Astrology! Tarot Card Readins!! PSYCHICS!!! GARGAHLES!!!!
None of these dark-sided things are in Darksiders and yet we still managed to have an awfully good time after the Apocalypse.
Published: December 18, 2009
Adding up all the individual components of Vigil Games' founders, comic book mainstay Joe Madureira and ex-NCSoft vet David Adams, one would imagine a solid background in well-drawn massively multiplayer online games. While Vigil is technically working on the WarHammer 40K MMO, their first game is as far removed from the MMO space as a game can get. For starters, it doesn't even have an online component; Darksiders is a decidedly single-player affair, and after five or six hours of time with the game, we're ready to declare it the first big game of 2010.
It helps that Darksiders actually is the first game of 2010 -- at least for the PlayStation 3 -- but that shouldn't lessen the buzz around the game. It rocks, and rocks hard. The easiest way to describe things is to imagine God of War getting it on with Zelda and producing a baby that's equal parts visceral combat and clever puzzle-based dungeons. That's not really doing the list of influences from games like Panzer Dragoon Saga, Castlevania and Metroid justice, but it's at least effective in setting the tone.
In truth, the game clearly borrows from a host of major franchises, but does so with such reverence and adoration that nothing feels like it's been unfairly cribbed. Quite the contrary, in fact; every element that can be recognized as having come from another game is stitched into the core gameplay that it feels like a best-of cobbling of different ideas rather than something that's cobbled together into an unwieldy mass of genres and inspirations.
Judging Darksiders on its spurs would be short-changing it to the extreme, though. Plenty of games have attempted to incorporate elements from Metroidvania outings or borrow the combat fundamentals from a Devil May Cry, but rarely do they do them justice. By contrast, Darksiders displays a kind of even-handedness and attention to detail that's excessively rare in any genre; just when combat starts to get a little dry, a shooting section crops up. When puzzle sections of a particular dungeon pop up, enemies ebb, allowing you to suss out exactly what needs to be done to progress. Level designs tuck pathways back into main areas to avoid backtracking, elements like switches and levels are logically -- even creatively -- woven in to the dungeon designs themselves and everything just feels... right.
Things start off with a literal bang. Something has happened to summon War, one of the Four Horsemen to Earth. Ordinarily, this is something that would only happen during the Apocalypse, as the Horsemen serve the Charred Council, a timeless body that regulates the conflict between Heaven and Hell. Problem is, when War shows up amidst the bombardment of New York by meteors containing critters of pure evil, none of his Horsemen brothers are there. In fact, the Apocalypse seems to have happened far earlier than it should, and the resulting tussles in the streets between angels and demons is blamed on War. To top it all off, his powers are slowly drained from him until he's crushed seemingly to death by The Destroyer, Darksiders' version of Old Scratch.
When he awakens, charged by the three lava-spewing maws of the Council with working alongside The Destroyer's minions, he asks to return to Earth to figure out who could have kicked off the End Times and sapped his powers. The Council agrees, knowing that without his powers, War will likely meet his end for good, and allows him the chance to clear his name. There's just one problem: a hundred years have lapsed since he was last in the world of Man, and... well, Man's pretty much kaput, replaced by shuffling husks and a whole lotta Destroyer nasties.
It helps that Darksiders actually is the first game of 2010 -- at least for the PlayStation 3 -- but that shouldn't lessen the buzz around the game. It rocks, and rocks hard. The easiest way to describe things is to imagine God of War getting it on with Zelda and producing a baby that's equal parts visceral combat and clever puzzle-based dungeons. That's not really doing the list of influences from games like Panzer Dragoon Saga, Castlevania and Metroid justice, but it's at least effective in setting the tone.
In truth, the game clearly borrows from a host of major franchises, but does so with such reverence and adoration that nothing feels like it's been unfairly cribbed. Quite the contrary, in fact; every element that can be recognized as having come from another game is stitched into the core gameplay that it feels like a best-of cobbling of different ideas rather than something that's cobbled together into an unwieldy mass of genres and inspirations.
Judging Darksiders on its spurs would be short-changing it to the extreme, though. Plenty of games have attempted to incorporate elements from Metroidvania outings or borrow the combat fundamentals from a Devil May Cry, but rarely do they do them justice. By contrast, Darksiders displays a kind of even-handedness and attention to detail that's excessively rare in any genre; just when combat starts to get a little dry, a shooting section crops up. When puzzle sections of a particular dungeon pop up, enemies ebb, allowing you to suss out exactly what needs to be done to progress. Level designs tuck pathways back into main areas to avoid backtracking, elements like switches and levels are logically -- even creatively -- woven in to the dungeon designs themselves and everything just feels... right.
Things start off with a literal bang. Something has happened to summon War, one of the Four Horsemen to Earth. Ordinarily, this is something that would only happen during the Apocalypse, as the Horsemen serve the Charred Council, a timeless body that regulates the conflict between Heaven and Hell. Problem is, when War shows up amidst the bombardment of New York by meteors containing critters of pure evil, none of his Horsemen brothers are there. In fact, the Apocalypse seems to have happened far earlier than it should, and the resulting tussles in the streets between angels and demons is blamed on War. To top it all off, his powers are slowly drained from him until he's crushed seemingly to death by The Destroyer, Darksiders' version of Old Scratch.
When he awakens, charged by the three lava-spewing maws of the Council with working alongside The Destroyer's minions, he asks to return to Earth to figure out who could have kicked off the End Times and sapped his powers. The Council agrees, knowing that without his powers, War will likely meet his end for good, and allows him the chance to clear his name. There's just one problem: a hundred years have lapsed since he was last in the world of Man, and... well, Man's pretty much kaput, replaced by shuffling husks and a whole lotta Destroyer nasties.
