Darksiders is a very good game that you will want to play to the end. Great story, great gameplay and great visuals.
Darksiders is my kind of game. An action adventure with a lot of sword swinging, puzzle solving and item collecting to do, all wrapped-up in a visually beautiful package and driven by a great story. If you liked games like God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Devil May Cry, Prince of Persia, the Zelda games and so on, you really can't go wrong with this one. And if you didn't like some of the above, chances are you'll still like Darksiders.
Make no mistake, this is a very, very derivative game. It borrows - and sometimes blatantly rips-off - many gameplay and level design cues from a plethora of other similar games. All of this is very evident and does take away some of the value of the product, but the end result is still very good. That's mainly because Darksiders mirrors the very best aspects of the very best games of the genre and gels everything together cohesively. If Darksiders is not an inventive game by any stretch of the imagination, it is a great way to do all the things you've grown to like in fantasy action adventure games all in one go 'round.
This lust for being many games at once surprisingly never makes Darksiders devoid of it's own identity and everything the game throws at you feel right. Granted, sometimes there's too much going on, especially in terms of weaponry options and control gimmicks. War, your Rider of the Apocalypse protagonist, is a bona fide Inspector Gadget. Eventually, you'll have twice the number of items as you'll have slots for them, plus your four powers, your main weapon, your two switchable secondary weapons, your "alternate super powered form" and the option to wreak havoc on horseback. Oh, and sometimes all this won't be enough and you'll have to pick up ranged weapons left behind from fallen enemies.
So you can imagine the game controls are a bit on the complicated side. Throughout the game you do get the hang of it though and they never really get in the way of the fun. Every single button is used, sometimes for more than one thing, and apart from some actions unintuitively assigned to some of those buttons, the controls are quite responsive.
You get a free camera in Darksiders, movable with the right stick. As with the game controls, the camera is competent and doesn't get in the way of the gameplay. A fixed camera in games like these needs to be perfect, always allowing an optimal angle for the action while turning every simple step up a staircase into a majestic scene, almost like a silent second character - at least that is what God of War taught me. The guys at Vigil didn't dare go that far, which is a shame since War's dash move would be best assigned to the camera stick than to the block button. Everytime you move and block at the same time you end up dashing, which renders the block feature and the very cool parry mechanic all but useless, since you are always moving during combat.
The story of the game is really interesting and imaginative, not surprisingly with a graphic novel feel to it. All the elements are grandiose. Armies of Heaven and Hell going at it, the end of mankind, a sealed pact that eventually will bring forth the Riders of the Apocalypse and so on. This story is told through a few cutscenes scattered through the game, but they do a less than stellar job at shedding a light at the many events that thicken the plot - and the plot is very thick. They do on the other hand portray the complexity of the characters involved and their various intentions and personalities. Is great to see the particular wickedness of some demons and how they come across as individuals rather then mindless brutes. This is all aided by an excellent script and an intricate and powerful dialog. Too bad that the plot requires so much thinking to piece together.
The voice acting is solid throughout, and is highlighted by Mark Hamill as the Watcher, a wicked companion to War on his quest, following his on agenda. It has being reported to exhaustion how similar Hamill's voice is to that of his Joker in Batman: Arkham Asylum. It's true. I also couldn't care less and so shouldn't you. War himself is a somber fella and he is not very talkative, remaining silent other then in the scarce cutscenes. But when he does talk, he is powerful and believable.
Overall, the audio is excellent. Your sword shattering your foes armors, the neighs of your horse, sliding rocks and cranking contraptions, it all sounds great. I can't remember of any annoying sounds or audio glitches neither, so is hard to find fault in the game in that regard.
Visually the game really impressed me. You can see the pencil of Joe Madureira in every single character in the game, and believe me, that's a good thing. If you're not familiar with the work of Madureira, do yourself a favor and Google him up. The characters are incredibly detailed and well animated. The environments are beautiful, varied and vast, conveying a desolate, empty feel. The textures, the color palette, the lighting, it's all good. The cutscenes have in game graphics except for the opening, which is a jaw-dropping CG sequence. There are indeed some technical issues, like some jagged edges here and there, but I didn't notice all that screen tearing reported in other reviews. Graphically you can't say that the game shines, but it does a decent enough job technically and fits very well the style of the game.
But the real star of the show is the gameplay. You progress swiftly through the game, battling hordes of many different enemies, dispatching them uncerimoniously with an array of offensive moves and weapons. The combat is very fluid and satisfying and you can really feel the weight of your strikes. After you beat the living and un-living crap out of your enemies, you can finish them off with character-specific animations prompted by the press of a button. There are no quick time events in the form we have seen them in recent games though. You can earn and buy new attacks and powers as you advance, as well as upgrade your weapons through experience gained in battle. Thankfully - and I mean thankfully - the game doesn't sail the waters of light/heavy attacks put together in dozens of impossible to memorize combinations. I hate to go through a game not actually using all the combos available because I can't remember the difference beetween AABAB and ABBBAB.
When you're not shedding gallons of blood - which the game actually keeps track of - you are solving the many puzzles the game offers in order to progress through the clever level design. The puzzles feel just right, not too hard and not too easy. You keep receiving and discovering new items as you go along, and all of them end up being used to solve more puzzles and beat specific bosses. Because of so many items you end up having to do some backtracking, in order to reach previously unreachable places and unlock rooms and passages that were blocked. That can negatively affect the pacing of the game, but there's never really a dull moment in Darksiders.
The game is a bit easy and I recommend playing on the apocalyptic difficulty from the get go. That's not to say you'll breeze along only buttom mashing though, and some of the puzzles can really get under your skin. But the campaign is not short, which is good since the replay value is hindered by the lack of a unlockable difficulty and the inability to carry over your items and weapons to a subsequent playthrough.
I knew within the first hour that I would play Darksiders to the very end, wich is rare for me. The game is engaging and compelling. The gameplay is a blast and you want to see that story through and clear your name in the end. Dialog is grand and the final sequence has the mother of all hints to a sequel - which you will love. There's something to be said about the bossfights too, wich, like the bosses themselves, are absolutely incredible. The game looks good and you need to see that next area that you will unlock with your next item or power.
Yes, the visual and gameplay elements from other games are all-over the place. The green health chests, the enemies coming from magical gates on the floor, the invincibility while doing a prompted finishing move, gliding a little with your pair of wings, these all scream God of War. By Kratos, you even have a purple secondary weapon like the Spear of Destiny and a giant gauntlet that beat the upcoming Cestus to the punch. The puzzle-solving bits are right out of games like Zelda and Prince of Persia. From Link you also get the boomerang, from Dante you get the pistol and from The Orange Box's Portal you get the ability to create blue and orange gates that teleport you from one point to the other (that was far fetched!) You backtrack in the game like Samus Aran, you manipulate time like the Prince, you fly on-rails Panzer Dragoon style and you even pick up your alien weapons from the ground to fire away with impunity like Master Chief. You have Ruin, the hellish offspring of Agro and Epona, to ride and help you kill a giant sandworm in a circular arena, EXACTLY like Wander did in Shadow of the Colossus.
But tell me, wasn't that all great back in the day? Best off all is what this game doesn't have, that being that utterly japanese nonsense that festers in the design, story and overall feel of otherwise great games like Devil May Cry and the recent Bayonetta. You can be fun, nonsensical AND japanese without resorting to that - just see Ninja Blade. Don't let the derivative nature of Darksiders keep you from playing this truly amazing game.