I’ve made my way through countless caves, temples and ruins in my years as a gamer. Often as a young hero or heroine who is helped by kind-hearted characters I meet along the way, or in the case of the Zelda games, in the form of some magical being constantly nagging me what to do next. Darksiders II also lets you explore forgotten sanctuaries but you mostly have to solve everything yourself, because who wants to walk in Death’s footsteps?
Because it is precisely Death whose role you assume in the second chapter of the tetralogy of the four horsemen (War, Death, Fury and Strife) whose arrival heralds the approach of the apocalypse. Death is an opponent we all face or later face, but for the sake of the unusual, in Darksiders II we get to play as the Grim Reaper himself and instead of harvesting human souls as is the custom, you aim to restore humanity to Earth. Death comes to us all, but it wasn’t quite how I imagined it.
Unlike the first game’s protagonist War, whose perpetually grave voice made me roll my eyes, Death has a really sharp tongue with biting sarcasm, kind of like Alan Rickman making his action hero debut. Death aims to exonerate his brother War after the latter is blamed for mankind’s untimely demise. To do this he needs to find the Well of Souls that now houses all human souls and undo the apocalypse itself. Really how this should work in practice feels a bit fuzzy and the game usually degenerates into other, more local and precise problems.
To be about Death are the worlds Darksiders II shows off remarkably colorful and vibrant compared to the mostly gray and dull ruins of the first game. All the locations have their own nice color themes and together with the stylistic features they mostly arouse my curiosity and spirit of exploration while the lighting design, voice acting and especially the music written by Jesper Kyd, with its combinations of strings, choirs and electronic ambient “pads” are thrilling me into the fantastic worlds Death witness. There’s even a village inhabited by hulking dwarves that give you side quests and allow you to purchase upgrades and new combat maneuvers.
Why does the world make me think of Blizzard?
The game is even more reminiscent than its predecessor of Zelda’s previous 3D iterations and you have several different zones that contain several temples and ruins each. In addition to the larger ruins, there are also several smaller temples and caves that offer their own challenges and rewards, but don’t need to be played in any specific order, although you may not be able to reach every room in the cave without certain gear.
Each temple offers quite a few trials, whether it’s various monsters blocking your progress or puzzles to solve. That the latter aren’t watered down by a chatty companion does a lot to make them feel meaningful and satisfying once you’ve figured them out. Granted, you do have a screeching raven with you that can perch on items that might be interesting, but I didn’t even notice that feature until late in the game, and you can choose to dismiss it if you want. The puzzles themselves usually involve tiles to stand on, levers to pull, portals to open and beams of light to hit the right mirrors. These are classic obstacles, but they also work really well – they’re neither too obscure to understand nor so easy that you solve them on the first try.
The other bit of the game is similar to its predecessor all the life and death fights you get into (how to kill death and what that would mean). You get to fight everything from magical stone structures, to underworld lackeys, to mighty dragons and outlandish monsters with tentacles protruding from their chins. Death is a very fit figure and as his primary attack he uses his dual scythes to harvest victims at a rapid pace. But like many other games, you also have an alternative attack with another weapon such as fast spiked gauntlets or heavy, slow axes and hammers. It’s possible to create all sorts of combat combinations with your various weapons, and you also have access to extra gimmicks like a gun or a hookshot-like ghost hand you can use in the heat of battle. Last but not least you have your various magic skills which you use with a combination of LB and the X, Y or B buttons on an XBox controller. With your spells, you can summon exploding zombies to fight for you, a massive 360-degree sweep with your scythe, and a dash that can set your enemies on fire. All in all, there can be quite a lot going on on the screen at once.
You get to meet the “ruler of the dead”… Isn’t that you?
Darksiders II allows you to vary your fighting style by equipping you with a large variety of weapons and armor with their own unique buffs and effects, but at the same time you have quite limited space in your backpack and I struggled over and over not wanting to throw away from unique weapons I collected as rewards after bosses or temples, but at the same time didn’t have room to pick up what was in the cave I was currently exploring. Some weapons allow you to upgrade them by destroying others, but this particular type of micro stopped my gameplay quite often.
It rarely feels like the backpack is this empty
Finally, I came to the conclusion that the absolute best combination of gear was to have a weapon that gave me health when used and another that gave me magic. The combination allowed me to constantly spam zombies, magic attacks and then when either magic or health started to capsize quickly replenish new energy with new attacks. The fact that that tactic largely worked against all the enemies and bosses I encountered was probably something of a minus, but the battles still didn’t get boring, mostly because there was still a lot of clicking and wheeling to get the flow going. That being said, I would have preferred a system where I couldn’t customize Death so much with so many different weapons and armor, but instead limited the choices to a few weapons that you had to learn to master as effective counters against different types of enemies, much like in the first Darksiders.
Late in the game comes a chapter that repeats the mistake of the game’s predecessor and feels like it goes against everything I learned before. Instead of the above combination of Zelda-like puzzles and God of War-like fights, the game pretty much tells you to use a holy machine gun for an hour or so. It even lays out several on the way in case you feel like throwing your first away when opening a treasure chest or climbing somewhere. It feels like an idea that should have been left on the drawing board as it’s not much fun.
The game also has some notable bugs that haven’t been ironed out even in the definitive version, which I ran. For example, there is a recurring puzzle where you have to point a statue’s light in a certain direction in order to open a door, but it happened to me repeatedly that the game did not respond to the light of the light and the door remained closed. In other cases, I managed to put myself in a situation where I was locked in a room when the game only designed how to get to the room, but not out. It would also be worth putting in a teleporter pad at the end of each temple that takes you out of the temple instead of having to trudge all the way back or use the game’s fast travel. Just fast travel is also buggy and sometimes doesn’t work at all. Fortunately, a quick reboot solves all the above problems, but it’s a shame that it wasn’t fixed even in a definitive version (unless it’s this particular version that introduced the bugs – it’s happened in other games).
The definitive version, on the other hand, has updated the game’s textures and includes the game’s three DLCs, which are three additional temples with different themes that each take about an hour to play through. Two of these contain new temples with their own logical challenges. But two of them unfortunately also contain even more machine gun sections.
Overall, it took me about 35 hours to play through most of the game and its DLC and Darksiders II is thus comparable in length to a classic 3d Zelda game. It’s a sequel that improves on most things from its predecessor and entertained all the way. If oversized monsters and game characters in fantasy worlds appeal to you, you’d probably appreciate what Darksiders II has to offer. If you also like the old Zelda games but thought they were a little too easy is Darksiders II definitely worth a purchase.
Darksiders 2: Deathinitive Edition
+
Fast, intricate combat that fills the screen with things happening and allows for all sorts of combos, tactics and playstyles
+
Nice sound, voice acting and music
+
Beautiful environments and neat use of all the arts of color theory
+
A more interesting main character than its predecessor
+
Appropriately difficult puzzles in Zelda-style temples that the game lets you solve yourself
–
A bit too much loot and too little inventory space
–
A story that doesn’t quite add up
–
Plenty of bugs that should have been fixed by now – which can of course be solved by reloading a save file
This means the ratings on the FZ
2023-09-25 19:41:06
#Darksiders #Kill #undead #death #die
