Darksiders

What is “Darksiders?”

“Darksiders” is an open world action game that follows the horseman of the apocalypse, War. War finds himself mistakenly called to Earth before the apocalypse begins. His arrival causing an unbalance in the struggle between Heaven and Hell. Accused of purposefully tipping the scales, War is sent by “The Council” to restore balance and prove his innocence.

The Win Condition

The win condition is pretty cut and dry for this one. Simply reach the end credits of the game. Nothing else to say about this so moving on to…

The Experience

I am going to start off by applauding this games enemy design. Particularly noteworthy are the bosses. Every enemy feels beautifully crafted and fascinating. I constantly found myself looking forward to the next boss just so I could see what the next boss looks like. In addition to some awesome looking bosses, most boss fights also felt unique. Requiring different strategies for defeating each new monster.

The games story and level design were both quite solid but aren’t particularly noteworthy. However, I do want to give a shout-out to a pretty decent job pointing the player to the next objective without directly telling them how to solve the puzzle. This was a nice change after spending 5 hours lost in Bloodstained.

Unfortunately there are two area where this game is lacking a bit and holding it back from being great. The first is that the controls feel sluggish at times. After a while you get used to the delays caused by long animations and some sort of input delay, caused by whom knows what. But there will always be those occasions you walk off the edge because your jump command didn’t register for some reason. On the bright side this seems to be fixed in the later entry we previously played “Darksiders 3.” Granted the boss design is definitely better in this one than said later entry.

Moving onto problem two, the last 4 hours of the game. The last 4 hours felt like a desperate attempt to make the game longer which ultimately results in a bitter taste being left in the players mouth. The last tower has you essentially doing the same thing three times over in order to power up three mechanisms. Sure the puzzles are slightly different but ultimately all feel the same. This could have been easily avoided by just having one mechanism dropping a three hour segment to one hour. The game then adds insult to injury by having the player back track to the seven main areas of the game to collect seven pieces of a mighty sword. Each of the areas are unchanged apart from some tougher enemies appearing. Making this return to previous parts feel like a waste of time.

The Ranking

Some promising monster design is ultimately held back by sluggish controls and a desperate attempt to squeeze out “more content” by making the game longer arbitrarily. Still the game is enjoyable overall largely for it art direction. I am placing “Darksiders” at number 9 in the horror list. Immediately behind the series layer entry “Darksiders 3” and above “Shadow Warrior 2.”

Time To Beat: 14:57:32 Platform: Xbox 360

How To Play?

“Darksiders is currently available for purchase from Intergalactic Games and Collectibles.