Developer – Vigil Games
Publisher – THQ
Available on – Xbox 360, PS3
Reviewed on – Xbox 360

Darksiders is the product of every 90s gamers fantasy, being thrown quite literally into the apocalypse. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has been remade for the current generation and overall it’s a good experience. Darksiders follows the story of “War”, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, whose coming signifies the end of days and the breaking of the seven seals, who is called to bring judgment on the three armies of Heaven, Hell and Earth. The game begins with War arriving on earth to discover that the seventh seal has not been broken, but either the armies of Heaven, or the Hordes of Hell have begun the war early. Given that his brethren have not to been called he is defeated by a Demon, “Straga”. The overseers of balance, “The Council”, blame War for leading into the apocalypse early, and he ends up having to find out who are involved and punish them to clear his name, and so begins our journey.

The game’s art is all made by Joe Madureira, famous for his comic book work, including Marvel Comics “Uncanny X-men”. It works amazingly with the games atmosphere and has created a huge supply of awesome desktop pictures for me. Graphically, the game isn’t spectacular, but it’s unique comic book art style makes up for any polygon and invisible wall syndrome.

THQ have created a pattern in their better recent releases of having awesome gameplay to support average graphics (Saints Row 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla) and this game creates no exception. Whilst a large amount of the mechanic and puzzle idea’s have clearly been taken from OoT, they have been executed well and are not at all gimmick-y. Throughout the course of the game you get a hook-shot, a horse, a four-pointed boomerang, an instrument, a mask, (enough with the Zelda nostalgia)  a power glove, the ability to slow time, a portal gun and in an epic move to bring the old testament to the new age, a gun. All these tools assist you in solving puzzles and in later parts of the game create some interesting combination of effects to progress. Strangely though, the game arbitrarily restricts you from having more then three of some of these tools in the quick-equip menu (d-pad left up and right), forcing you to pause the game and change weapon assignment through the menu, which creates a terrible break to game flow.

Near the beginning of the game you receive a large horn that you use to awaken giant stone golems that have been enslaved by the “Destroyer”, leader of the Dregs of Hell, that block your path. Some of these golems have been cursed by creatures called “Shadow Lurkers” that must be defeated in order for the golem to move on and for War to continue on his quest. These creatures are found in arena style rooms located through portals near the golem they are holding, and cannot be defeated until a tutorial-like challenge has been defeated. These trials are relatively enjoyable if not a little difficult, but after six or so in the game (and about 6 hours in), they are forgotten about and not seen for the 18 hour game, nor are the golems for that matter.

Darksiders is all about the epic boss battle. Keeping with the Quintin Tarintino “homage” style of game that Darksiders is, you fight a giant worm (Dune) and  a giant spider (LOTR), as well as a large bat. The boss battle’s run pretty close to textbook, you use the tools you most recently acquired and you need to get through 3-5 stages to kill the boss. The game seems to have been made relatively cruelly in that when you get a lucky break and seem to be on track to beating the boss quite quickly (after dying over and over again) the boss does something a little out of it’s pattern to make it that little bit harder. A minor technical issue came up with some of the bosses, particularly the ones that could teleport, in which invisible walls would stick in the places that they had been, or where about to be for almost a second after they had left of before they had arrived, and in most of these cases the delay in your escape was enough to lose a considerable amount of health, and even when you had the patterns understood the bosses still provided a considerable challenge. The only exception to the epic boss rule of the game was the last boss, who was by far the easiest of the game, and also least interesting in combat style, the ending to the story does make up for this lack-luster boss, but with the standard shown in bosses to that point an epic battle requiring use of all the skills obtained to that point would have been some insane fun.

I played through the game on Apocalyptic difficulty first play-through, and I would strongly recommend against this for anyone but the most seasoned of gamers, as mid-game difficulty changing is not possible and you won’t know how hard it is until you’re a number of hours in. I can’t be sure if this is true of all difficulties, but for me the game was extremely harsh, and only a few slight mistakes or a bit of bad luck would have me spending an hour or more repeating the same boss or battle over and over again, which got very tedious. I also encountered a few freezing issues, mostly minor, resulting in the game pausing for a second or two, though at one point, during a puzzle using the portal gun, the game crashed and sent me back to the title screen. Fortunately the game auto-saves before most rooms, so I only had to restart the puzzle I had been working on.

Achievement-wise the game is quite generous, receiving 785G just during that first play-through, and although most of the achievements are related to story completion, the few that require extended play or changing game-play styles supply adequate incentive for play beyond just the story.

Darksiders

85%

The Good -

• Awesome comic book derivative art-style
• Epic boss battles
• Amazing and well-executed nostalgia trip
• Interesting and compelling story

The Bad -

• Unforgiving game-play
• Unspectacular end-boss
• Minor technical issues