#but i think it works better as a soulsborne 'puzzle with missing pieces' type thing

[king-dra]

the archeology stuff theyre gonna introduce in minecraft 1.20 looks cool but i hope they dont lean into the idea of giving the game "lore" too hard because to me minecraft is game where you make the story as you go

[infraredpenguin]

Review - Darksiders: Warmastered Edition

[Platform: Steam] [Control Scheme: PS4 Gamepad]

So Darksiders 3 is a thing apparently. It’s looking... like a game, I guess, but I did quite enjoy its predecessors a fair bit when I played them ages ago. The problem is that I never quite finished Darksiders 2, getting myself sidetracked as I am wont to do, so what better time than with a new entry on the horizon to finally go back and finish up Death’s perilous journey?

As it just so happened, I actually had the Darksiders games in my Steam library, along with upgrades to their remastered editions. In light of this bounty of Darksiders goodness (and the ability to ignore the frankly absurd DLC policies for the original DS2) I figured I may as well check out these “improved” versions and start my journey out at the very beginning, with Darksiders: Warmastered Edition.

Back when Darksiders first came out I played it on the PS3 and very nearly got the platinum trophy for it (missing the trophies for playing on the highest difficulty and that aggravating griffon trophy, which I will get to in a bit). I loved it. It felt like a perfect blend of some of my favorite franchises. Okay, more like a great blend of one of my favorite franchises and another franchise that I think is pretty good. Now that I’ve played through it once again, and in an enhanced form that has largely left the gameplay as it was, I can say that Darksiders is a satisfactory blend of what is still one of my favorite franchises in gaming (Zelda), a franchise that I still like but haven’t touched in ages (God of War), and a bunch of half-baked contributions from other game types I don’t really care about (namely, rail shooters).

Why has my impression of this game cooled somewhat? Well, for one thing, I think I’ve just gotten better at analyzing games over the years and also have less patience for clunky game design and shoddy controls. But if I were to pin down what constituted a majority of my frustration with this title, it would be due to my experience playing games in the Soulsborne series over the past several months.

I actually saw more than a few people trying to compare the Darksiders franchise with that of Dark Souls over the past week, so apparently I’m not alone in making this connection. But for me, the biggest point of contention I have with Darksiders against Souls is just how sloppy the controls feel and how poorly realized the combat is.

You see, Dark Souls and Bloodborne have kind of ruined for me a lot of action games, I think. With rare few exceptions, any failure I experience in those games is clearly my fault. It gives me a very robust set of tools to make my way through their world and its up to me to utilize that toolkit effectively. Every movement has purpose, every action a clear intent, and failing to exercise due diligence in feeling out the situation will more often than not lead to my character bleeding out on the floor. The Souls games are, in a word: fair.

Darksiders is not fair. But I may not have noticed this had I not played on Apocalyptic difficulty. A big part of Souls appeal lies in its (initially) obscene difficulty. Without the game forcing the player to carefully consider their actions and master the systems inherent to the experience, your typical erstwhile adventurer will just throw themselves willy-nilly at any and all threats, powering through on sheer brute force thanks to a lack of consequence for making mistakes. With each Soulsborne game, you don’t have that wiggle room, forcing you to *ahem* git gud (I hate myself for that) if you want to progress. But key to this requirement is the fact that these games give you every possible opportunity to do just that.

I’ve been talking a lot about Dark Souls in this Darksiders review, but I just want to impress upon you the magnitude of how frustrating combat can be in a game that doesn’t finely tune itself like a Souls game does while still having prohibitive difficulty. Because Apocalyptic difficulty in Darksiders is most definitely very punishing; even if it doesn’t present a challenge as intimidating as that of Dark Souls, it still punishes mistakes without mercy, but it doesn’t actually give you the same ability to overcome those mistakes without feeling kind of boring.

The reasons for this are threefold:

1. You take an obscene amount of damage on this difficulty. There are minibosses in the final dungeon that can take out upwards of 5 full health bars with a single hit, and you can only have 10 health bars! This in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but combine it with the other 2 points and you have a problem that can only be overcome by playing it safe or keeping a lot of healing items on hand.

2. Hit-boxes are way too big. The amount of times that I could clearly see an attack land miles away from me yet still inflict damage was absurd. This is an even bigger problem when you consider how often you get swarmed by enemies, especially when you can’t keep track of them because this God of War-style action game keeps the camera right on War’s ass for some inexplicable reason. But this wouldn’t be that big of an issue if it weren’t for the fact that...

3. There are NO invincibility frames on War’s dodge! This is by far the biggest issue for a frenetic action game like this because it limits aggressive play by an astounding degree. Being able to dodge through attacks with precise timing is a big differentiator for higher levels of play because it allows you to maintain a steady offensive rhythm, allowing for faster resolutions and more engaging interactions in general.

Due to a lack of iframes, fights against more imposing enemies with long strings of powerful attacks just boil down to keeping your distance and popping in for quick hits when there’s an opening. It’s not exactly thrilling, especially when War’s dodge isn’t very satisfying to begin with. 

It gets worse with enemies like the aforementioned minibosses where you need to bait out a specific attack in a specific area to accomplish anything. For those fights, you need to wait until the very last moment for an attack that comes way too fast (for the enemy’s size) and has a hit box seemingly 50% larger than its effect animation that you can’t dodge through, which will hit you for massive damage. It’s frustrating as hell, and the best way to deal with it is to bait the attack at an awkward angle so you can just pre-dodge directly away from it and wait ages for it to bring the attack down. Boring.

I hate that I’m harping on this so much, but the lack of iframes really did kill a lot of my enjoyment. So much so that I feel confident saying that Apocalyptic difficulty just doesn’t really work in Darksiders. It’s not even like I had an extremely difficult time beating the game; it just felt unfair, despite also being kind of easy at the core of it.

But enough about how this game fails at being Dark Souls (and God of War, ‘cause I’m pretty sure that game had iframes), now it’s time to talk about how it fails at being a Zelda clone!

On the face of it, Darksiders does a lot of things right. It has some fun dungeons to traverse with interesting (if simple) puzzles to solve, and some pretty solid major boss fights at the end. It kind of misses the mark everywhere but the critical path though, missing the spirit of what makes Zelda games so beloved.

For one thing, the combat arena rooms get old extremely fast. There’s just too many of them and it’s much too transparent that they exist primarily as filler. I get that they’re trying to ape God of War at the same time as Zelda, but one of the biggest problems is that they never really do anything interesting with these arenas. It’s just, “Here’s a bunch of enemies you have to fight ‘cause magical barriers won’t let you leave. Have fun!” I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that many of these encounters could have involved puzzle solving of their own, such as requiring use of the environment to overcome the challenge, or even using the fight itself to overcome the environment in some way.

But outside of those arenas, there is an excellent illusion of non-linearity in some areas, even if there isn’t any real opportunity for branching. The worst that can be said for these dungeons is that they’re as straightforward as some of the lesser Zelda dungeons, which isn’t actually that bad.

But outside of the dungeons things don’t hold up so well, with the exception of the Ashlands, which could be thought of as a dungeon itself, in some ways. The biggest issue for me is the means in which you accumulate strength.

In Zelda games, you will find Heart Pieces and the like in simple chests, to be sure. But, many of those upgrades will require a more roundabout series of tasks to uncover or unlock, in a way that helps to more fully immerse the player into the world of Hyrule (or Termina or whatever). In Darksiders, every single upgrade is found in one of those simple chests, usually requiring a specific piece of gear to access, but never really requiring much thought beyond “Lock Meet Key”. I think a big part of this is due to how barren the world is, which makes sense considering it’s a post-apocalyptic setting, but still feels like a missed opportunity.

However, the biggest problem with the Darksiders progression scheme is the weapon experience. Put simply, girinding out XP for each weapon type is pointless busywork that adds absolutely to nothing to the game. Worse than nothing when it comes to one weapon, which, near the end of the game, just automatically levels up fully, rendering all your hard work up until that point completely fruitless. The only meaningful reason for this grinding is to allow the player to unlock new moves in combat, but these moves cost money (souls) to get anyways, so why bother with an extra gate, especially when enhanced moves don’t feel markedly different to begin with!

Actually, both weapon XP and grinding souls feel like some of the worst filler I’ve seen in a game like this. It just costs too much to buy stuff, which means you probably won’t use everything, and it takes way too long to get XP which means you have to go well out of your way to bring your weapons up to par which means you feel obligated to switch instead of actually wanting to. These systems exist purely as grinds for trophies/achievements, which is never a good thing. I don’t think I ever used/upgraded any of War’s Wrath Abilities besides Blade Geyser, which is kind of sad for a highest difficulty playthrough, normally encouraging players to make use of every tool at their disposal

I’ve been shitting on Darksiders a lot, but here’s thing... I still really like this game. I just wish I hadn’t subjected myself to Apocalyptic difficulty. It also shouldn’t come as any surprise that it fails to be quite as magical as a Zelda game nor should it be shocking that tacking on gratuitous progression mechanics does anything other than drag things down. That being said, there is so much to like about this game.

For one thing, it is absolutely gorgeous. Post-apocalyptic Earth has never looked so good (except perhaps in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West). The art direction is stellar, and with the HD facelift for Warmastered, it doesn’t look even remotely dated. Despite being set in barren wastelands and the dilapidated ruins of a bog-standard metropolis, everything somehow manages to pop. It is vibrantly muted in its aesthetic, and some areas (Twilight Cathedral especially) are truly breathtaking.

While it isn’t going to win any awards for storytelling, the plot is perfectly serviceable and the lore underneath it all is extremely compelling. Even if I didn’t care about War’s redemption arc, I still wanted to uncover more and more about this ravaged world.

The characters help here, each of them being clearly motivated (or just as clearly unmotivated, Ulthane) and distinct, with visually striking designs. You’re dealing with demons for the most part and one of the biggest twists in the game is that there is no twist involved with one of your “business relationships”. The voice acting ranges from perfectly serviceable to delightfully camp. War is laughably dour and stone-faced, almost to the point of absurdity, while Mark Hamill’s turn as the Watcher is, unsurprisingly, great fun.

While there are some pacing issues with the cutscenes, especially later on when things start moving along at an extremely brisk clip, the cutscene direction is excellent and makes use of some legitimately inspired cinematic techniques that feel as though they were ripped straight off a comic book page. The only real downside to these scenes is thanks to the Warmastered Edition. For some reason, the audio channels in cutscenes are completely unbalanced, with voices being extremely clear and loud, while everything else (music, effects, grunting voice effects) is almost inaudible. I tried my best to get around this issue, but couldn’t come to any real solution in the end.

And yeah, it does have good gameplay, despite all my griping. The flaws are just that: flaws. They aren’t game breaking or anything, they’re just all the more frustrating because they highlight how much better the game could have been with just a little tweaking. The weapons and movesets are all extremely satisfying to use, with the additional tools mixing things up in fun (if straightforward) ways. The controls aren’t perfect, and War does occasionally fail to grapple correctly at times, but they do the job more than well enough, for the most part.

The boss encounters are all very well done (if you can ignore the iframe issue) and excellent examples of class Zelda puzzle bosses. It’s also just fun exploring everything in your quest to tackle those bosses. Hell, Darksiders probably has my favorite fast-travel system in any game, ever. You don’t just pop into existence at some arbitrary map point, you actually have to travel on paths between worlds, and there are even a few important items hidden away on these paths. I can’t tell you how badly I want to see another game flesh out this fast travel system!

See, I wanted to get through all of those negatives right up front because I wanted to end on a high note. Darksiders is a great experience if you lov-- wait... ah crap, I did forget one thing to hate on...

That goddamn griffon rail shooter experience you encounter early on is the worst fucking shit ever. It control like shit. It throws shit at you with no impact. It’s just absolute chaos and has a bullshit achievement tied to it. It’s just shit. This game does not have good targeting controls, and thankfully you dont have to be too precise with them outside of this segment.

Anyways...

Darksiders is great. Play it if you haven’t. Play it if you have. Spoiler alert: Darksiders 2 is also great (in different ways). Just don’t play on Apocalyptic difficulty if you’re used to games with iframe dodging.

Final Score:

6/10 if you play Apocalyptic

7/10 otherwise