The action is pretty fast paced since the way Jackie gets his health back is eating hearts from the corpses of his enemies. This system has its upsides and downsides, which also carries over to the co-op. The upside is that there’s often a decent supply of hearts lying around during and after a big fire fight, so you can move along without too much fear of death. The downside, however, is that after a fight it can sometimes feel like a bit of a boring scavenger hunt as you try to hunt down the corpses that have hearts so you can get your health back. Still, the annoyance is relatively minor.
This is a black hole, one of the many darkness skills you'll have access to in the game
“What about the co-op,” you ask? Loosely, there are two co-op modes (both known as “vendettas”): the co-op campaign and the hit list. The co-op campaign supports up to 4 players online in a reasonably-sized 8 mission campaign. You can only have one co-op campaign save going at a time and there’s no skipping around between the missions within your saved game. So, for example, if you have a save towards the end of the campaign and you want to start a new one with a different friend, if you were to create a new game, all progress in that save game would be wiped. A better option would be to have that friend host the game. This is a bit of an annoyance simply because it’s bewildering why they wouldn’t simply allow multiple save slots for the co-op campaign. The inability to jump around between missions isn’t such a big deal, since the Hit List mode allows you to do this.
After you’ve unlocked the missions in the co-op campaign, they will appear in the Hit List scenario options. So if for some reason you really like mission 8, you can just keep playing it over and over until the cows come home. Besides from all the missions being represented in Hit List, there are other modes which take the same maps from the co-op campaign and add different objectives (e.g. kill all enemies).
This is Vendettas. Notice the lack of aforementioned demon arms.
While an attempt is made at story for the co-op campaign, it’s not very successful. While the single-player story has decent depth and character development, the vendettas co-op story is both vague and shallow. Four people (are they mercenaries? Fellow gang members? I’m not even sure) have been tasked with helping out Jackie’s gang tackle a new darkness-related threat that’s apparently below his notice. They are all infused with darkness powers (no, I’m not sure why), and they’re sent running around the city collecting darkness relics and killing darkness bad guys. Whew, okay enough trying to puzzle out the rationality for the co-op story. Let’s move onto the different characters.