Review: Darksiders

"Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword." - Revelation 6:4

Taking the setting of the seven seals and the four horsemen of the apocalypse found in Revelation, this game pits you as the horseman, War.  In this universe, when the seventh seal is broken, the four horsemen are summoned to determine the ultimate fates between the Kingdoms of Heaven, Hell, and Man.  Or at least that was the plan.  War's story starts out being summoned amidst a raging battle between the forces of the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Hell on Earth with the Kingdom of Man (who were created to be a balance between the other two kingdoms) getting decimated in between.  After the leader of the Kingdom of Heaven gets killed and War nearly gets killed, the Council in charge of the balance and the horsemen blame War for the Kingdom of Hell taking over the earth.  They proceed to strip him of his powers and send him back to seek vengeance on whoever mistakenly summoned him.


To be honest, that set up for the game felt kind of weak to me and more of a "We need to give a reason for War to want to kill everyone....so how about this?" feeling.  I never understood why War being summoned when he wasn't supposed to be and just doing his job would get him in trouble or be his fault...but that's okay.  I was fine with just accepting that I needed to run around slaying demons (and occasionally angels).


Gameplay itself is a mix between God of War and Zelda.  It's a third person action RPG with combos, a tiny bit of fighting strategy, and chests with green, red, or blue souls that each serve a different purpose.  It also has dungeons with maps and compasses showing the locations of all items in the dungeon with a boss defeated using the item you get in the dungeon.  So gameplay-wise there is nothing really new here.  They pretty much just grabbed from multiple sources and put it all together.  The great part is that they did that very well.  All the systems fit together and they followed some very tried and true game design methods.  Unfortunately, they had the same problem as God of War where you only need to use a few combos over and over and over again to win.  It was very very very rare that I had to change my fighting style to cope with anything.  So the only strategy was to run away when I was overwhelmed and then dive in with the same combos again and repeat.


The game definitely has its own visual style, though.  It's beautiful and feels like a very well developed world in its own right.  The characters are mostly enjoyable as well (except the one you're meant to hate...), especially the giant....giant? with the Scottish accent and giant hammer.  He is freaking awesome.  War himself is a mix between extreme rage and extreme sense of duty, both of which tend to require him to kill almost everyone he sees and never back down from a challenge, but I still like him better than Kratos who is just all rage all the time.


The developers also took a huge risk with a new IP and gave it a cliffhanger ending, but it worked for me and got me very excited for more games in this universe.  It also clearly worked financially since Darksiders 2 is coming out August 14th.


Ultimately, I was glad to have bought and played this game and do recommend it, but I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it.  I'd say it's worth $40, a steal for the $20 you can find it for now.