A year in the making: Darksiders!

The time played on this, which I provide to give a vague idea how much play I got out of a game, is all sorts of screwy. I picked up Darksiders like, last year? The summer sale I want to say? I was pretty excited to play it or at least vaguely interested. Mostly on the basis of really liking the art style. Also, I waited a while, because I wanted a controller to play it with but was looking for a deal.

Problem being is my previous PC had little interest in running Darksiders, or at least enough disinterest that I eventually gave up about half-way through. I'd blame the game, but tons of stuff was crashing on that PC for a variety of reasons. Mass Effect 2, which I noted back in its review, would crash in the exact same way and had the same engine. I fixed that by going to windowed maximized mode, but Darksiders being more of a port wouldn't let me. So it got shelved and now it's back.

Darksiders is a weird experience for me in that I've never really played 3D Zelda games. I've been told repeatedly Darksiders is a huge rip-off primarily of Zelda, but I largely don't see it for lack of experience. Zelda is a weird one for me, in that I picked up the first 3D version and it sort of became the figurehead for how much I hated the transition to 3D from 2D. I played through the proverbial golden age of PC gaming and was never too impressed with where 3D took most games. So I never played past the first dungeon, and more for baseline reasons like 'I hate how this game looks' and 'I hate 3D controls'. LTTP was like Super Metroid, I wish they'd made another like ten of that game. So much so that I played the gameboy Zeldas. No, the original Gameboy. Have you looked at that thing? Horrifying. My old eyes can't even tell what's on a Gameboy screen nowadays. Is that Link? Or a turtle? what

So I really have no idea how innovative Darksiders probably isn't. To be honest, when people say games are innovative or whatever, I just think they're showing their ignorance. Games and books feel creative because we have pretty limited perceptions of the vastness of the medium. I probably say it too and I'm probably showing my ignorance when I do it. The only real spot you can have truly exciting creativity in games is in controls and UI, which I doubt Darksiders, Zelda or whatever the fuck else have really broken new ground in

And seriously if you count a game as unique because of storytelling: BOOKS.
One of the funniest things about Darksiders, and apocalyptic fiction in general, is the original biblical concept portrays four horsemen, but one of them is in fact Jesus. War definitely isn't Jesus, and my understanding of who the four horseman in Darksiders actually are is flimsy at best. I know there's War, because you're War, who I quite like. I'm total sucker for the huge space marine style males Joe Mad draws. But then there's Death, who doesn't look like War, and I like him too?

War is stylish looking, and his animations are good. The game uses brief bursts of slow motion to good effect, really picks up on little details. There's a couple spots where War will break from one animation to another, usually when on a level, but him and his enemies all move pretty smoothly from one attack to the next.

On my old machine, Darksiders looked pretty mediocre, but here with a better cpu and a much better monitor backing it up the game is surprisingly nice looking. The art style is very Warcraft or Warhammer, but the artists behind it are generally of a high quality. Maybe that's sort of harsh to say, but seriously, both of the War~ games suffer for having a couple nice designs back a decade or two ago, then nothing really improving since. Darksiders has a good visual style superimposed on the vaguely effective set of environments. Some of them are really pretty, some sort of generic, others just a mishmash. There is a question of course as to whether or not the 'mishmash' is intentional, the sentiment of a broken world post-apocalypse being expressed?

get bent robot

Visual improvements don't really help Darksiders' biggest problem, which is one of - How do I say this? - Not really knowing what you're doing. The game has two big sources of difficulty, the first being combat and the second being puzzles. Both can be a bit confusing at least a couple times per chapter.

Now, don't get me wrong, the game tries to do proper conveyance. If you're given a new tool, you tend to have a proper progression of puzzles with it, the first being something simple like a hit a button, the last often being some mess of setting things on fire to explode a thing to press a button you can't reach. If you're supposed to smash things with the smashy glove thing, it tends to be all the same color, and interactive items have a slight 'shimmer' on them so you know they can be interacted with.

But, even still, more than a few times the game throws you into a situation that has either no visibly interactive logic or have no visible ending. Several of the puzzles just feel like you're thrown in a room, and then you don't know what. You obviously want to get out of the room, but the exit isn't visible, the mechanics to make an exit appear are concealed and the whole thing is very "ok I do what now?" This happens repeatedly and it isn't the sort of puzzle solving one enjoys. It sort of reminds me of doing point and click adventure games, and I'll tell you a little secret: Adventure games died out because most of them were terrible. "Combine fish with torch" is not a puzzle.

This happens in combat from time to time as well, which is a bit odd. Most of the boss fights have a gimmick and go away from War's mainstay swingy slashy combat, which is totally fine and definitely what the game should do. The problem is - You have no idea if you're winning or losing in most if not all of the fights. There's nothing telling you that you're even damaging your opponent or how to proceed. I think this is halfway towards what it should be, but the game really needs to offer you more insight into whether you're hurting things.

time for a fucking boss battle

I make a big note of this because it is largely THE worst aspect of the game, barring quibbles with the genre itself. Half of the puzzles in the game end up taking more time trying to visually tag what you're interacting with as opposed to legitimately figure out what's going on, and I'm counting stuff like 'Going from point A to point B' as a puzzle. Because shit be puzzling at times! If you find yourself irritated by game designers being too lazy to explain or graphically demonstrate when you are, or aren't, winning a boss fight - This game is unreal annoying in this aspect. Every single boss has a total 'I have no idea what is going on, the fuck, gamefaqs time' element to it. Often you are doing what you're supposed to, but the game offers such a limited sense of feedback you can find yourself very frustrated. It's one thing to fail a boss at 98%, it's another to do so and not realize you did.

On the other hand the game's main combat against the demonic hordes is strangely satisfying. It's simplistic, though there is a better and worse to timing things. You can brute force your way through much of the combat on normal, but it's certainly satisfying to time blocks to do "the devil's cross". There are multiple cooldowns available and timing them is fun, though they seem entirely useless in several of the boss fights. I get the impression most bosses are built around number of hits, with your Chaos form and stoneskin cooldowns not really doing all that much to shorten the battle.

The various equipment angles in the game are a little weird and unevenly applied. Your sword and several other weapons can level up - but it seems to change little, and most of the other gear that can level up takes forever to do so. Outside of getting three of the four sword levels, I ended up only leveling one other piece of gear a single time. You can buy new moves for your weapons, but I used nothing but the sword and only really bought those upgrades. The main currency in the game is souls, which are harvested from enemies, random bits and the occasional chest. I almost feel like they went with souls as a means to show off neat graphics whenever you kill an enemy.

The game's story is good, in a roundabout fashion. The opening hints at deeper issues, then the game slides casually away from the larger plot towards a simple revenge story. Then two-thirds through the mess, gears switch up and the main plot re-instates itself. Though some of this is a bit confusing, as a main character just vanishes from the game, in retrospect it probably works pretty well for most people as the big political story the game plays at probably doesn't suit the opening til players get more of a handle on the game's characters. Oddly it feels like it was setting up a sequel, but I've read Darksiders 2 actually runs parallel to this game, so I'm not too sure if it resolves much of anything.

Overall I liked Darksiders, enough to play through the first half twice, though I really did find many elements of the game extremely frustrating. Several of the boss fights and puzzles could do with a bit more output from the clue factory, and the lack of lifebars - or just general visual evidence, like changing color altered beast style or something - really hurt the enjoyment of several of the encounters. Still, even if its a mash-up of other games, it had a fair amount of variety and the story was interesting enough I enjoyed the cut scenes.

Also the ending is surprisingly bad-ass once you realize what War has done.