If you liked Darksiders: Wrath of War, then you will love the second installment. Apart from the story that is simple like a pebble, everything is epic. The characters, the locations and generally the whole experience raise the series to such a level that I was just wondering about what can come in the third and the fourth part?
Briefly for newbies: In the world of Darksiders the end came, so heaven and hell are battling and humanity is extinct. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse came, or in the first part rather just one, War, who tries to tidy up. But the Seventh Seal is not broken yet, and the Horseman was summoned by a great power to saddle the Apocalypse on him. It is typically the case of the chicken and the egg: no one can tell if the World’s End brings the Horsemen or the Horsemen bring the Apocalypse.
Anyway, War does his homework with a gentlemanly cut (hmm… with some thousands of powerful cuts), and at the end he breaks the Seventh Seal. Because of this he goes to prison powerless, but his fellow companions hear the call and hurry down from the sky like falling stars. That is the point where the first part ends.
The second one begins when his buddy, Death gets the general picture and looks after things to help War. It belongs to the story that the four Horsemen are members of the same race, the Nephilim, which they exterminated by themselves. They are like brothers, and this gives the motivation for Death’s quest.
War mostly showed some deficiency in the area of anger management, but Death is another matter; he is not able to think little. He must pick on the biggest ones and gave no littler quest than to erase War’s sin to help the bro. If it was not enough to find it out: He wanna erase the Apocalypse and resurrect humanity.
Here I must emphasize the bright twist; a Horseman of the Apocalypse, Death, the one-man-executor-squadron is fighting for the resurrection of a powerless race whose only thing to do in the multiverse is to live, mate, become sinners and saints while knowing nothing about what happens on other worlds around them.
To execute his plan, Death has to visit the Well of Souls, but first he has to find where it is. The next step is the finding and getting of the keys for the gate, then comes the figure who is owning the Well, and finally the big act is done. The story of the game is just this in general.
But the world setting and the conflict itself are much more interesting. Death have to defeat not just the ones who hate the Horsemen anyway, but he has to kill a lot of those too who basically would like to help him, because they are plagued with the Corruption, that can reach anyone. However, there still are some helpers among the haters, for example the Makers, who cannot cope with the fact that some slimy black mass pierced by ill-yellow crystals tries to eat everything they created.
The first “aha” feeling comes when you realize that the first Darksiders was full of this Corruption. Of course, the developers were smart enough to leave this storyline out of War’s adventures. OK, I shot the joke, but you can still appreciate it when you play the game. Then comes the first “whoa” feeling when you take a look at the post-apocalyptic Earth. It is the same as it was in the first installment, however it is still shocking, maybe because you rode on a landscape full of or completely without greenery. You get used to the spectacle of alien lands, so the vision of Earth takes a stronger effect.
By the way, as in Darksiders, the world is big enough to spend some 40 hours in it, and that is fine compared to today’s action-adventure games. (I will always remember The Force Unleashed 2, that lasted for 10 hours only. Considering I am an easy player who likes to look around a little, it was really a shame.) Of course, you don’t go the same places as War before. You get to know new dimensions, planes of existence and all. You walk in heaven and hell, at least in a little part of them, and you fight battles on the planes of making and undoing.
And there are other news beside the world setting. Character development became a bit RPG-ish with skills and points, but this is all in this area. You have equipment lists, so the Equipment (with the used items and some extras) in the first game became Inventory (with lots of needless items). It is big enough to pick up everything on sight.
And you want to pick up everything on sight, because the best weapons have only a damage score and a reddish color that means they can eat other items to take over their special attributes. It is not so random, so if you are deliberate enough with feeding a Possessed Weapon, you can create much better stuff that can be hammered by any smith. Better than the named weapons, so these latter have no more significance than coloring the world of Darksiders.
The gameplay didn’t change a bit, as well as the atmosphere and the need for tactics against the various opponents. You even get a handgun again, but there is no such big emphasis on it as in the first installment. However, the number of your skills greatly widen your options for tactics. Half of them are for strengthening your combat abilities, and on the other side of the line (literally) there is magic for summon, shielding and attack.
Being smart about all these things is not a great art; in fact, here is the only flaw of the game I consider worth mentioning. It is too easy. This flaw is typically comes from the combination of a good rule system and the too many options. If you find the essential points, your character becomes undefeatable.
Such essential points are the „Health on Crit”, the „Health per Kill” and on higher levels, the „Health Steal” abilities in the weapons. And the „Health per Execution” in your talisman. As in most action game, if you have enough health support, you have nothing more to do than jump skillfully, dodge and counter the attacks in the right moments. Just watch the movement of the opponents, and soon you will find out when and how you can hit them.
To tell it honestly, I was about admiring the game until I wrote these things down. The gothic fantasy world is an eye candy in itself, and the events grab your attention for a time. Besides combat tactics, some puzzles need a little brainwork, but there is a moment when these all become less than enough and cause no more stress. Even the main-main-main evil needs only some jumps and hits, five minutes of lazy cuts and slashes, then it is over.
At the same time I must add that this doesn’t lower the epic characteristic of the whole game. I’m only thinking about that if every loose thread was sewn, then what will be in the next two Darksiders?
—Garcius—
Publisher: THQ
Developer: Vigil Games
Homepage: none, nie, null, zero
Style: hack’n’slash, adventure, action-RPG
What I liked:
gothic fantasy
various opponents
epic general effect
What I didn’t like:
too easy
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