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Darksiders Review
Kelli Lenae
April 11, 2010
As always, I'm late to the party. It happens with me a lot. I tend to wait for the newer games to price-drop, or I pick them up immediately on launch and always mean to get to them but end up playing some older, nostalgia-infused game. In this case, I didn't buy Darksiders at the launch because I figured I might not like it; but the mixed reviews made me curious. You see, I tend to like games that evoke extremely diverging opinions, I like the charms and I forgive a lot of the shortcomings, I've discovered I love giving brownie points to new IP's with the right ideas even if they're not quite AAA quality.
This is a bad, bad habit. Brownie points shouldn't be involved anywhere near financial purchases; like any other media that has roots in artistic values, games should be appraised on what they accomplish and not what they almost accomplish.
This is why I was torn by Darksiders. At the beginning of the game, I felt like I had stumbled upon something golden and grand. I was all over the forums telling people to stop being so biased because the game is awesome despite its habit of copying other famous titles. Then, after about seven hours or so, I discovered that I didn't want to play anymore. I was stunned: I couldn't understand why I had suddenly loathed the idea of playing it. What happened? The most amazing part was that I had to sit there and think about why I didn't love it anymore.
Before I answer that though, I'll break down Darksiders.
Graphically, Darksiders took a simple comic-book style art approach. It's not cell-shaded but rather uses oddly detailed clothing, large muscle-enlightened men and comic-styled faces. It can make you think, sometimes, that it's not that graphically impressive; but Darksiders has a nice finesse that looks great whether it's close-up or far away. The art is simple, yet detailed, and extremely difficult to describe; suffice to say it's very nice and doesn't suffer. The opening scene in Darksiders is the only time there is obviously more graphical power presented as compared to the rest of the game. Otherwise, the cut-scenes and the gameplay are on par with each other, and that's nice.
Darksiders has a good, but totally unmemorable, soundtrack. I can't even recall a single tune and the game has you playing the same areas often, so I should have heard the loops enough to recall, but I can't, so I don't find it bad--just unimpressive. The voice acting was good; Mark Hamill was a severely underused resource in the form of one of the most uninteresting villains in the game, which is a real pity. War, the ever-so-brilliant protagonist, had a very generic man voice and the various characters were well cast but not incredibly powerful in their roles.
The story was obnoxious and one of the reasons I lost interest. You know those movies that give you tons of action and events that kind of make sense but you know there's more behind it and the film slowly flashes back to get you up to speed? Darksiders tried to do that, but did it all wrong. It gives you a grand opening scene where the denizens of Earth are slain like ants as the epic battle between Heaven and Hell plays out on a modern Earth. It's grand and then War is there and he's awesome as you play him in one of those obnoxious tutorials where they give you all the cool stuff and, as War suddenly is overcome by weakness, they take it all away. What a tease. Characters are introduced and killed and suddenly War is on trial and sent out to kill the Destroyer or Satan. C'mon we're not going to tattle on Vigil games about making Satan evil, right? So then War has to talk to some seedy demon who ends up being your item and upgrade shop. Then you meet Samael who sends you on fetch quests. You have to defeat the four guardians to get to the Destroyer's tower, yadda yadda. To be honest, there was no story at all for the first few hours and characters interacted like there was a great history behind it all but nothing was explained. The monotony was covered up by really nifty puzzles and areas. I didn't understand what was going on until the last two hours of the game, no joke, suddenly I was bombarded with cut-scenes as everything came together but there wasn't anything to bring together because the bits of story they did give me were so miniscule that I didn't care about the bigger picture.
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