While it would've been nice for there to have been a demo for The Darkness before the game was released, this is still good news for anyone that is on the fence about purchasing the game. The 1.27 GB demo includes three single-player levels, so figuring out whether you hate it or love it shouldn't be too difficult.

This next bit of news is for those of us who have already bought The Darkness, beat it, tried out the multiplayer and realized that a good majority of the online matches are unplayable due to massive amounts of lag being present. The game's MySpace blog had this to say about an upcoming patch:

Right now, it seems that the main cause of the lag is the bandwidth of those hosting multiplayer games.  We didn't get any lag problems during our testing because we have pretty good bandwidth speeds.  We are working on a patch that will hopefully solve this problem. 

We aim to release the patch sometime next month for the 360. For PS3 users, we are waiting for Sony's August patch for our update to work. After that happens, we'll fix your multiplayer, too.

If Starbreeze can find away to eliminate the horrible lag, I can honestly see myself giving the multiplayer another shot. Being able to turn into a Darkling, climb up on the ceiling, and wait for your opponent to get just close enough so that you can kill him by pouncing on his head is too much fun, dammit!

[Via Major Nelson and Xbox 360 Rally; thanks Mr. Burling]