There’s Hell to Play.
When the original Darksiders released a decade ago, It was one of my most anticipated games ever. This is in large part to the art design and style of the game being adapted from artist Joe Madureira, who also served as one of the game’s co-directors and shifted from being just a comic book artist to that of a full-fledged game developer. While a different team took on the development chores for the long-awaited Darksiders 3, Joe Mad and his own studio at Airship Syndicate, which was founded shortly after THQ went bankrupt in 2012, have returned to helm a brand new adventure in the series, one with a very different perspective, that apart from several technical problems, is my favorite of the franchise by far.
This latest installment of the Darksiders series sees War and Strife, two of the Four Horsemen, tasked with tracking down Lucifer, as he plots against the Charred Council, who are mysterious beings that uphold the very balance of existence. While the whereabouts of the other two Horsemen are unknown, you’ll only take on the roles of War, the protagonist from the first Darksiders game, and Strife, who while appearing in previous entries, makes his playable debut here. The story is told across 16 chapters, through comic-book style cutscenes and spoken dialogue across a series of NPC’s that will join your cause, even if they are not fully upfront about their true intentions. There is also a nice dynamic of War being the straight man to Strife’s comedic charm that is rather enjoyable throughout their adventure. If you’ve enjoyed the story from the other games, then this prequel will certainly entertain as it leads into the events of those games with more than a few winks and nods.
War, as we’ve known him, is a very melee-focused character with a giant sword, capable of splitting open nearby threats with bloody ease. While Strife does have a few close-range attacks of his own, his purpose is better suited to that of a ranged-marksman, gunning down his prey from a distance with two large revolvers named Mercy and Redemption. Each character can feel fairly different from one another as War is slower, stronger, and able to take more hits, whereas Strife is quicker, a bit more fragile, but can maintain his distance from the more imposing threats, diving in and out of skirmishes with ease. If you play solo, then you’ll want to tag them in and out as each Horseman is better suited to certain encounters. In co-op, each player takes on the role of each character to assist in their own ways to tackle the vast hordes you’ll cut through to find Lucifer. Each character can also mount their horses in Ruin and Mayhem, for War and Strife, respectively, and while not many levels really suit the steeds in a gameplay sense, there is one battle that really offered up something I wanted from their inclusion, even if it was a bit brief.
While Darksiders: Genesis may look like your typical Diabloesque hack and slash adventure, it still plays very much like the previous games, just with a new high angled focal point. While that may be good news to those looking for another entry in the series, it does have its drawbacks as the new angle does contribute to not being able to line up several jumps, or causing the distance between you and where you’re wanting to be that much harder to judge, especially when your characters are incredibly tiny on the screen. This means that several platforming aspects the series is known for are made more difficult to achieve, solely because you’re not really going to know what you did wrong as the game’s jumping isn’t as forgiving as it should be. Had characters been able to grab the ledge at the last moment to mantle up, then nearly every problem I have with jumping would be solved in a big way. While dropping to your doom is only paid with a sliver of health lost, it still feels like it happens far too often for no good reason.
The new angle also brings additional problems that other games in the isometric hack and slash genre have solved long ago. Here, the camera will often tilt up and down or move in ways that can often block what you’re able to see or you will have several foreground elements like stone arches, pipes, bridges, or other environmental elements blocking the view you have of exploring or in many cases, while engaged in a difficult battle. While your character is presented in a blueish silhouette, as are your enemies, it still makes for a bizarre choice to not simply make the foreground elements transparent as you pass under them so that you can see the gorgeous visuals during battle. Combine that with the fact that it’s easy to lose yourself when a lot is going on, and it just further adds to the problem.
Darksiders: Genesis is the first of the franchise to incorporate co-op, allowing two players to push the entire adventure together. While you can swap back and forth to each character in a single-player session, the real intent of this title is to play alongside another player, allowing both Horsemen to do battle together, as brothers. The game will also shift around some of its level design and puzzles depending on the number of players, forcing both of you to work together to achieve certain solutions as each Horsemen will gain unique tools that the other will not have. The only issue I have with co-op is that joining a match is dependant on the host player being near a summoning stone, a location-based beacon that is sometimes not spaced decently apart. Should a player drop or the game freeze, to reconnect with that player can often result in some needless backtracking to the previous summoning stone. According to the developer, this is because safe spaces needed to be created since again, the levels and puzzles change based on if you’re playing single-player or co-op. It may sound like a mere nit-pick, but it was actually one of my biggest gripes with the game, but more on that later as there are certainly many other problems to still discuss.
Each Horseman has a variety of unique skills and attacks that cater to their strengths, such as Strife laying down a series of caltrops to lure his foes into them, causing them to explode when they get too close, to War slamming his sword into the ground and releasing a plethora of glowing blades as they erupt from the ground. Strife will also earn a variety of different ammo types that can be used alongside his neverending supply of regular rounds. These range from powerful electrical shots, gravity fields, to rounds that can cause health orbs to appear more frequently from downed foes. By dealing damage to your enemies, a Hotstreak meter will charge up, allowing each different type of bullet to fire differently, such as turning your electrical rounds into a sea of chain lightning, a bullet type that I found too useful to really keep using the other types. War, on the other hand, can benefit from various charge type attacks by changing the element of his blade. These consist of attacks that drain health from his foes to spinning around with a fiery blade. Each of these different elemental attacks has various passive skills and change certain attack combo’s and jump attacks, giving War a vast array of ways to gut some unfortunate demon. Whether it is swapping to the various sword types for War or Strife’s selection of ammo, you’ll do so with a weapon wheel that is a bit cumbersome to pull off in the heat of battle by holding LB to bring up your skills window and then the right analog stick to move the wheel around.
I touched upon it earlier, but each of the Horsemen will gain special tools that are used in solving puzzles, such as Strife using his Void Bomb on special glyphs to teleport from place to place, or War throwing out a glave to set things on fire, or by targeting special gems on the walls to open doors. There are moments in the campaign that are designed around having those tools to progress, but many areas hold onto their secrets until you return to them with these new tools. I will say that throwing the glave can be a bit awkward, but Strife certainly has it far worse with his Void Bomb and Aether Spark. Each tool is not terribly fun to control and while I eventually got the hang of moving the Aether Spark around, the Void Bomb arc is unpredictable in how it will turn or move, even when I thought I finally figured it out. That said, many of the puzzles are very well designed, with a few of them that made me really think back to how I solved many of the challenging puzzles in Portal 2.
Aiding in your Horseman’s journey are creature cores, special orbs that are infused with special perks or stats. Each creature core can be upgraded as you find more of the same one, leveling them up to a max level of three as different level tiers act as a potency factor of how good each tier is at that specific stat. These stats range from increasing your health, summoning a hellhound for assistance or just boosting percentages on certain skills or attacks. There are nearly 70 to collect and you’ll place them on a skill board that is designed around certain slots boosting specific core types as they come in three different flavors. The system is interesting and allows you to create builds of certain characters, so it really rewards killing bosses and enemies over and over to level these up and reward experimentation on creating different loadouts.
Skills, items, cores, and more can also be purchased from two different stores within the game. Vulgrim and newcomer Dis, are available to you early in the game to offer up various wares in exchange for souls and boatman coins, one of the many different collectibles you’ll encounter, such as Trickster Keys that open up treasure vaults in each level. While Dis will offer up new moves, abilities, and attacks for your Horseman, Vulgrim can enhance the health and wrath of your character as well as a how your potions work, as well as a core shop that feels like a microtransaction store without the real money costs attributed to them. Should you run low on souls, you can always re-run any of the available levels, or dive into the arena for a plethora of different rewards as you hit certain score tiers.
Darksiders: Genesis is gorgeous in its visuals, and apart from some choppy framerate dips in co-op, the game ran pretty smooth even on an Xbox One S. The game is bursting with tons of color and fantastic art direction, but given that Joe Mad is back at the wheel, I’m not surprised that the game has a strong visual flair to it. Each location is bursting with clever designs in how it guards its secrets and each of the boss encounters are a sight to behold, not just with fun and engaging mechanics, but feeling large and immense in scale.
Liam O'Brien is back as War and with Chris Jai Alex opposite as Strife, the two have really amazing conversations that play off each other rather well. I’ve always enjoyed the voice acting in the Darksiders games, but the dynamic between characters has never been this involving or as engaging. I will say that the only big issue I have with the audio is the echo each character’s voice has when in the Void hub world, as a large part of the dialogue is spoken here, making it a bit hard to understand unless you are really hanging off every word.
I mentioned before that the game has problems, and while many of them are technical, several are mechanical and are less likely to see addressed any time soon. From a technical point of view, I encountered several moments where the game would get stuck on loading, forcing me and my co-op partner to back out and try to reconnect to each other, which had its own problems as we often had to try connecting to each of our games sometimes a dozen or so times before it would finally work. Sure, we could have tried the local co-op feature, but frankly, I’d rather play co-op with each of us having our own screen. Combine that with falling through the map, a few crashes here and there, and some moments where we’d get stuck in the environment and all of which required us to shut the game down and attempt to reconnect all over again.
The other problems I have are mostly around some buttons being used for too many things. The B button, for example, is how you’ll interact with everything from items, the brutal finishers you’ll commit on nearly defeated foes, to simply opening up a chest, some of which requires your co-op partner to assist. There are also the prompts when picking up new creature cores that result in your character just standing there until you press the A button to exit the prompt. While you can try to avoid them until the battle is over, they are mapped to the B button which again, is used for far too much. Finally, is the issue I have with the LB button as LB+A is used for initiating a character switch with your co-op partner, which results in your character kneeling motionless in a glowing circle. Where the problem lies is that LB+Holding A is used to perform a synergy attack, something that the game could barely tell the difference between. This became such a problem that I pretty much gave up on performing the synergy attack altogether. And as I’ve read on several forums, I’m not the only one to notice this odd design choice of how it’s implemented.
While Darksiders: Genesis may look the part of an isometric hack-and-slash game, it still feels very much rooted in what made the original games so great, well… at least the first two entries anyway. It’s certainly not without its severe technical problems, but frankly, I still adore this game. Sure, I swore constantly when the game would crash, lock-up, or deny my co-op partner entry for almost an hour, but when its works, when you’re in the thick of it with War and Strife, it really is a solid experience that I hope we see more of. Now, that said, I do have to lay down some tough love for what Darksiders: Genesis is right now. Amidst the chaos and solid combat inner workings is a game that is in desperate need of polish and a patch or two, or three. Had the problems with this game been regulated to just that pesky B button, then I would have easily placed my score for this new entry at a solid 9.5, but frankly, I wouldn’t be doing my job in reviewing my entire experience. Regardless, I still highly recommend Darksiders: Genesis due to the wealth of content you can play with a friend at half the price of a standard AAA release. It’s buggy, sometimes broken, but man do I still love this game.
Darksiders: Genesis was purchased by the reviewer and played on an Xbox One S
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One S