Game: Darksiders

DarksidersFinished Darksiders on Saturday.

This game is fun. You play War, one of the four horsemen … to bring devastation on the world. And, oh my, you do. Hell is loose, the angels and daemons are fighting each other and in the middle is mankind. Well, mankind: not long.

Soon you find yourself tricked and are “accused” to have been showed up at the wrong time, since noone actually has called for you. You are brought before the cosmic council and you are given a second chance to remedy your “failure”. You are sent back to earth to only find out that centuries have passed since you have been trapped. You are weak and lost all your powers (and your horse). Further more, the council decided to attach an enervating spirit to you which watches every step you take. Step by step – level by level – you regain your powers and abilities back (and finally your horse too). You figure out who is behind your imprisonment and manage to take revenge. It’s a road movie in a post-apocalyptic world roamed by daemons and angels alike fighting each other … and you.

The action is pretty cool. You jump, swim, run, crawl, climb, etc. Fighting has some nice moves and as the game goes on you learn new skills and weapons. It really is smooth. The graphics are comic style nice and pretty to watch. The riddles range from easy to pretty awesome. And after learning new skills and abilities you tend to go back to levels you already cleared since you might now discover new places and spots you haven’t been before lacking the ability to fly to these places or even teleport (!). This game has looting features you get hooked on.

War is a cool character. … who is lost in a cool though confusing world.

The setting has some real nice touch. The world is filled with angels and daemons of all kind fighting each other and you’re fighting all of them. Some boss monsters are huge and some are pretty tough. Still one question remains: why I’m doing all this? What’s the point? The “mighty” council is a bundle of idiots easily fooled by a child or they deliberately sent War to prison … for what? Daemons and angels are fighting because … they don’t know what else to do? Yes, the overall action in the game is very addictive but the story could use some improvements. It seemed that some boy child fantasy has gone wild and just stopped at the point when one starts to justify all the action and reaction the characters in the game perform. “It’s there because … it’s just damn cool, isn’t it?”

Finally the controls: I played with my XBox controller on PC. First it starts all nice and easy. Pretty simple and clear. But as you learn new skills, abilities and weapons you find your controller overloaded with zillions of different moves and actions you can do. At the end I felt having about ~40 different key combinations to choose from. And as such I sometimes ended up jumping and flying around before I got the right keystroke to actually hit my foe. This is simply too much.

Still, a very pretty entertaining game.

7/10: 7 out of 10