-CrumbdiggimusMacDire
I just finished playing through the first Darksiders game. I tried playing through it about a year ago and got tired of it once I got the Voidwalker (basically a portal gun). I'll get into my issues with the game after I go through some positives.
I just finished playing through the first Darksiders game. I tried playing through it about a year ago and got tired of it once I got the Voidwalker (basically a portal gun). I'll get into my issues with the game after I go through some positives.
I think the biggest part of Darksiders that I like is the story. I find the premise of the game very interesting. Before I played the first Darksiders I played through Darksiders II which got me interested in the first game. The world is somewhat comparable to that of Diablo, heaven and hell wage war and humanity is weak (significantly more so than in Diablo). You are one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, imbued with incredible power. You have been charged with crimes you did not commit and so your power has been stripped from you but you offer to find and punish those responsible without your former power, saying that if you die trying then your judgement will have been fulfilled. I somewhat enjoy that the game doesn't go into great detail about world, but simply lets you role with it. It makes it feel like you are simply a part of the world, things are what they are and people are used to it, so when you hear about the shadow realm you just simply go "of course." A slight grievance I have with this is that occasionally it feels like the game does use this to simply pull things out of nowhere on you and simply expect you to just go with it.
The game itself still looks very good in my opinion. It's almost 9 years old now but I'm still impressed with the amount of details that go into things, your armor, sword, your horse Ruin. I will say here that I personally don't see much of a difference between the original and the remastered versions of the game. It seems very much the same to me especially in comparison to looking at remastered versions of Halo.
Combat within Darksiders rides a bit of a middle line for me. Personally I am a huge fan of the combat system in the Dark Souls games. What I like is the level of control that you have. If I get hit by an enemy it's because I messed up. That's why I'm not as big into games like World of Warcraft or even Skyrim because you have to expect to get hit (especially playing a melee character). Darksiders does a good job where I ususally feel like getting hit was my fault, but I often did feel like I got hit for no reason, specifically when it came to trying to evade attacks. It took me a bit to realize that for some enemies you can't evade in a particular direction depending on their attack. Some AoE attacks hit when you evade sideways and some hit in a long line when you evade backwards. You have to learn what's what when dodging.
Speaking of combat and really getting into some of my issues with the game. No one has a health bar. In particular I have very little indication how I'm doing with a boss except that they attack more as you hurt them, but you don't really know how far you are. The biggest case of this is fighting Silitha, the last of the Chosen who is simply put, a big spider. I absolutely hated this boss fight and it was easily the hardest when I played through the game. The main attack that she has is that she simply teleports above you and then falls. The only thing you can do is run and then evade, but if I'm right not only do you have to evade at the right time but also in the proper direction. The only way to figure it out for me was trial and error. The best thing I could find was to run circles around the edge of the room and when you heard her teleport you waited for a second and then evade slightly angled towards the edge of the room, I believe it was towards her front. The timing just seemed to be overly particular in my opinion.
Originally the biggest problem I had with the game was the amount of puzzles and what simply felt like busy work to me. That's why I stopped playing the first time. There's a lot of running around, platforming, and puzzle solving. This might have been better if War had not been so slow and had a higher vertical jump. What would often get me was that I would continually run off the edge of cliffs. I am a gamer where I always try and time my jumps right at the edge of a platform so I can land farther on the next one and not worry about coming up short. Darksiders seemed to have a knack for not letting me jump right at the edge and I would just fall. The consequence of falling is a small hit to your health, but really it was just frustrating to have fallen in the first place. Now I want it to be clear, I like platforming games, and I think having platforming or puzzles in a game is fine, Darksiders just seemed to have this way of not making me feel great for having solved a puzzle. I don't really know why but I didn't feel rewarded for solving them.
All in all, I would give Darksiders a 6 out of 10. The reason that I finished the game this time was in part because I enjoyed the story so much and in part because I was between games. Really I played the game to get the story, but the game itself felt a good deal like work. What made it much more bearable for me was that I started listening to podcasts and music as I played. Then the drag of running around was much easier. In the end, I do not have high hopes for Darksiders III and if it's anything like the previous games then I resent the fact that it has been called the next Dark Souls.
