Darksiders 1 and 2 were two of my favourite action games and I still couldn’t tell you why I never got it at time of release, shortly after I found out the game had received mostly negative reviews and that was that. So I was really delighted to see that it was on PS Plus as its always something I had wanted to play despite the reviews, being a series fan. I thought to myself it can’t be as bad as everyone makes out can it?…..
Well in truth it isn’t AWFUL but its also not a scratch on the first 2 entries. They’ve tried to move away from the classic hack n slash fun that they had so successfully pulled off and moved more towards a kind of dark souls style of play, but not enough that it works all that well (I’m still trying to work it all out myself). The Combat thus far has consisted of me hitting square, and I found out that you can just hold it to pull off combos, and this will defeat most enemies, this and dodging are the 2 combat elements except your power moves. This makes the combat grow tiresome very quickly, as you’re just pressing one button, and whilst I’m sure you’ll pick up a new move you can use triangle for I’m not sure I want to stick around long enough to find out. You can also use square to swing on beams but that’s solely to add an element of fun to the relatively dull world exploration.
Then there’s this weird Souls element they’ve tried to add in. Similar to the beloved games you drop experience when you die (although it doesn’t seem it’s all of it) which are essentially souls, and you must feed your ‘souls’ to the merchant to level up…. Alongside this the enemies have definitely upped in difficulty, I chose the second easiest tier out of like 6 and I still found myself dying early on, the game not really feeling like it had an ‘intro’ level as these games usually do. Now this is absolutely fine, other games have copied the souls formula to relative success BUT this game doesn’t have the solid combat to back it up. What frustrates me is they’ve taken something away from the fun open world manic combat of the first 2 games to add in this souls system but not one part of it feels perfected. It’s all half assed, not only this but I actually had to double check it was actually a PS4 title, because this could have easily come out for the PS3.
For nearly everything you pick up you’re hit by walls of text so it’s possible I’ve missed something important by skipping through and there may well be more to this game, but equally I don’t care and I don’t want to learn more. Now it does seem that I’m completely shitting on it, and by all means it’s not a terrible game, it’s still playable and fun, it still works and has some of that darksiders charm to it, but……It’s still NOTHING compared to the others in the series.
Maybe if I had no other game to play I’d really enjoy this but that’s never going to happen due to my ever growing library so I’ve got to say it’s not worth the download and it only gets a: