Darksiders

As a teacher and compassionate human being, I always like to preface negative criticism with positive. In this case, that’s pretty easy because Darksiders does a lot well. The art design is colorful and fun, if largely stolen from the Warcraft universe and not altogether consistent with the grand and humorless story. The voice acting is likewise well done, although with vets like Troy Baker and Mark Hamill leading the charge, the voices are, like the art, very familiar. (Mark Hamill even said the Darksiders devs basically asked him to do the Joker’s voice without all the giggling.) The battle system is a bit shallow, but is still flashy and fun…and largely stolen from God of War, quicktime finishers and all. Finally, the Zelda-esque progression of temples and gadgets works well until the final, practically endless dungeon.

Darksiders is a borrowing game. This is not a problem as far as I’m concerned; borrowing games can be fantastic—Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Nier, and Shadows of the Damned are just a few recent examples. A less successful example would be Dante’s Inferno. But unlike those games, Darksiders doesn’t use all the borrowed bits to fashion a true identity for itself. Instead it feels like a slightly worse sequel to several beloved video game franchises all at once.

The story is definitely the most unique aspect to Darksiders, which isn’t saying a whole lot because the story is a boilerplate epic mythology story. In this case, the myth (or religious prophecy if you prefer) is Armageddon. Earth is the final battleground for Heaven and Hell, and only YOU can blah blah blah. The fun twist is that you play as War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse, and neither side knows why you’re there. Frankly I’m still not sure why War was there either. The game tried to explain it—something about a council of demons who enforce the rules of Heaven and Hell and the breaking of six of the Seven Seals—but it’s all just a God of War style revenge yarn that’s saved by good voice acting and interesting character models. The main demon, Samael, who sends War on most of his errands is especially impressive looking…and also happens to be lifted directly from that old Tom Cruise movie, Legend. In fact, when looking for pictures to prove it, I realized that someone at Gamesradar already had done it for me.

The errands, which comprise most of the gameplay, are very elaborate fetch quests a la Zelda. Travel across the world to a dungeon, defeat the boss, earn another layer of HP, return to the quest giver. On the way to and from the dungeons there are inevitably zones that seal themselves until you defeat a set number of enemies in increasingly difficult waves. The enemy spawn system is by far the laziest element of design in the game, and in the final dungeon the difficulty spiked so crazily that one fight could pathetically easy while the next might take five or more attempts just to survive.

The dungeons are also multi-pronged, meaning that to reach the boss you might have to clear out three mini-bosses in three different wings of the dungeon, often acquiring a new gadget in the process. The gadgets are pure Zelda. There is a spinning glaive (boomerang), spiked chain (hookshot), a horse named Fury (Epona), and many more. As with Zelda, you can return to previously visited areas with new gadgets to open the way to health containers and other loot that were inaccessible the first time around. Handily, the final mission requires you to visit ALL of the previous zones after you’re fully kitted out, so you’ll likely find some goodies just before the end of the game.

But to get back to those multi-pronged dungeons, they are really, really fun to navigate. Once. The first wing of any dungeon is a real joy to conquer, but doing it once takes all mystery from the remaining sections of the map, which are just slightly more difficult versions of the first. And therein lies the ultimate failure of Darksiders. The devs came up with a lot of great ideas, then used each idea three times in a row to pad out the length of the game, which isn’t that long for an action RPG. It took me about 15 hours to finish the whole game, but those 15 felt like 40. I mean, I liked crawling through the web-infested ruin of a huge, dying city, using the hookshot and slowing time to get through different doors in order to reach a guardian spider that unlocked the way to the giant mother spider boss. But I didn’t like it as much the second time. Or the third. And by the FOURTH time, I was so sick of the spider dungeon that I quit playing for a couple days just to give myself a break. Video games are supposed to BE the break, right?

Dungeon bosses themselves are uniformly huge and scary and cool. Yet they are also susceptible to the curse of threes. Figure out the attack pattern, dodge it (or get hit and heal) and attack in the middle until it falls over and kicks feebly at the sky while you spam attack for a few seconds. Now do that three or sometimes four times and then there’s a quicktime prompt for a huge, gory finisher. Every. Single. Time. The quicktime events are so huge and cinematic and over the top that they just make you wonder why War can’t do any of that stuff in real time. The battle system is as deep and customizable as you want, with multi-weapon combos and access to gadgets during fights. But none of the depth is necessary. The main sword is so much more effective than the other weapons that you’ll be spamming regular attack through most of the game.

Wow, I have complained a lot about this game, and I’m not even sure why. Honestly I’m glad Darksiders got its own sequel (which I have not played yet) because the team at Vigil Games knows how to make a compelling video game. Like I said at the beginning, Darksiders is a good game. It’s just not the blockbuster it wants to be.