Darksiders Review

Darksiders tells the tale of WAR. One of the four horsemen of the apocalypse who was accidentally summoned to earth. Upon arriving WAR quickly discovers he is not suppose to be there and is stripped of all his powers and killed. He then faces the council who seem to think he is responsible for all this chaos. Upon convincing them to let him prove that he is innocent and find out what all is occurring he is granted a second passage to the world, but he will not be going alone. The watcher will be his companion on this journey to help and to keep WAR in line.

Along with a decent storyline are nice visuals which look like a high res. Version of World of Warcraft. Take note blizzard, Just kidding. Decent combat, just think of God of War or any other hack n’ slash and you get the gist of it. Pulling off combos is as easy as hitting XXX. But the combat fits well in this Zelda style action game. Speaking of Zelda this almost feels like a demonic clone of the recent 3D Zelda games. You have your basic Z targeting by hitting the left trigger. The weaponry shares some similarity but also has some unique items to mix things up a bit. Finally you get Epona! Well, not exactly you get a horse but it’s more on the demonic side. While these may sound like pure rip offs they actually are implemented very well and keep the pacing of the game going.

Visually the game looks amazing. The opening cinematic was one of the better CGI cut scenes in a long time. It popped out at you and can get you wondering whats going on. Each environment feels fresh and has new and unique things to look at. You never feel like you’re in a spot for too long and what back tracking you have to do is not really a bad thing since will get to explore areas even further. The only lacking feature is that on the Xbox 360 version some screen tearing occurs. While it may not be noticeable to everyone it doesn’t hamper the experience of the game.

While Darksiders sounds like an amazing title it does have its fair share of problems. While playing the game you will come to section in which you are required to disband a curse in order to open up a new section. This has you travel about the map and go into these time trial like scenarios in which certain objectives must be done. It seems like they wanted to have the player play around with the different ways to dispatch enemies, they just felt tacked on. The other complaint is that sometimes when you would get too close to an edge or even the right spot to jump you would just fall to your death resulting in a loss of life. Toss in the few technical errors and that sums up the overall complaints. Again these are minuscule complaints in a 15+ hour game.

Darksiders has a lot to offer with its nice visuals and game play. And with the first quarter of this year being so jammed pack it is good to see that thus far we have rang in the New Year with a bang, or rather an apocalypse.

*We reviewed this game on the Xbox 360 but there is little to no difference to the PS3 version.