SallyNasty's Game Club — Darksiders (Dec. 2018) — Is it any good? Sounds like the answer is "no"

The original game club is back! Starting December 1st, we're playing Darksiders.

Yes. Darksiders.

Is it any good? Let's find out!

Don't want to pay more than $5 for it? It's currently $3 on Humble Bundle for the Fall Sale, or it's available to download on console with Xbox Game Pass or Playstation Now.

If you're interested in joining, check in here in this thread. I hope to see you in December!

checking in. Gonna polish up my ridiculously oversized shoulder pads and boob armour!

Will the club move on to 2 after? I finished 1 awhile back but never finished 2.

Darksiders II has a glitched achievement, so we'll have to play it while Sally isn't looking.

Tagging!

Downloaded from Now in readiness.

I soured on Darksiders so fast the first time around that I'm not sure I gave it a proper chance. Sounds like a good time to give it a final shot before banishing it from my pile.

The ending was terrible. Fighting the same robot thing over and over, and the maze was confusing. I could tell they ran out of time to playtest the ending level.

Yeah it really dragged towards the end. I thought Darksiders 2 was more consistent although for some reason it has a reputation for being disappointing.

Because it's not very good.

i have a videogame crush on the giant Scottish blacksmith lady and her amazing hair, so DS2 is automatically better than the first! Science!

IMAGE(https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/darksiders/images/c/c5/Alya.png/revision/latest?cb=20120909172502)

Yeah! Also, Death is a much sassier horseman of the apocalypse than War.

Just a reminder: we start playing Saturday!

I'm waaay too lazy to put together some kind of schedule, though.

OK, this has been sitting in my Steam library for a way too long amount of time. Time to clear it off the backlog!

It's December now! Go play!

oh yeah!

I will definitely do that....after I install the CORRECT (updated Warmarster edition) version not the original version like I had already done.

Woops!

I started this last night and played up through the entrance of the Twilight Cathedral, the first major dungeon in the game.

I must have gotten better at these kinds of character action games in the last nine years, because this is a lot easier than I remember. I even went so far as to look up any balance changes with the remaster, and the only changes that were made were to the graphics.

The art style and character animations have held up remarkably well. It looks great in 4K.

It's funny to think about this game getting dinged for being too much like Zelda. Not even Zelda is like Zelda, anymore. I've never really understood where the line was between a game being an homage, being a rip-off, and just being another game in the same genre. Whatever that line was, Darksiders got flak for being on the wrong side of it, and that seems increasingly silly. Darksiders had a creative verve to it that's missing from a lot of the homogenized AAA output we have now.

I'm looking forward to playing more, especially if it goes as smoothly as it did last night.

I love how stupidly po-faced this game is in contrast to it's cartoony tone. Also having watched season 1 of critical role I can't help but recognise Liam Obrien doing a super gravelly, super emo, turn as War

Everyone doing voice acting in this game (a) probably had a lot of fun and (b) probably got through a hell of a lot of throat sweets!

I mentioned this last night in Slack, but that kind of slapstick serious tone, where everything is kinda silly but everyone acts like it's super serious, has become one of the defining characteristics of that console generation for me. See also: Gears of War.

Nothing bothers me more in a game review than the word "derivative." That was plastered all over the reviews of Darksiders and used to knock it continually..

If a game is GOOD, who cares if it imitates another game? Most games do! Darksiders is a great, darker (older style) Zelda clone with more story. I loved it.

There sure are a lot of skulls in this game! I haven't got particularly far with this just yet, but I am enjoying it. I'm not sure if it's quite going to hold my attention for the length of the game, but we'll see.

After hearing so much from critics at the time about how derivative it is of Zelda, I'm kind of surprised that it's really not anywhere near as much as I was expecting. I mean, sure, there's influence there, but there's plenty of other things in the mix too. Or maybe I'm just not far enough into it yet.

One useful tip: you can instantly kill the zombie guys using the finisher button (B on the Xbox controller; circle on Playstation). If you do this, they'll produce health souls instead of money. Handy if you need a smidge of healing.

halfwaywrong wrote:

There sure are a lot of skulls in this game! I haven't got particularly far with this just yet, but I am enjoying it. I'm not sure if it's quite going to hold my attention for the length of the game, but we'll see.

After hearing so much from critics at the time about how derivative it is of Zelda, I'm kind of surprised that it's really not anywhere near as much as I was expecting. I mean, sure, there's influence there, but there's plenty of other things in the mix too. Or maybe I'm just not far enough into it yet.

It'll become a lot clearer once you hit one of the boss dungeons and start getting the abilities you need to access secret areas and items.

Yeah I see what you mean. I just got up to the boss of the first dungeon and yeah, it was a lot like Zelda. Which is not really a complaint as far as I'm concerned.

I just finished off Tiamat, the boss of the first dungeon.

A few months, or maybe as much as a full year, after launch, THQ released the entire Twilight Cathedral dungeon as a demo for Darksiders, and it was that demo that convinced me to get the game. Playing through that area again was a nice little trip down memory lane.

It's interesting to look at this dungeon and compare it with Zelda, because it lifts many of its set piece rooms directly from a sprinkling of Zelda dungeons from Ocarina to Twilight Princess. But even with that generous assist from Nintendo, I don't feel like the dungeon here is especially well-designed.

It makes good use of the wheel-and-spoke layout of Zelda's dungeons, where you have a central room with a larger multi stage puzzle, and smaller rooms off to the sides with standalone puzzles that somehow advance the progress of the center room. It's a tried and true design, and Darksiders does it fairly well.

What I would take issue with, though, is the structure of the dungeon as a whole. Outside of the wheel-and-spoke rooms, I doubt that at any point you can look at what you're doing and see how it contributes to advancing through the Cathedral from beginning to end. You sort of solve each room as it presents itself, but it lacks a dramatic arc of setting your sights on a destination and seeing how you're working toward it.

That said, to end things on a positive note, I'm really enjoying the game's aesthetic. I saw it once described as Trapperkeeper art, and that's spot on, but it's colorful and fun in a way many of its contemporaries were not.

I'm struggling with Tiamat's dungeon purely because it's something I've done several times in the past and it's a bit of a slog. Like you say, it's kinda all over the place in terms of how it all flows together. I still get lost and confused with the layout even having run through it a few times already. Looking forward to getting clear of it and into the stuff I remember less well.

The aesthetic are good and hold up pretty well. But then it's the same as with WoW and Borderlands - the more stylised you make something the less uncanny it looks when you come back to it later.

Tiamat is down...finally. I forgot how hard that first boss fight is, even on easy. (Mostly because i'm all thumbs when it comes to switching between throwing/igniting bombs and dodging fireballs).

Made a start tonight and played for about an hour. Seems like good fun, will continue.

ugh. Stuck at a familiar sticking point - trying to do the little arena challenge thing where you need to kill X number of things with environmental objects. Whoever thought it was a good idea to tie these challenges into the main story progression needs to be fir....oh wait they all were anyway. Never mind!

I played through that portion of the game tonight, and yeah, I wasn't a fan. I didn't have too much trouble with the environmental one, but the one requiring chaos form kills nearly undid me.

I find some of the choices in this game to be just baffling. In the next area, you get a power-up (the super glove punch) that lets you break down barriers and is presented as a secondary weapon. It even swaps out for the scythe.

Immediately, a new enemy type is introduced... and the glove doesn't do sh*t to it. You will try to punch it, and it will eat your face. Isn't that pretty much game design 101? Introduce a new weapon, then use the next encounter to showcase its usefulness?

Of course, I have to consider the possibility that I'm just bad at the whole thing. Despite my earlier optimism, I'm struggling with the combat. I feel like there's some fundamental element of it that I just don't get. It seems to be difficult to avoid taking damage, but there are few options for recovering lost health in the thick of combat. You don't get enough money for me to feel like you're just supposed to stock up on consumable shards, but you don't really find them in the wild, either.

But miss a dodge, and wow, there goes a full health bar. And enemies are not shy about stun locking you into a string of brutal combos. I feel like I'm maybe supposed to be blocking more (the game even gives you a counter move if you block with good timing) but if you're in motion at all during combat, the block button will cause you to dodge. There are a lot of enemies, and they're all trying to kill you at once. It's hard not to be on motion. You will probably die if you're not in motion.

I admire the hell out of this game for trying to do and be so many things, but revisiting it, I'm not convinced it does any of those things particularly well.

Ooh, I just realised I have the Warmastered edition with my Origin access sub. Bit late but downloading now!