Darksiders Catch-all

I guess I'm an outlier in this regard. I was bored stiff by every dungeon except the Dark Throne. Granted, the core mechanic of Dark Throne is one of the more blatant instances of mechanic-borrowing in the game, and they do a bad job of teaching the key way that the mechanic works different from the original inspiration, but at least some of the puzzles in there require a bit of thought to solve. The things in the other dungeons I can hardly bring myself to call puzzles. They're more like things I sleepwalk through and that waste my time in between combat encounters.

Oh I enjoyed the room with the 3 cages and 2 blocks. And the boomerang mirror switches. And even the guardian boss fights for the most part. Did have a little big of a bug on one of the bosses though

Spoiler:

where I was trying to open floor portals, and went into the wrong one first and got stuck in a loop where I hit the boss's electrified arm, fell back into the wrong portal, hit his arm, fell back... and so on about 5 times until I died.

All that save/load/checkpoint issues I mentioned just made me feel like I've been in there forever.

Now the game has taken to crashing. Had the first one in Dark Throne around 11 hours. Now I've had 4 more in the last few sessions playing. Starting to wonder if I'm going to finish this thing. :p

What system are you playing this on?

PC. Had another crash last night after that post as well. Last 2-3 have been in areas I had already been to, going around collecting things. So it wasn't just the Dark Throne.

Stele wrote:

PC. Had another crash last night after that post as well. Last 2-3 have been in areas I had already been to, going around collecting things. So it wasn't just the Dark Throne.

And the intarwebz have similar issues? Kinda weird that it's places you've already been to just now crashing. What sort of crashing? And are you monitoring your hardware as you play? I know my vid card has taken to overheating (no specific game, but anything more demanding causes issues more often obviously) which is sometimes caused when it decides it doesn't want to speed up the fan. And I'm on the 12.1 catalyst drivers.

And done. Played with CPUID up tonight after my first crash. 2nd crash tonight I saw normal GPU/CPU temps, close to 50C. Not sure what happened, just running down a passage and blam, it's locked up nothing happens. After alt-tabbing I'll get the popup that darksiders has stopped working.

Anyway. Aside from the technical issues and the Dark Throne issues... great game. Every other part I enjoyed. Probably my favorite couple of boss fights were ones where you got to ride Ruin.

Liked the story well enough. Looking forward to the 2nd.

Probably didn't love it enough to 100%, especially on Steam. Yeah no gamerscore/trophy count makes it much less addictive.

I'd definitely recommend to anyone for the usual $5 it's on sale for lately. Even for $10-15 on the console. You'll get 12+ hours out of it pretty easily, which is solid for a lot of single player games lately, and over 15 or 16 probably if you want to 100%. Steam reports me at 24, but my in-game save was at like 14:10. All the crashes, and several checkpoint restarts account for a lot of that extra time. And a bit of AFK here and there.

Bottom line: Fun.

I dug this out of my pile a few days ago and have mostly enjoyed it so far. The story takes a pretty quick left-turn into cheeseville with the voice acting, the lame phantom buddy, etc. This seems like a huge missed opportunity, except I imagine that making the story more gritty might have driven off much of its target audience. Either way, I mostly ignore the story now and am happy just killing stuff.

What I really like about Darksiders so far is that even at the beginning the character seems powerful. His weapon has a very long reach, and the attacks are all very punchy. I'm at the end of the Prologue now and so far the game has done a good job of introducing new skills and then integrating their use into the level design. My only real gripe is that the boss fight at the end of the Prologue is just freaking tedious and there's little margin for error, despite being pretty easy in terms of the tactics required. So during the fight I feel like I'm fighting the crappy ranged weapon aiming controls more than fighting the actual boss. Here's to hoping the future boss fights are done better.

complexmath wrote:

So during the fight I feel like I'm fighting the crappy ranged weapon aiming controls more than fighting the actual boss. Here's to hoping the future boss fights are done better.

I'm pretty sure there's a lock on button that makes aiming to throw a lot easier.

The problem is that you have to route your throw through a brazier and then to the boss rather than just to the boss, so I think you have to go into aiming mode and select the two targets to get the bomb to explode. I'd love to find out I'm wrong though.

Complexmath called Mark Hamill lame, you guys.

Blind_Evil wrote:

Complexmath called Mark Hamill lame, you guys.

OK, so while looking for a good "Burn the Heretic" image, I stumbled on this, which, while unrelated, is awesome and must be shared.

IMAGE(http://cghub.com/files/Image/029001-030000/29468/476_realsize.jpg)

Right now I'm at Anvil's Forge fighting angels with a guy from WOW. I have a some kind of big gun that is great for taking down angels but the fight is hard. I think I might be under powered.

I just started this game recently. It's been okay so far. The setting and story are surprisingly unique, and my two year-old has enjoyed mastering the combat ("Hit the blue button as fast as you can.")

Tonight I was very surprised by a ten-minute rail shooter sequence. Whoever came up with that idea: f*ck off. At least before I could ignore how arbitrary the game's progression was. At least I sort of felt like I was going somewhere! Now I've flown what feels like half a world away from where I was, but conveniently ended up at a place that sounds important.

I'm not saying I'm done, but c'mon, man.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Right now I'm at Anvil's Forge fighting angels with a guy from WOW. I have a some kind of big gun that is great for taking down angels but the fight is hard. I think I might be under powered.

Ah yes this sequence. I finished this part before losing interest and moving on to... Darksiders 2!

It just takes a lot of patience. You'll find a point on the path that has a couple nice posts to hide behind as you take potshots at the angels. The charged shot comes in handy when a few of them try to rush you down but in general I used the regular rapid fire to take them out at a distance. As soon as you see more angels in the distance, back-pedal back to the parts where you can take cover and repeat.

I got through on my first try after my break. Funny how that happens from time to time. Right now I'm working my way through the next area. I defeated a crab like monster with a laser attack but it ran off so I guess I'm tracking it.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

Tonight I was very surprised by a ten-minute rail shooter sequence. Whoever came up with that idea: f*ck off.

Seconded. That was my (second) least favorite part of the game. I hope there's nothing like it in Darksiders 2. (My least favorite was a particular set of puzzle areas made damn near impossible by the way the camera works. I hate fighting-the-camera gameplay.)

The fact that I have to un-invert the right thumbstick camera's X-axis EVERY SINGLE TIME I LOAD THE GAME is ass. Amateur ass.

Welcome, perverts!

I didn't mind the rail shooter bit but it could have been shorter. The worst times I have so far was in the downed pass because i didn't know you could dive under water. The boss Tiamat so far has been hardest and the most BS fight. I must have fought her 30 times before I defeated her. The thing is it was kind of hard aiming with the left stick and having to to repeat the the same attacks 10 times was a waste of time. However, in the end I beat her easily. The last thing I didn't like was this rope puzzle with 3 mouth monsters above it. I had to look up the solution on the net. The placement of these puzzle was just dumb and there isn't anything the sets you up for the solution.

I greatly enjoyed the game, but Tiamat can go to hell. That boss fight frustrated me more than almost every boss fight in Dark Souls.

I, uh, killed Tiamat on my first try last night. I did use my second health thingy ever to do so, though.

Also, for years I have lived in fear of games that let me choose "Continue" rather than "Load Save" when I first load in. What if it's not smart enough to choose the most recent save file?!?!? Despite this, I still mostly use the Continue option on such games, and have never had a problem.

Until yesterday, when Darksiders loaded the wrong save. I then manually loaded the right save, so no damage done, but COME ON. I suppose I shouldn't expect much from a game that can't remember that I don't want the X-axis inverted, but still. Don't have a Continue option if you're too stupid to link it to the most recent save!

Despite a lot of WTFs in this game, I seem to be quite enjoying it and am playing a lot. I finished the first dungeon, and yeah, it was Zelda as hell.

The combat reminds me of KoA Reckoning. Both Darksiders and Reckoning describe themselves as having God of War style combat, so that's probably the reason for the similarity. Haven't played any GoW, though.

I need to finish Reckoning.

God of War 1 and 2 were pretty good. I didn't like 3 very much though. The combat sounds, maybe the voice actor, the combo system, and instant kills are all GOW. Also the climbing seems very GOW like.

Yeah, but Death is so much smoother than Raging Teen Angst Kratos.

I really don't want to read through the thread just yet. Loaded up the game through steam and tried playing for the first time. I wasn't able to use my mouse and keyboard to move in game although it did work in the menu. I figured maybe it was controller only so I synched up my wireless controller and tried to play. Only the start button works. I don't have any other controllers hooked up to my computer.

Any one else have these problems when they played? Thanks!

Some games only detect whether you've got a controller attached when you start up the game, might be that.

Scratched wrote:

Some games only detect whether you've got a controller attached when you start up the game, might be that.

No tried that also. Oh well. What is weird is I should be able to play with mouse and keyboard but I can't. If it is because I have the 360 wireless adapter plugged in, in no way am i unplugging it for one game, that would just be stupid.

Finally figured it out. I had to disable the N52 in my device manager even though it is not hooked up. Very stupid! Anyway, game is fun so far, in Tiamat's castle atm.

Ho boy. I just finished Darksiders, and I feel conflicted. Mind you, I ended up finishing the game, and I don't do that very often unless I find the experience of a game compelling. Still, there is something about the Darksiders experience that made my completion of the game seem false, as if it the game has cheated some time and effort out of me without my willing cooperation. Overall, I think I can divide the game into three parts - the first four dungeons, the Black Throne, and then the gosh-darn awful finale.

Darksiders built up a lot of good will with the first four dungeons and their intricate Zelda-like designs. Each of them was brimming with character - a post-apocalyptic human world tainted by the mystique and colors of demonic residence presented some truly wondrous scenes. I didn't mind that the combat never got too challenging, nor was I disappointed by the shallow plot given the potentially rich lore. I enjoyed learning and utilizing new tools that the game cared to throw my way, and slashing through droves of paper-thin demons was its own brand of mindless fun. I wanted a game that was polished and colorful, involving yet accessible. For the first ten hours or so, I got exactly what I wanted. Then I reached the Black Throne.

The endless series of challenging puzzles, frustrating combat sequences, the dull Gothic architecture, and overall rigid designs were drastic departures from previous portions of the game. The Black Throne wasn't all that bad if evaluated on its own. In a way, it continued the spirit of the game by giving the player an interesting portal tool, which was then used to solve some admittedly fun puzzles. Still, when juxtaposed to the experience offered by prior dungeons, the sudden spike in difficulty and length felt a lot like diving into a cold swimming pool. One might recall the frustrations brought on by the infamous Meat Circus, though maybe the Black Throne didn't go quite as far. In any case, I had to deal with changing expectations as I exhausted several gaming sessions to nibble away at various wings of the dungeon, asking all the while when this was all going to end.

Things got worse after the Black Throne. Just when the game seemed poised to redeem itself after the Straga fight, it decided to completely drain all of my patience by sending me on a near-meaningless fetch quest. This task involved a lot of backtracking, and a slight plot-related wrinkle was not enough to justify the tedium. I think the designers intended to use this segment as an excuse for players to collect all the missed treasures along the way. If true, this would be an unnecessarily redundant gesture for the completionists, who would've gone on a fetch quest of their own anyway. Meanwhile, the players who wanted to just get things over with are straddled with a quest that offered little fun.

I finished the quest. What else could I do? Would it be reasonable of me to spend all that efforts and time in a game only to leave it incomplete near the very last moment? Begrudgingly, I ran through the wormholes, traversed the now trivial obstacles, turned on the magic glasses, took the sword pieces, gathered them at the forge, and took the sword to the final battle. I was ready to be done then, but I was ready to be done a long time before then. I didn't become a better person in the time of the fetch quest. I didn't learn any new things. I didn't even have any fun. The fetch quest squandered what could've been a serviceable finale to an overall excellent game. So here I sit, fuming at thought of the lost time I could've used to, I don't know, make coffee or something.

Thanks for that post, Thirteenth. Struggling a bit with the Silitha battle, and seeing that beating her will lead me to further punishment takes away all motivation.

I've put in about 12 hours and the last 3 have felt like a chore, so I'm walking away.

If it's the zelda dungeons you like Thirteenth, then I would recommend pushing on and playing Darksiders 2. They fix up the combat and the entire game is just a ton of really well designed dungeons.

I enjoyed the first one a lot but I will agree the Black Throne and the subsequent fetch quest is not much fun. Although the end is pretty awesome (unfortunately it doesn't really pay off in 2).

The Black Throne has a monotonous look to it, but they did have some quite excellent puzzles in it.