Game Reviews

If I were to reduce all of the things I liked about THQ’s new epic action/adventure down to one particular thing, it would be this: Darksiders is great for being a game for game’s sake. It doesn’t feel like a movie waiting to happen or an adaptation of one that has already been made. It doesn’t feel like a comic book come to life, though it was written by a well-known comic-book artist. No, it simply feels like a story meant to be played, with awesome fighting and puzzle solving components, complemented by a fun set of weapons and tools that let you traverse the game world in varied and interesting ways. Darksiders doesn’t do anything plenty of games before it haven’t done, but it puts so many of those great borrowed elements into its game experience in such a neatly designed way that it feels like you’re doing all of these things for the first time. It may be derivative, but Darksiders even does that better than most games of its kind.

What Darksider does really well is stay interesting. As you progress through the post-apocalyptic world, trying to make sense of the impenetrable story involving angels, demons, wars between Heaven and Hell and a bunch of other stuff regarding the Seventh Seal and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (don’t bother trying, at the end it all sort of gets explained, but it’s still confusing), the game continues to add more gameplay elements in the form of new pieces of equipment that let you do new things and get to new places. It’s a bit Zelda-like in overall design, because of the way logic plays in to the level design and increasing capabilities of your character, but the combat is God of War with a dash of Ninja Gaiden. In fact, the main character is the actual “God of War” from the biblical Book of Revelations; the horseman named “War,” who rides with his three compadres of the Apocalypse. Death, Famine and Pestilence (Wikipedia claims the other one is Conquest, but Pestilence is the more familiar) don’t make actual cameos in this game, but at the end of the game (minor spoiler alert) they are definitely hinted at making an appearance in a potential sequel. War is the star of this show, and as a character he’s a bit of a cipher. You’ll wonder at his inscrutable motivations through the game, and if you’re like me, wonder just what War does in his off-time. It’s probably not scrapbooking. As a character, he doesn’t give us a lot in the way of personality, but he sure looks cool.