The Road to Ruin
Congrats, Darksiders, you're the first must-have PS3 game of 2010.
Published: January 2, 2010
The art of effectively cribbing from another game is, well, an art. Pull too heavily and you end up becoming an outright clone, cherry pick elements and you can end up feeling like a weak imitator, and no matter what end of the spectrum, there's the very real chance that a game could lose its identity or fail to strike that careful balance between incorporating elements from another game and preserving the very things that would define a new game among a sea of competition.
Darksiders, somehow -- miraculously, even -- manages to borrow from a host of different games; Zelda of course primarily, but nabs the combat mechanics of God of War, some shooter bits of Panzer Dragoon and Ratchet, some of the platforming and traversal of Prince of Persia and, some have already felt, a bit of the general art style of the Warcraft series, yet never once feels like these elements aren't perfectly at home in the world first-time PS3 developer Vigil Games has created. There's one more, too, that I won't spoil, but suffice it to say the inclusion could have single-handedly broken the game. It didn't. It made it better in every way.
Think about that for a second: A game that borrows -- sometimes heavily but never without the utmost respect for the source material -- from a handful of games and still manages to be its own beast. That shows a remarkable sense of self-confidence, but more importantly the kind of steadied hand that few developers that have been around for decades can match. Whether a fluke of some magical confluence of outside ideas or the result of a good five years in development I won't know until Vigil's next game, a massively multiplayer online entry into the Warhammer 40K universe, is released in a couple years, but it doesn't really matter: Darksiders is a fantastic game.
It's a meaty one too, clocking in at around 15 or so hours depending on how diligent you are at scooping up some of the side items (10 pieces of armor, a number of fragments and whole chunks of the health and special moves meters, bonus runes for more currency). The length, like many things in the game, seems to be a perfect balance between being satisfying and not overstaying its welcome.
It's something I talked about in our preview a few weeks back but it bears repeating: at nearly every point in Darksiders' campaign, there's a clear and yet subtle use of refinement. The sprawling, sometimes hours-long dungeons you'll spend the bulk of your time in dovetail back into themselves after picking up an item or flipping a switch, easing the amount of backtracking. When combat starts to lose its oomph, short flying sections or over-the-shoulder shooting bits are brought in, then dropped to allow you to go back to the meat of melee action just as more moves are introduced. Just when the world starts to get a bit too big to traverse on foot, teleporters (conveniently linked to shop locations) become involved and when even they are too sparse to allow for quick travel, leading ass kicker War recovers his faithful steed Ruin. Platforms have extra catches or lack instant death pits early on as you learn the slightly funky timing of jumping off them.
The scribbled notes I took while playing the game are littered with little observations like this, but in all honesty if you never noticed a single one of them, it likely wouldn't matter. In a best-case scenario, no player would; everything would just... flow. That's precisely how Darksiders works -- momentum drives everything and save for a late game bit that harkens back a bit painfully to the Triforce hunt in Wind Waker (though not nearly as painful), the game is constantly driving forward, constantly offering you new powers, new abilities, new skills, new upgrades.
Darksiders, somehow -- miraculously, even -- manages to borrow from a host of different games; Zelda of course primarily, but nabs the combat mechanics of God of War, some shooter bits of Panzer Dragoon and Ratchet, some of the platforming and traversal of Prince of Persia and, some have already felt, a bit of the general art style of the Warcraft series, yet never once feels like these elements aren't perfectly at home in the world first-time PS3 developer Vigil Games has created. There's one more, too, that I won't spoil, but suffice it to say the inclusion could have single-handedly broken the game. It didn't. It made it better in every way.
Think about that for a second: A game that borrows -- sometimes heavily but never without the utmost respect for the source material -- from a handful of games and still manages to be its own beast. That shows a remarkable sense of self-confidence, but more importantly the kind of steadied hand that few developers that have been around for decades can match. Whether a fluke of some magical confluence of outside ideas or the result of a good five years in development I won't know until Vigil's next game, a massively multiplayer online entry into the Warhammer 40K universe, is released in a couple years, but it doesn't really matter: Darksiders is a fantastic game.
It's a meaty one too, clocking in at around 15 or so hours depending on how diligent you are at scooping up some of the side items (10 pieces of armor, a number of fragments and whole chunks of the health and special moves meters, bonus runes for more currency). The length, like many things in the game, seems to be a perfect balance between being satisfying and not overstaying its welcome.
It's something I talked about in our preview a few weeks back but it bears repeating: at nearly every point in Darksiders' campaign, there's a clear and yet subtle use of refinement. The sprawling, sometimes hours-long dungeons you'll spend the bulk of your time in dovetail back into themselves after picking up an item or flipping a switch, easing the amount of backtracking. When combat starts to lose its oomph, short flying sections or over-the-shoulder shooting bits are brought in, then dropped to allow you to go back to the meat of melee action just as more moves are introduced. Just when the world starts to get a bit too big to traverse on foot, teleporters (conveniently linked to shop locations) become involved and when even they are too sparse to allow for quick travel, leading ass kicker War recovers his faithful steed Ruin. Platforms have extra catches or lack instant death pits early on as you learn the slightly funky timing of jumping off them.
The scribbled notes I took while playing the game are littered with little observations like this, but in all honesty if you never noticed a single one of them, it likely wouldn't matter. In a best-case scenario, no player would; everything would just... flow. That's precisely how Darksiders works -- momentum drives everything and save for a late game bit that harkens back a bit painfully to the Triforce hunt in Wind Waker (though not nearly as painful), the game is constantly driving forward, constantly offering you new powers, new abilities, new skills, new upgrades.
