I missed Darksiders the first time around and picked it up on a whim during a Steam sale. Where it then promptly sat on my hard drive for months waiting to be launched for the first time.
If you look at the elements it should have been something I was all over. War, rider of the apocalypse, shows up and rips the earth to shreds only to find he’s far too early his siblings are nowhere to be seen and it’s not actually the apocalypse. The powers that be are displeased and his protestations that he was summoned go unheeded.
It’s a frame job and he rode right into it Claymore at the ready.
Cue a massive depowering and being shackled to a shadow entity who has you on a short leash, voiced by Mark Hamill who plays it as the Joker but without the cackling, and away you go.
My problems with the game came from the fact it’s the cliché depowering plot mechanic again. You play Metroid, they take your abilities away in the first level. In God Of War you dragged Kratos carcass through ancient Greece to become the God of War and then they depower you at the beginning of God Of War 2.
The list goes on and on and it always struck me as lazy game design. In Darksiders you start as War, you then spend the rest of the game trying to unlock abilities to get back to being War. Net result to me is damn all progress.
The targeting system is awkward, I can’t lock on to fast moving flying enemies as smoothly as I’d like and it can drop the lock when the view of an enemy is obscured momentarily, which is something that shouldn’t happen. I know it has walked behind the pillar, let me circle it so I can take the shot.
Then there’s the art style. War is pretty squat looking. So squat looking he looks more like a chunky action figure than a game texture model. And those textures are ridiculously ornate to the level that he looks like he was dressed by Liberace.
Indeed everything is pretty squat and looks like it was dressed by Liberace.
Then there’s the mechanical puzzles and secondary items which have been ripped from The Legend Of Zelda.
And like Zelda it is a collect-a-thon.
And like Zelda it cheats by extending the play time by forcing you to back track.
And like Zelda it’s good.
The last one is what surprised me. It’s good in a way that I wasn’t enjoying it until I had three hours of play time racked up and couldn’t remember exactly when I started enjoying it but now was.
I’m not sure if I’ll enjoy it enough to carry on when the inevitable ‘Now run back and collect all the stuff you could see but couldn’t reach the first time around’ twist occurs but it’s good enough for now.