Darksiders

Darksiders feels strongly of the Devil May Cry games.
The difficulty is on par with what I remember of the first DMC; no rushing into the fray with reckless abandon or you'll die quickly, even on easy in the mid to late game. I wussed out and started over on easy. Beating the game on easy has the adeptly named achievement "You Call That Easy?"; I still got my ass handed to me a number of times, damn floating demon women. You'll know who I'm talking about when one sneaks in 3-4 hits and you kiss 2 life bars good bye and that's just on easy against only one of them, wait until you get two at once.
The puzzles were too straight-forward for my tastes. Only one had any sort of trial-n-error and even then it was just a matter of getting the timing down. I was probably doing it wrong considering the difficulty of every other puzzle in the game.
I enjoyed the camera not having any fixed positions as was custom to DMC. Even having full control over the camera the developers managed to hide goodies in plain sight on a few occasions simply because there were less than zero reasons to look in that direction rather than straight ahead.

It took me 15h 23m to beat the game on easy, 2h of it was running through all the areas before the final boss fight collecting stuff I couldn't get on the first run through for 100% completion.
I highly recommend this game to anyone that enjoyed the Devil May Cry and God of War games. You won't be let down, I sure as hell wasn't. The story had me hooked from the start too. Which is saying something post 2007 where most games have a virtually non-existent story after the initial cutscene, let alone an interesting one when they do. The ending wraps up the story behind Darksiders completely yet sets up for Darksiders 2 so perfectly that the ending cutscene could be used as the starting cutscene for the sequel. I personally have never seen a sequel get a setup that good before. Most setups for sequels just show the antagonists opening their eyes(or <insert lame action>) right before rolling the credits and that is even if the sequel got any kind of lead-in. Not the case here at all.

Despite starting out as a console only game released January 5th, 2010 the PC port released in September 2010 is very well done I believe. The game doesn't have that console feel like most console ports do. Part of the default KB/mouse controls felt odd to me but you can easily change them and you'll probably have to rearranged some bindings after a few minutes of play. Also if you have any kind of peripherals like a lightgun, steering wheel/pedals, non-xbox joystick/gamepad you'll need to unplug them. Darksiders tries to be smart and configure itself to use a xbox controller whenever it detects a "joystick" and turns off kb/mouse controls after the main menu. You'll know something is up when the options menu gives an option to change joystick bindings and not KB/mouse bindings. Ignore the warning sign and be greeted with a close up of War's crotch. You've been warned. haha

Morale of the story: I can't wait for Darksiders 2!

Published on 2011-03-23 02:56:31.