Slick’s Nit-Picks: Darksiders

Ever had a bad day? I mean a really bad day? Well War, the first Horse­man of the Apoc­a­lypse, doesn’t wanna hear you whine about the day you spilled cof­fee on your brand new, white silk suit. One hun­dred years ago, he had the mother of them all. All he wants now is to right the wrongs he com­mit­ted that day and find out who set him up, and then make them have one final, excru­ci­at­ingly bad day. Dark­siders puts you in con­trol of War and lets you unleash rage the likes of which have never been seen before. Even cer­tain Spar­tans would tell this guy to calm down, Unfor­tu­nately, anger man­age­ment is not in this guy’s vocabulary.

This folks, is your tutorial.

STORY

In the begin­ning there was only Heaven and hell. Mankind came to be amidst this eter­nal strug­gle for power and it is believed that man is the key to it all. A truce was called between the blessed and accursed forces; a pact sealed with seven signs which were not to be bro­ken until the time of the end­war. Quick check…yep, the seals are all still intact, so…why is the first Horse­man on Earth lay­ing waste to well, every­thing? Leave it to Vigil Games to give you a tuto­r­ial in the mid­dle of the actual apoc­a­lypse. You fight your way through human, demon and angel, killing indis­crim­i­nately until you come upon Abbadon, leader of the Angelic forces and Uriel, his lieu­tenant. Abbadon meets a swift end at the hands of Straga, leader of the cho­sen demons and one nasty indi­vid­ual. You face off with Straga and teach him that depth per­cep­tion is not for big nasty demons but before you can kill him you sud­denly lose all of your pow­ers and real­ize that you have bro­ken sacred law. Straga laughs as he takes advan­tage of this and crushes you to death. Here’s the funny part: one hun­dred years later your bosses, known as the Charred Coun­cil, revive you in order to carry out your pun­ish­ment – death. Accord­ing to them the seals were not bro­ken and War was not sum­moned. He swears that he received the call and begs the oppor­tu­nity to prove his loy­alty or die try­ing. They bind this scrag­gly lit­tle turd of a wraith to you called the Watcher to make sure you stay in line and send you back to (now) post-apocalyptic Earth. You have been stripped on roughly ninety-nine per­cent of your true power. Still, you are War and you are deter­mined to show who­ever is behind your betrayal why you are the one true her­ald of the end of all things.

Score 9.5/10

War has a sick fetish for wings — not kidding

GRAPHICS/CAMERA

The sec­ond and third pic­tures above are in-game, action shots, not cut scenes. This game is visu­ally stun­ning and moments like the above bat­tle with the bat queen Tia­mat really make you want to just go “wow,” but if you stop to stare, you will get torn to pieces. The art of Joe Madureira has wowed count­less comic book fans for over ten years and now his work comes to the video game realm in Dark­siders. If ever a game needed a replay fea­ture it is this one because there are times you just wish you could see that last move or even that last demon again up close. The cam­era is a bit lazy in this game unless you con­trol it and that is not really a bad thing. What I mean is that the cam­era tends to sit back and sort of stay away from the action giv­ing you a wide field of view. This becomes invalu­able dur­ing the fre­quent swarms of ene­mies you encounter. Your pri­mary weapon is not great for sweep­ing around your body so being able to see when to dodge and repo­si­tion is won­der­ful.  I only had a prob­lem with the cam­era at one point where I was so used to leav­ing the cam­era alone that it affected my jump direc­tion and I died. I also have one minor gripe about the tran­si­tion from game to cut scene and vice-versa. There is a notice­able lag when the tran­si­tion hap­pens and I have become so used to games being seam­less that it really kind of bugged me. It does not take away from the enjoy­ment of the game in any way and another per­son might not care but I just felt it was a lack of pol­ish on the final prod­uct. This is an IP that will def­i­nitely con­tinue based on both the end of the story and the suc­cess­ful sales; I look for­ward to see­ing the next install­ment fix these lit­tle hiccups.

Score: 9.8/10

MUSIC/SOUND EFFECTS/VOICE ACTING

The music in the game is unfor­tu­nately quite absent dur­ing much of the game. There are themes for the open­ing and the end­ing and each boss has a decent piece to com­ple­ment its bat­tle. Sadly, when you are not in one of these gar­gan­tuan bat­tles, the music pretty much goes silent. Instead, it is replaced with the ambi­ent sounds one might expect if one were stuck in post-apocalyptic nowhere: creak­ing metal and crum­bling rock, along with eerie howl­ing winds that have you check­ing behind you every five sec­onds. Every mon­ster in the game either talks to you or makes some kind of dis­tinct sound to let you know it is near. If that wasn’t enough, some of the nas­tier ones come out of demonic por­tals and you can hear those open­ing as well. The gripe about no music again is just a per­sonal pref­er­ence, as the bat­tle noises (espe­cially while you ride Ruin) are pretty much all the atmos­phere that is needed for this title. The voice act­ing in this game is noth­ing less than top notch. I chose the above movie because Ulthane was sec­ond only to War him­self in my list of favorites in this game. I loved his voice because he made me think of him as a mix of the Jug­ger­naut and Thor, with the voice of Shrek. How­ever, JB Blanc (the voice of Ulthane) has to step aside for some heavy hit­ters in this record­ing booth: Moon Blood­good (Uriel), Mark Hamill (The Watcher), Phil Lamarr (Vul­grim) and Liam O’Brien (War) bring their char­ac­ters to life with spec­tac­u­lar voices, to name but a few. When you turn this game on, I hope you have a home the­ater or at least a really good sound bar because Dolby Dig­i­tal is going to be your friend.

Score: 8/10

GAMEPLAY

If one were to sim­ply look at this game, “god of war clone” would prob­a­bly be one of the first thoughts and that per­son would not be totally wrong. The whole truth, how­ever, is that while there are sim­i­lar­i­ties to Sony’s sun­shine boy Kratos, this game does play dif­fer­ently enough that you do not feel like you are in some ran­dom cor­ner of Greek mythol­ogy. It is dif­fi­cult to explain in words so I do encour­age any­one that enjoyed those games to give this one a go. War offers up the ultra-violence, com­plete with spe­cial kill moves and he is faced with puz­zles that will tem­porar­ily infu­ri­ate you. The con­trols are very respon­sive and it is won­der­ful that War can instantly can­cel a combo if, for exam­ple, an enemy became stunned and he wanted to go for the instant kill. This was a smart move by devel­op­ers because War is very fre­quently sur­rounded by ene­mies (some much more pow­er­ful) and going into an instant kill makes him tem­porar­ily invin­ci­ble. Even with lit­tle tricks like that, you will die quite often on Apoc­a­lyp­tic dif­fi­culty, so you had best col­lect your wrath core shards, life stone pieces and abyssal armor pieces in order. With­out them, even the reg­u­lar bad guys are going to smack you around. The com­bat can be con­sid­ered but­ton mash­ing, but it becomes some­what impor­tant and very help­ful to be a lit­tle bit diverse in your tech­nique. One could beat the entire game using only the Chaoseater sword, but there are ene­mies that will be so much eas­ier if you use the Har­vester (scythe) and Tremor Gaunt­let and keep all three main weapons upgraded. Upgrades come from killing mon­sters and earn­ing expe­ri­ence points for the weapon you are using. There are tokens you can col­lect to aug­ment your weapons to either give you more souls, regen­er­ate health, power up your weapon faster, etc. Cus­tomiza­tion is key to bal­anc­ing out your abil­i­ties and for­tu­nately it can be done at almost any time in the game. Mid-combo you can pause a game and switch from the sword to the gaunt­let (or scythe), add a new or dif­fer­ent token to any or all of the weapons and go right on back to caus­ing griev­ous bod­ily harm. The only down­side I can even think of in terms of con­trols comes from War’s trusty steed, Pain. For the most part, Pain is fun to ride and very easy to con­trol, but the only way to pre­vent dam­age (and pos­si­bly being knocked off) is to lit­er­ally dodge a hit. There is no block­ing abil­ity while rid­ing Pain and many of your weapons become need­lessly unus­able. This would not be a pain for some­one who does not care about 100% com­ple­tion and is not going to bother rid­ing Pain for 100 game miles or killing 150 ene­mies on horse­back. There is still the issue of cer­tain areas of the Ash­lands, where rid­ing Pain is nec­es­sary since War is com­pletely defense­less on foot there. There are many cor­ri­dors that you ride through that are too nar­row for com­bat. The major­ity of the hits I took while on horse­back were because I was cir­cling an enemy and hit a wall, which kills your momen­tum and it takes a few extra sec­onds to get off the wall. Even with the horse con­trols feel­ing like they needed more, the game­play of Dark­siders is fun and very easy to learn. Once you get good with switch­ing weapons on the fly, you start feel­ing like an over­pow­ered ver­sion of Dex­ter and cre­atively muti­lat­ing bad guys becomes an art.

Score: 9.5/10

Dark­siders trophies

REPLAY VALUE/TROPHY & ACHIEVEMENT HUNTING

The clas­sic and unfor­tu­nate draw­back of great sin­gle player games is that usu­ally once you are done with them, you are very much done with them. Dark­siders really has lit­tle to rec­om­mend even a sec­ond playthrough unless you just want to expe­ri­ence the cool story again. If you are like me and try to get every­thing on the first playthrough then you would have pieced together the Abyssal Armor and it becomes avail­able to you from the begin­ning of the new game. It is worth men­tion­ing that even towards the end of this game, the armor made any­thing attack­ing you that was not at least five times your size feel like a naughty tickle. If you played the game on a lower dif­fi­culty and got the armor then I would say go ahead and crank it to Apoc­a­lyp­tic dif­fi­culty and have some fun. Truth of the mat­ter is that I started on apoc­a­lyp­tic and the game is not that dif­fi­cult. There is an item towards the end that even shows you where all the col­lectible stuff is located so the only place you have to worry about miss­ing any­thing is in Eden and the first area of the Iron Canopy. You can back­track any­where else in the game. As for the achievements/trophies, only four of the forty-three can be missed and one of those you can get within the first five min­utes of a new game. Any­one that wants a plat­inum tro­phy in this one is going to get it.

Score: 7.7/10

The Four Horse“men?”

OVERALL

Dark­siders was a won­der­ful game to expe­ri­ence and a great way to kick off 2010 gam­ing. If this is the worst title to come out this year then we have a lot to look for­ward to. A “Zelda-esque” beat-‘em-up; a Kratos adven­ture with 007 gad­gets; these are a few of the ways I can think of to describe the game. War also took weaponry and abil­i­ties from his “broth­ers,” (yes, I see a girl in the pic­ture also) which along with the end­ing and words from devel­op­ers is ensur­ing that we will see more of the Horse­men in the future. In my book that makes this title the open­ing chap­ter in what I hope to be a deep and sat­is­fy­ing series of games. I hope to see much improve­ment from the next game and either a new main char­ac­ter or some online co-operative options. This game is a solid rental at bare min­i­mum how­ever I would not dis­cour­age a pur­chase – some early adopters got a code that got them a free copy of Red Fac­tion: Guer­rilla. I would not put it past Vigil and THQ to make your saved game worth some­thing in the next title. Maybe the next Horse­man will have use of War’s sword? Who knows? I know I will be one of those to find out.

FINAL SCORE: 8.9

Handel

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