. You have to fight your way to the opposite end through two waves of weak Brotherhood enemies. Here, you pick up Dolfo and the escort mission begins.

You have to fight your way back through the subway and out onto the street. You’ll encounter around 20-30 enemies during this time, most of which are weak with a couple of shield guys thrown into the mix.

Once you cross the street and enter the courtyard, you have to protect Dolfo for a couple of minutes whilst he sets up the bomb to blow the doors. You will fight 3-4 waves of teleporting, heavily armoured enemies – again with shotguns and bludgeons.

Whenever these guys whack Dolfo, he loses half a bar of health, meaning he can only tank around 6 hits even on Thug. I started this part off by standing directly behind him, but he ended up getting whacked twice and actually trapped me among 3 bludgeoners with no special charged and Shoshanna desperately trying to reload her guns. I almost died.

So pro tip: keep moving. Watch over Dolfo from the left or right side – even if a tough guy with a bludgeon teleports straight at Dolfo, you can shoot him once or twice and his attention switches to you.

Once the timer is up, move away from the doors as far as you can. Due to using the above-mentioned technique, I thought I was far enough away. I still took health damage however, not sure if it would have killed me outright on a higher difficulty.

This is by far the “toughest” mission due to Dolfo ‘s flimsy health and more than a handful of enemies being thrown at you at once. You can easily become cornered which on anything above Thug could be fatal. All I can advise is keep moving and ensure your skills are maxed by this point. Even on Thug, my skills were maxed by the start of Mission 6.

Estimated time: 10-15 minutes


Mission 8 – Sins of the Brothers

The final mission. You’ve managed to make your way into the bank, thanks to Dolfo’s explosive expertise. There will be a lot of fighting heavy armoured guys in here, ending in a boss fight.

Make your way through the bank toward the designated vault, blowing away the weak gunners and toughened bludgeoners on your way. The bank is a wide open space with tons of spare ammo lying around and not much threat from the enemies at this point.

Once in the vault, you’re faced with two waves of teleporting shotgunner and bludgeoner enemies. For me, Shoshanna made quick work of them before they’d managed to step much more than a foot into the vault with the special.

After the vault, you come to a large open room, lit with florescent blue lighting. There are 30-40 enemies in there in total, with more than 75% of them being weak Brotherhood gunners. There are just more than a handful of bludgeoners and a couple of heavy shotgunners in there, too.

This is another rather large battle but is still shorter than the rooftop battle back at the News station. Once you’re done here, it’s time to confront Graves and destroy the Spear. Graves has a little surprise lined up for you, however, which takes us into the final boss battle of the Vendetta campaign…

Okay, so he’s huge. He’s also extremely cute! He spews at you, sweeps wind towards you and sends endless Hell Spawn and exploding Darklings at you, too. You can choose to move around the room or use the pillars in front of you for protection. On the easiest setting, you can simply stand in front of him and pump round after round into his head.

When he rears up, his massive heart becomes vulnerable and when shot, stuns him for a few seconds. This allows time for ammo collection or dealing with the Hell Spawn.

Again, I was using Shoshanna and two uses of her Gun Channel special and this boss was toast. I don’t doubt, however, his attacks would be devastating on harder settings and should be avoided as much as possible. They have immense range on them, all the while you have Darklings and Hell Spawn eating away at your health. Be careful!

Estimated time: 10-15 minutes


It’s not over yet!

Once you beat this boss down and you’re returned to the table, DO NOT quit out or press any buttons for that matter! Vinnie re-enters the room to conclude the story and when the credits start roll, THEN you should get your achievement for completing the Vendetta Campaign.

I have no idea how to fix this if it does not pop for you, but I would suggest replaying the last chapter and again, once returned to the table, touch nothing! Just in case. :)

Hope this helps some of you. :)

The Vendettas campaign can be accessed from the main menu. You can play offline by yourself or online with up to 4 players. According to sephex's solution here you can just play the very end of the campaign to get this achievement (thanks for the tip!), but I suggest just playing from the beginning and doing the campaign regularly on any difficulty you like. By the end of it you should be very close to the Embrace the Darkness achievement for acquiring all the talents for one character.

After beating the final level DO NOT SKIP ANY SCENES. Doing so may cause the achievement not to unlock. Let everything play until the credits roll. If your achievement didn't unlock, refer to the edit below.

Edit: A few people have reported this achievement as glitching on them and here is a solution to that issue as posted in the comments by BillJones0302.

Apparently, once you defeat the Hell Beast and are returned to the poker table with the other gamers, Vinnie enters the room and offers a closing speech. The achievement will unlock as he ends this and the closing credits begin to roll. If you end the segment before Vinnie's speech, the achievement will not pop (my dilemma). If you missed it, simply replay a new Vendetta campaign and let it run it's course at the end. Worked for me.