Darksiders is the highly anticipated action game from THQ and Vigil. By now most of you have heard about it, seen part of it or played it. It�s been a long-time in the coming and the hype surrounding it was big. But the question is, does it live up to what we were told?
The story goes that there is a universal council that is tasked with maintaining balance in the universe and that a war raged between Heaven and Hell prior to the coming of man. When the third kingdom arrived, that of man, seven seals were set in place. When the time came the seals would be broken to begin the End War. Of course if there is going to be a war, that would mean there will be a winning side and then there could be no balance, so a minor flaw in the story one might suggest.
You take on the role of War, one of the Four Horsemen who was tasked with helping keep the balance. When you are summoned to Earth you believe that the seals have been broken and your time has come. However, you�ve been duped and you are stripped of your power but sent back to Earth to find out what is going on. The Destroyer, a lord of Hell (maybe?), has some foul plot afoot and you were simply a pawn it seems.
The visuals in the game are great. It�s everything that we were expecting. Detailed, interesting environments and character models. Stunning effects and a wide range of things to be seen. There�s very little to fault the game on in this department and I won�t even attempt to do so. It�s certainly not the greatest graphics ever seen but for the Xbox 360 they are extremely good. I can only imagine what a PC version would look like with the proper gaming rig powering the display.
Sound is also extremely well done and fits very well with both the theme and the visuals. Every form of creature has their own sounds in attack, idle and otherwise. Even the voice work is quite well done and very few flaws exist in it. In fact I�m quite surprised at the lack of annoyance in the ambient and character sounds. Sure throwing the cross-blade and swinging your sword always make the same sounds, but with so many ways to do them it�s still interesting.
Where
the flaws come in are in gameplay and level design. They�re not huge flaws but enough to suck some of the fun out of the game. In regards to gameplay, imagine the standard third-person Zelda games and you have a great idea of what you�ll be doing - right down to throwing a boomerang through a flame to destroy a monster or unlock a puzzle. Heck, they even have bombs! The game is very much like Zelda games with puzzles that you have to solve my jumping, climbing, flipping switches and fighting bad guys. Some of them are quite unique and so it�s not a knock-off of those games, but more like an evolution of the genre. What it really means is that the gameplay is not as innovative as one might hope for, but it�s still fairly fun to sit and sort through all the problems presented. Generally, the puzzles are part of the environment and that keeps you on the move from place to place when you�re not just hacking through a horde of oncoming enemies. There are also some strange glitches that may require you to back out of the game. I got lost in the �void� outside of the environment at least twice.
