Darksiders

The great thing about Darksiders having so many clear influences is you get to have what you love about a great swathe of games in one place; the visceral satisfaction from God of War, the balletic combat of Devil May Cry and the gadget fuelled exploration of Zelda. These don't get in the way of each other, are all done extremely well and all feature in Darksiders. You play the game wondering why nobody mixed those things before. It’s like witnessing the first time someone put peanut butter and jam together and om-nom-nomming all over it.

The story starts out as a reasonable, but fairly cookie-cutter, premise for the games proceedings: The End of Days is started and War, one of the four horsemen, comes along to check it out. Unfortunately, it’s not quite the party he had in mind and you find out War was tricked. After a cut-scene whereby you’re given some intravenous Mark Hamill voicework, you set about your quest for revenge. In the second half, however, story becomes one of the games strengths, calling to mind some of the writing from the Legacy of Kain games.

The game owes most of its gameplay ideas to Zelda; collecting four pieces for an extra health meter, an item that works exactly like the boomerang, one that’s the hookshot, finding maps in dungeons, then the item that shows you where treasure chests can be found. A full list could probably fill a page. You could say Darksiders is the first time you’ll play Zelda in HD, for which we should be grateful.

As for the fighting, it works like the button combos of God of War or Devil May Cry, with new moves bought in a similar fashion to either. Souls, your currency, are spent on first buying an ability, then levelling it up. Proficiency with a particular weapon is increased by using it though. Purchasing and levelling work fine, but as with any use-it-to-level-it system, you wish it would all happen much faster. 

Stylistically, Darksiders is very reminiscent of World of Warcraft, with War himself looking like a stunt double for Arthas. Unlike WoW, Darksiders is dripping with detail. Pretty much everything looks pixel perfect, no matter how close you are, with only the occasional skybox letting the side down.

As crisp and sharp as the graphics are, the audio is more so. It has DTS support done well, putting it on the list of PS3 games to put on when you want to show off your sound system. With production values to match, the immersion of having the apocalypse going on all around you is a real treat. Not least because it’s a video game, and not really the apocalypse.

All told, it might seem hard to describe Darksiders as anything other than a mashup of other games (there’s even a Portal gun). The key point to make? It’s only a rip-off if done badly, but it’s an homage if done well.

There are some issues, though. The checkpoints before boss fights are ostensibly there to allow you to explore, to get more powerful for fights that prove challenging. If you do this, however, the checkpoint created on your return will mean you have a lot more to do before you can retry a fight. Ideally, dying during a boss fight shouldn’t just have “Return to last checkpoint” and “Quit to main menu”, but also “Retry Boss Fight”.

There’s also a Class-A bug on the PS3 version: On starting the final boss fight, you need to use something as the fight starts, but doing so while the name of the boss is still on-screen (in other words, being too quick) causes the system to stop/freeze/hang/die, however you want to put it. Bummer!

Such issues and the derivative nature of the game keep it from top marks, but only just. It’s still a (literally) bloody good game.