"You underestimate the power of the Dark side" - Darth Vader
Darksiders (Xbox 360, PS3, PC - released January 5th, 2010)
Darksiders is an action-adventure game that was hyped as Zelda meets God of War and they weren't kidding. As an added bonus, a third popular game is also incorporated into the final dungeon.
The story is a mostly incomprehensible biblical epic. Angels fight demons and War, Horseman of the Apocalypse, has been mysteriously invited to show up early to the party. This breach of Armageddon-etiquette has apparently brought about the arrival of the Destroyer, and now everyone is REALLY in trouble. War is stripped of his Horsemen powers but convinces his bosses to let him go back to try to fix this mess and get his revenge. It all sounds like a bad 90s Image comic book, trying way to hard to be epic and doing as little as possible to explain what's going on in an effort to prevent plot holes and keep options open for sequels.
To go along with the mostly nonsense story, you might have noticed the mostly horrific design of the main character, War.
While War looks mostly ridiculous, the overly bulky designs work pretty well for the demons, Samael and some of the bosses look especially good. (For more frightening Joe Madureira character designs dig up his old Battle Chasers comic book, although the Darksiders designs remind me more of Pat Lee's Warlands comic)
What really sets the mood for the game is the stellar voice acting. Mark Hamill voices your Watcher and even the merchant-demon Vulgrim is given a great performance by voice-over veteran Phil LaMarr.
The gameplay consists of God of War style combat breaking up Zelda style environmental puzzles. Like Zelda, you follow the plot through the over-world, until you get to a "dungeon" area. Solve some puzzles, fight a sub-boss, get a new toy, solve some more puzzles with the new toy, fight a boss with the new toy. Return to the over-world for more plot and extra pickups for health, wrath (magic), and pieces of abyssal armor. (Warning: acquiring the abyssal armor will make the endgame easy!)
I was having enough fun that I flew through the game in less than a week, and approximately 20 hours on the game clock. I found just about every chest in the game, and went back for the 3 i missed before fighting the final boss, so you can play through even quicker if you skip some collecting.
The gear is pretty standard, you get two alternate weapons (scythe and gauntlet that smashes rocks). glider wings, over-world warp tunnels, a horn that stuns creatures, boomerang, hookshot, gun, and the 4th dungeon surprise... a portal gun! Even with all this stuff, it remains easy to change items and weapons which is something a lot of games fail miserably at. You can also purchase more wrath abilities and combos for your weapons from Vulgrim. In a nice change of pace from most games, you don't actually get enough "money" during normal playthrough to purchase every option. This prevents the money from feeling completely worthless from mid-game like in too many other games.
The level design is very good. The puzzles are just the right difficulty to make you stop and think, without making you scream at the TV and run to Gamefaqs. The combat is pretty easy on normal difficulty. and gets easier as you power up.
The game's biggest weakness is the odd over-world map system, that only shows the main areas you can warp to, but not the smaller areas in between them or the dungeon areas. When backtracking for treasure chests, you can easily forget where certain "boards" are located on the over-world.
The game has gotten some mediocre and bad reviews that seem to focus on the "unoriginality" of the game, stating that it doesn't just pay homage to Zelda and God of War but copies them completely. I don't understand this complaint AT ALL. How many FPS games are released every month, and how many of them add anything new to the genre? (Hint: none)
I've been saying for years that Zelda needs more combat, and God of War needs more puzzles and now my prayers have been answered in Darksiders. Add in the Portal gun, which hasn't had the opportunity to get stale yet, and it's a winning combination.
Unoriginal? Maybe. But I could fill a few posts with my complaints about how the Zelda series has stagnated, and how God of War 3 was a bit of a disappointment in its sameyness. This game takes unoriginal parts of three games, but merges them together incredibly well. And that should be applauded not criticized.
The survival of certain characters and the last 10 seconds of the game do a great job of setting up the inevitable sequel, and if they can rein in Joe Mad's character designs and get someone who didn't grow up on 90s Image comics to flesh out the plot and dialogue, Darksiders 2 could really be amazing.
If you like Zelda and God of War and Portal and haven't played this game, what are you waiting for?
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