Oh dear.

Oh me oh my.

This might be troublesome. Typically the negative impressions are the easiest to write. Picking apart every tiny detail a developer overlooked is usually the most fun and even obvious part of games writing. Yet Darksiders dared to be a tightly knit package of fun and joy. It may not have made any sleek innovations, but the heads in charge actually understood what it takes to make a game fun. In fact, more than just fun. A delightful experience that can be returned to several times.

Damn you sirs of Vigil Games. You’ve made a product that I enjoy to the point of having trouble criticizing it.

The game’s review scores are mostly fair, but too often from the big names have I heard the cry that too many other games are imitated without surpassing them. This is perhaps the largest hypocrisy (considering the praise given Shadow Complex despite being a total rip-off of Super Metroid) that also misses the point. Darksiders isn’t supposed to surpass any of those single titles but mix what makes them excellent into a giant pot of awesome.

Yet that discussion is for later. For now, I can say that some of the complaints are valid. Not many.

The largest issue in the game is actually the voice actor for the character of War. He isn’t a bad voice actor by any means. In fact, the voice work overall is good stuff. It’s more the direction given. Someone told him “every line you say must be long and drawn out and trembling as if you are bringing about a vengeful curse”. Sometimes it works. Most of the time it doesn’t. There are many times where the words being spoken sound silly when tied to the weighty tone with which War speaks. It is probably the greatest oversight given to the game and is the worst crime.

Now let’s consider the atrocities committed by other universally acclaimed games and tally all of their crimes against good design. I’d say if the worst part about your game is a single voice actor (or rather, how he was told to act) then you got a good thing going for you.

Mechanically there are a handful of other problems. Not too many, but they keep the game from being as excellent as it could be. The combat is relatively shallow, for example. There’s certainly a lot more options to it than available in, say, The Legend of Zelda, but you’ll still find yourself repeating the same moves a lot. There are plenty of other abilities available, but most of them aren’t as useful as merely slashing at an enemy repeatedly. The easiest combo to stay in is slashing forward with the sword, pulling back to toss them in the air and leap to them, slash a couple of times, then hold the attack button to strike them down. It deals a significant amount of damage and keeps the hits coming.

At the same time, when you’re using this ability on every foe in the game it becomes a little too mechanical. Granted even God of War and Ninja Gaiden can fall into this trap, but even taking the attempt to learn what you are doing in those games soon reveals all the additional options available to you. Anyone that experiments in Darksiders will end up discovering that other abilities are conditionally useful, but on the whole you’ll just be doing crowd control with the scythe or dealing massive direct damage with the sword. The powerful glove gained later in the game might be useful as it knocks back enemies efficiently, but the power and speed are so low at that point it is nothing more than an additional tool for finding some of the lost items.

As a result the combat is certainly more enjoyable than what is available in Zelda, but it is still repetitive. It’s a good thing that it is the fun kind of repetitive. It may not have the combat of God of War or Devil May Cry, but the game as a whole is a lot more interesting because there is more to it than combat.

My real gripe in the gameplay is how long it takes to level the weapons up. There are some abilities you can only purchase once you have the weapon at a certain level, and reaching that level is excruciating. Add to the fact that there are achievements/trophies for leveling every weapon up (and then buying all of the upgrades) and you are in for a long time of grinding. The only way to max just a single weapon playing the entire game is to ignore both of the other weapons. This means you’ll have one strong blade while the rest are weak. If you try to balance and use all three weapons, then you’re going to have three relatively weak weapons that deal little damage.

While I understand you don’t want to make it easy for players to reach the highest possible strength, being able to maximize all three weapons by game’s end is beyond impossible. The grind required is akin to being able to beat a role-playing game at around level sixty or seventy but requiring they level up to ninety-nine just to get an achievement or all the abilities. If you want players to customize their experience so each character is different then make it impossible to master everything in a single playthrough. Otherwise it feels as if they are simply losing out by not spending hours fighting random foes all over the world map.

Once again, however, this is a flaw that is not game breaking. The closest to that is how War occasionally refuses to jump. Walk to a ledge and it seems there is a brief point where the game ignores any input to leap from the edge onward. The game will merely subtract some health and place you right back where you were, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

That’s really about all there is to knock this game for. Some reviewers have said the puzzles are too simple and uninspired, in particular compared to Zelda. I find this to be a little too subjective. I personally didn’t need to use a FAQ for any of the puzzles, which is always a good thing. Puzzles should be capable of being worked out, and Darksiders is able to be figured out just by some experimentation. Even if the answer isn’t clear from the get go messing around with the obvious pieces will allow you to see a solution. At the same time, I’m sure there are people that got stuck at certain moments. In truth, the puzzles aren’t there to be a lengthy aspect of play. They are a small distraction to change pace after several rooms of splashing blood on the walls. They are, after all, building an action adventure game. Not a competitor to Tetris. As such, the puzzles do an adequate job without being so simple they may as well not be there at all.

Some of the last few items you collect aren’t used for many puzzles outside of their respective dungeons, but this is a tricky challenge to meet. You want items in the last few dungeons to be useful and awesome, but by then the player should have most of the items already. Hiding more across the world means they player may be under-powered later on or they’ll just find a lot of cheap items they don’t really care about, and thus seems less rewarding for obtaining them late in the game.

The end result is there isn’t really anything Darksiders does wrong. Could certain aspects of it be better? Possibly, but considering the variety of activities offered in the title I’d say it does a great job standing on its own. Yet I’ll get into that more when I explain why it is you should buy this game before it hits the bargain bin, in particular a new copy instead of a used one.

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