If you haven’t gone to the hyped Bayonetta yet, then you’re off to a good start. Unlike Bayonetta – In Darksiders you play as War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Initially the plot takes place in nowadays americana downtown setting, demons are meteoring onto Earth to seize control and eradicate mankind from the face of the Earth.
For odd reasons, War gets summoned to Earth to save the mankind, but is then being schemed as no call was given for him to arrive on Earth. A sacred covenant of seven seals has to be broken for the brotherhood of horsemen to arrive on Earth, till then they’re residing where ever they’re residing in Hell. War battles on only to lose as all his powers gets stripped from him, right before a rather large stage climax, only to wake up about 100 years after the incident. As War, the player has to go over a dozen of puzzles including monsters and bosses to gain enough power to be able to defeat the Destroyer and clear his name.

The plot itself is rather giving itself, you’re playing the hero who has been accused of treason, then nearly begging to be put back into action to prove his innocense. After this the ‘missions’ gets extremely linear, someone tells you to go to A, kill That guy and bring something back only to do it all over again, but you get something in return for the favor just so you can get to the next guy.
We’ve all seen this plot before, as it happens in nearly every possible game, albeit Designer Joe Madureira claims Darksiders to be unlinear, unfortunately to him it’s not being backed up. You do have the opportunity to explore as much as you want for collectibles scattered throughout the game, and gain enhancement to slot onto your weaponry.
Unfortunately this means that you can’t really call Darksiders unlinear, the only unlinear here, is when you’ve finished the game and gets to freely roam the environments for missed collectibles. And there’s plenty of them.

While playing you will have to battle though countless of demons and undead, Wars basic weapon is his huge sword. Now how many games haven’t we seen with main characters wielding enormous swords that noone human should be able to wield? I won’t say it’s unworthy, battle system actually works really well within Darksiders, with the possibility to add more moves to War, increment the damage or range of the moves, and finally adding enhancement to his weapons to either give a higher damage output, range or even experience gained.
When slaying enemies the used weapon will gain a certain amount of experience, making them able to level up, there’s a maximum of four levels a weapon. Thus giving the game more ‘grinding’ pace, aside from that, the currency in Darksiders is Souls. Whenever an enemy is slain, it will drop a number of blue souls. Green souls gives health and yellow souls give wrath to use special Wrath abilities that War has.
Putting abilities and enhancements to side, War is even able to perform ‘fatality’ moves on enemies that are on the brink of death. However each type of enemy only has a single fatality move, making it more and more repetitive, admittedly at this point I already think Darksiders is repetitive enough as it is. I don’t mind slightly repetitive gameplay, but this is nearly stretching it, I would like to see a wider space of enemy types and fatalities.

In the end the game is basicly a long Puzzle-Brawler-RPG, if you’ve ever played Zelda, you’d recognize Darksiders. Joe Madureira already gave out public reviews that Darksiders is a light combination of Legend of Zelda, God of War and Devil May Cry 4. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Darksiders only took the good parts of the before mentioned games, and added extremely good looking visuals and scores to it, most of the time while trying to figure out how the hell I would manage it to the other side of the room, that I had to get up four floors and there wasn’t a direct elevator to it, I was baffled by the way the ambience and sound was putting me into the post apocalyptic mood. Visuals did a great job as well, with alot of gore, and a grunge apocalyptic look and feel to it, I really felt like I was in a world 100 years from now, overrun by demons and undead.

My final judgement for Darksiders;
+ Visuals and ambiences
+ Puzzles
+ Combat system
- Repetitive Gameplay
- Fatalities

9.1

I wouldn’t recommend you rent this game, it will generally take too long to complete and get all trophies/achievements. In the long run you’d rather own it for the goodness, ’cause Darksiders is a really good game, compared with Bayonetta I’d rather play Darksiders.
After getting Darksiders I only had a single item of disappointment, the Harvester weapon. Despite it being extremely weak and useless, the code needed for it was the same for every pre-order of the game. Which means that the code has been launched onto the internet, and it was already included in the game for a mere 1000 souls without the code. I suppose when you launch a preorder code, you only allow the people who paid for a preorder to get that reward? Apparently that idea went down the drain on this one, quite disappointing.

- That’s it from our game reviews for this time, next up will be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – We do know it’s a looong time ago the game got released, and we’ve just attained it here on t3h Syndicate. Look forward to it!

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