I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.
This Week’s Game: Darksiders
As promised last week, I am going to pursue the whole Halloween thing by avoiding all the horror games that I don’t enjoy playing and play a nice post-apocalyptic action/adventure game instead. Before you ask, yes, I would like to play DmC for this but I only bought it less than a month ago, so it doesn’t manage to clear my self-imposed criteria for a game appearing on the Backlog. Don’t hold that against Darksiders, though, because I’ve spent the last couple weeks finding a few hours to play it and I quite enjoy it.
I am sure that this has been said before, but it bears repeating: Darksiders is The Legend of Zelda by way of Joe Madureira. I cannot say how this comparison holds up with regards to Darksiders II, but for the original, it is the most succinct explanation of what the game is and how it plays. I would point out, however, that the combat is deeper than that of the average Zelda game. The Horseman of War has a few moves on the Hero of Time. Also there’s a lot of blood, and the world ended a thousand years ago so if you were expecting to meet any humans that aren’t mindless husks thirsting for carnage then you will be severely disappointed.
I remember when I first heard of the game, I thought you were going to be a Horseman fighting against the Apocalypse. After playing through the intro at a friend’s house, I realized that no, the Apocalypse happened already and humanity is dead forever and you, as War, are just pissed that someone messed up the timing. Also, Mark Hamill is here to tell you all about the Apocalypse and dish some dirt on the various demonic and angelic heavies hanging around the ruined husk of the Earth. Everyone wins!
So I didn’t pick up this game for the entirety of the time that it was on consoles, and only got it on PC when it went on sale on Steam. I did this largely because while most reviews that I read agreed that it was a shameless love letter to the 3D Zelda archetype, they also seemed to agree that it got somewhat boring in the middle sections and maybe was not worth the full price of admission, so to speak.
Once I did finally pick up a copy, however, I sunk a few hours into it over the course of a week or so and then was probably distracted by other games that had released or gone on sale, and thus it fell to the bottom of my To Do pile. Every so often I would scroll through the list of installed PC games on Steam and pause on Darksiders, thinking “I should play more of this,” before scrolling past it to boot up some other game. This is more or less the essence of every game that I have written about here. So how is Darksiders now that I have left it alone for months?
As it turns out, it’s acutally very fun. When I missed my post last week I had already played another couple hours of Darksiders, and I booted it up last night to give myself a quick refresher before I sat down to write this, just a quick 20 minutes to gather my thoughts about the game. I ended up playing it for a good hour; lost track of time.
WarHorseman controls pretty well, and the camera is surprisingly generous when it comes to keeping all the action in frame. The combat feels meaty, and each swing of your ridiculously named sword has a consequence behind it that I found myself enjoying. There is a surprising amount of depth to the combat as well, and I found myself switching between sword and scythe in the middle of combos and laying waste to angels and demons alike.
And then they give you a gun that you never have to reload! It’s like Christmas!
Visually, the game has a great comic-book style, full of colors and intriguing monster designs. There was a fight that consisted of War punching a train car into a giant spider thing’s undercarriage, and every time the giant spider thing would rage and start to bring the ceiling down in an attempt to thwart War. Every weapon leaves a sort of colored trail when you swing it or throw it, and War looks like a hulking, angry gentleman with solid animation on all of his jangles and cape and hood and whatever else. This is a pretty game!
So conceptually, in my mind, this game is like the God of War series. Stay with me for a minute: both feature powerful protagonists out for revenge against a powerful enemy. Both are rooted in mythology, although I would say that Darksiders makes a few more changes to its source material. That said, I like Darksiders more than I like God of War. War is a more interesting and, dare I say, sympathetic protagonist than Kratos, who is just kind of a dick from beginning to end. I enjoy the visual style of Darksiders more as well, though its combat certainly borrows from God of War as well as the original Devil May Cry series. And quite frankly, the voice acting in God of War doesn’t hold a candle to that of Darksiders.
Darksiders starts off with the apocalypse and continues from there, which is not something that really gets done in video games. Killing off the human race in the first 30 minutes of the game is just not something that games are known for doing. I plan on playing it more once I post this, and I will certainly write about Darksiders II here once I get to it.
Back with a vengeance, y’all, this is the longest entry so far.
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