Lawrence.com

Darksiders is a mediocre action adventure game that freely cribs from more successful games — like Zelda and God of War — with varying degrees of success. And while in many respects it is not a bad game, its repetitive and stilted combat combined with late game difficulty spikes, boring puzzles, and bland main character keep Darksiders from being anything more than a weekend rental.

Let’s start with the good. The opening cinematic is one of the best parts of the game; a CGI showcase of the Apocalypse wherein asteroids crash into a major city revealing themselves to be demons sent to kick start the end of the world. Immediately after this impressive cut scene ends, you are dropped into the action as War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Not wanting to besmirch your good name, you quickly set to cleaving every demon and angel in your path with your giant man-sized sword, Chaoseater. And when things get to be too much, you can transform into a giant fiery Balrog known as your Chaos form to wreak even more havoc.

The first 10 minutes of Darksiders makes a solid first impression. The visual design by Joe Madeuria lends itself to a heavy-metal-meets-comic-book style that some will love and others will hate. Regardless of whether or not you like the look of the game, the clean graphics in combination with the amount of stuff blowing up all around you as you cleave your way down the street is pretty cool. Unfortunately, Darksiders peaks in those first 10 minutes and never manages to hit those heights again.

The problems start when you reach the end of the first level. After gouging out a giant demon’s eye with your massive sword, you are put on trial for bringing on the Apocalypse before the seventh seal was broken, thus breaking “the Law.” You are sentenced to be stripped of your powers and executed by a council of “Old Ones.” Instead, War talks the council into letting him return to Earth to seek revenge on those who are truly responsible. So as War you set off on your blood-soaked quest for revenge against an enemy known only as “The Destroyer,” stripped of your powers and bound to an annoying demon named The Watcher. (If The Watcher sounds familiar, it’s because he’s voiced by Mark “Joker” Hamill recently of Batman: Arkham Asylum fame.)

Problem No. 1: War is just not that interesting. Sure, he makes the ’roided out Gears of War guys look like they need to hit the gym and double up on the juice to compete. But that’s it. War’s personality is about as bland as his visual design. The voice actor that plays War seems either bored or disinterested throughout the entirety of the game. No matter what happens — from revelations to mundane conversations — War delivers each line with the same measured inflection of indifference. Look guys, Kratos works because he’s one angry mofo, not in just the level of violence prevalent in the God of War games, but in Kratos’ animations and voice work. War animates smoothly enough, but there’s no conviction in any of his canned motions that you repeat thousands of times throughout the game.

From there you traverse boring gray subways and industrial areas that don’t really resemble anything earth-like at all. It feels like the designers were reaching for a Gears of War-style “destroyed beauty” theme but it ends up feeling like a pale imitation instead. The graphics engine in general desperately needs optimization. The frame rate never dips too far, but it is all over the place performance wise. It also seems to dip for no reason what so ever. And the screen tearing is bad enough at times to give you a migraine. Vigil has promised a patch to address these issues and I hope that they make good on that promise, and soon.

Throughout the game there are far too many fetch quests and box-shoving puzzles for a game that is as crammed full of different mechanics as Darksiders is. You would think that with all of the toys that they give you to play with, you would get a few cool puzzles to go with ’em. And you do, but they are mostly just slight variations of puzzles that came out of whatever game the tool you are using “homages.” Like the portal glove. If you’ve played portal, you will not have a problem with that part of the game, because you’ve seen 95 percent of the puzzles already.

In addition to your sword you have a Zelda-esque boomerang, a glove that shoots portals, a horse and a grapple. It’s a lot to keep track of and unfortunately it’s clumsily implemented. You cannot pause the game and go into your inventory to use an item like health or rage. Instead, you must assign items to a direction on the D-pad in order to use them. It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t missions requiring you to have all three usable slots taken with stuff, forcing you to stop and re-assign health, use it, stop, re-assign whatever weapon again etc.

The combat in Darksiders is decent. Your big eff’n sword is mapped to the X button, and by pressing it with varying timing and adding in the right bumper as a modifier you can do about a half-dozen different moves. The one thing you can’t do is upgrade your sword. It upgrades through use, and use only. In fact all of the weapons do. You can add a modifier to your major weapons, but I didn’t notice much of a difference with the majority of the modifiers. The only exception is immolation, which sets your foes on fire. Problem is, you are fighting HELLSPAWN with fire. Yeah, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good. It looks cool, though.

I played the majority of the game with just Chaoseater and I didn’t manage to level it all the way up. Forget about leveling your other weapons, if you try you will end up with a bunch of weak weapons which will make the last third of the game just that much harder to complete. It’s a terrible oversight on the part of Vigil games, and hopefully something that can be addressed with a patch.

But the biggest problem with the combat is that they don’t have a blended animation system so you cannot break out of a combo to block, leading to your inevitable pummeling at the hands of some burly demon. Another side effect of not having a blended animation system in place is that you cannot smoothly switch between weapons and string them into a combo. It’s too bad because if you could it would greatly help alleviate the problem of leveling your secondary weapons. But as it stands, you can’t be in the middle of a combo with your sword with the X button, then add in your scythe with Y into the same combo. You have to finish whatever combo you’re in the middle of, and then start a whole new one. Lame.

The controls work well enough most of the time, but I had issues with War not jumping when he should, and falling to his death more often than I would like. My biggest gripe would have to be the use of the right bumper. Developer Vigil Games chose to make the right bumper both the block AND dash button. Let that sink in for a second. Yeah, it sucks. It’s made worse by the fact that the analog sticks don’t seem to have any dead zone, so the slightest touch will send you dashing around instead of blocking. Did I mention that they included a God of War style countering system? No? Well that’s because I managed to successfully counter no more than a dozen times in more than 15 hours of gameplay. So I wouldn’t call the blocking/dashing/countering system a raging success.

All of the above problems are amplified in the last third of the game. At that point you are being attacked by high-level enemies that do a tremendous amount of damage with every attack. And to make things worse, they decided to throw wave after wave of them at you with very little health and nary a Vulgrim location in sight. They also draw things out for far too long. One late-game mission tasks you with re-directing beams of light to free someone. After doing the task and directing the light into the right chamber — after about a half-hour of work — you find out that you get to do it all over again, not once, but twice. Ugh.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that you cannot set waypoints on your map manually. This can be a problem if you don’t carefully search each and every area for the hidden Vulgrim locations that allow you to fast travel from location to location. Why is that a problem? If you can’t fast travel to all seven locations at the end of the game, then you will have to travel to each on foot. And since your maps don’t label area exits and you can’t set a waypoint.... prepare to get lost and end up aimlessly wandering around trying to get to the next area.

In the end, Darksiders does have a couple of moments of brilliance. But they are lost in a sea of missed opportunities and unfocused game design. There are just too many different mechanics in Darksiders for its own good and that means that nothing is as polished or as thought out as it should be. As the first effort from Vigil Games, a lot can be forgiven. As a $60 title competing with the big boys, it’s just an average title. Maybe next time, Vigil.

Graphics: 6.0

Sound: 5.0

Gameplay: 5.0

First Play: 5.0

Replay Value: 2.0





Overall: 5.0