I played Darksiders 1 through the week before DS2 and a few things have caught my ire.

In Darksiders 1 every time you hit something, you got a very satisfying slashing or thumping sound, yeah it could get a little annoying in prolonged battles but you knew for certain you were hitting an enemy. The sound of a blade cutting through air is not enough when the hit numbers can appear behind the camera and obstacles.

The platforming in Darksiders 2 has certainly evolved but the detection of whats happening is gotten a lot worse. War could grab pretty much most platforms, getting out of this habit was difficult at first, but I adapted. Fighting Bheithir on the other hand... The game could never tell when I wanted to just hang on the ledge (which are predetermined ledges specifically for hanging!), it would throw me off everytime and I would reappear in the lava spew I was so desperately trying to avoid.

Another platforming problem I had was in The Scar, the part where you hookshot between sinking platforms, at one point I let go but Death would not grab on the ledge and fell, forcing me to restart from the beginning, and when I got to the end I jumped from the very edge of the last platform, hit where I was intending to go but kinda physicsed/dipped my tippy toe into the lava and had to start again... Very frustrating as the hookshot from DS1 would hook to anything it could so long as it was in range.

In comparison to Darksiders 1, there is very little combat. In DS1 I could walk down a huge corridoor and encounter more than my fair share of enemies. In DS2 I find myself crossing huge maps and half of the dungeons wondering where all the enemies are, there was a scene where I am in an elevator with a friendly NPC riding for a minute or two and there is nothing happening on screen bar the elevator travelling up.

The lip sync is not the only thing missing/not as well done as the original game.

Its a small detail, but they need whoever left to come back or find someone better.

Crosshairs, again a small complaint, but they are waaaaaay off. As someone who likes to fuck around and make their own games, it was difficult for me to get my first crosshair aligned right, but shouldn't be a problem for these guys. Here's what I'm talking about:

I quite like the game so far but I think its a far cry from the original Darksiders in terms of the type of game, the quality of the systems and the story.

I think I am gonna do what I did with the last Darksiders. Wait for it to be $2 on sale on steam, buy it and never play it.

Agree:

• Story is bad. Characters are interesting, but the plot and motivations for you moving forward are nonsensical. Also, you have no sense of where this fits into the first game's timeline until much later in the game.
• Lip sync. Ya, it feels a lot more like an RPG. But there's also significantly more dialogue in the game, so this can be forgiven. I mean, you only come across a very small number of cutscenes in the first game with proper lip syncing; in Darksiders 2, you can chat with nearly every non-hostile character you come across.

Disagree:

• Platforming is really good. It's very similar to Prince of Persia, like... eerily so. All of it feels really tight, the lack of a double jump is a great removal, and no more hovering. War in the first game felt like a tank that never really moved right when jumping. I agree, sometimes using death grip can be a tad annoying, but you (or at least I) figure out the nuance rather quick.
• Crosshair is pretty good? I never had issues with it. So long as the object got targeted (arrow), it would work as intended. I think it was just a really forgiving crosshair that didn't require a bunch of precise aiming.
• Quality of the game. I think this is the second best 3D action-adventure game I've ever played (next to Shadow of the Colossus). It's better than, in my opinion, every 3D Zelda title. Then again, I'm not a big fan of Ocarina of Time, so who am I to judge? I always thought Majora's Mask was the more interesting and compelling N64 Zelda title.

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I'll be honest. I loved the 'dark Zelda' idea behind Darksiders. But I think the original game really isn't that good. Go ahead, shoot me. The combat was real simplistic, the dialogue was more dense than it needed to be, the 'combat arena tutorials' were bullshit extensions of game time, underwater combat was such an unnecessary addition to the game, War was such a two-dimensional character, the gameplay niche of some items overlapped in the same dumb ass way Zelda's items tend to (why do I have a gun AND a boomerang?--they're functionally identical, but the gun sets no additional puzzle purpose), it has uncanny difficulty spiking, and it really felt like they were trying to be an edgy Zelda--like, painfully so. Why is unlocking a door so violent? To be a little more edgy? Sorry, that's trying too hard. By the end of that game, I found myself loathing combat so much that it became a chore. In Darksiders 2, I welcome combat whenever I can. I go to the Crucible just to kill stuff some more because it's such a blast. [/rant]

I've seen a lot of people praising the platforming, but I sorta agree with you. With War there was never any "finnickyness", while I find time after time with Death that he's not doing what I want him to do. While they've added more variety to it, I feel like a lot of the new stuff is very unpresice. Take wallrunning as an example, it's very easy to either not lean into it hard enough and just fall down the pit, or lean into it too much and just end up running up the wall. Also the wall-switch corner-jump is very unclear about the timing, so it's again easy to either do it too early or too late and just fail.

Add to that that Death has much longer animations making it more frustrating when you fail and even though it's more of a level design issue I've run into the same issue several times of Death running into some obstacle on a wall then get stuck in this "not quite close to the wall" area where he just fails to grab any ledges he falls past, really annoying.

@Ares42: In 2 playthroughs i failed the wall corner jump maybe 3-4 times, and all of that because i was zoning out (after too many hours playing) not realizing there was even a corner jump coming. I found the timing on them extremely generous, you could jump way a head or almost next to the wall, at least compared to actual platforming based games like PoP.