Darksiders

I picked up Darksiders because the department store at which I work is getting rid of their video games section.  We've had a lot of the same games since I started working there, so I keep an eye on whatever goes on clearance in the game rack.  I would have raided the skeletal remains of our video game sections if it weren't for the few hours I am currently working, so I narrowed it to a couple choices: Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Darksiders.  I've never played any of the other Deus Ex games (and I know that some people reading this didn't know there were other games), so I took my chance with the new IP, especially after I heard about how well its sequel is reviewing.

The shiny box didn't hurt, either.

An extremely basic outline of the story: The apocalypse is a party and War, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is getting things started right.  But while demons and angels fight in the streets, War notices that his three best buddies aren't laying waste to the world the way they're supposed to.  In short, someone started the apocalypse early, and War gets framed for it.  The game wastes no time in getting the destruction of Earth underway.  100 years later, War makes a deal with the powers that lie between Heaven and Hell: he'll find out who framed him, or the demons who now walk the Earth will kill him, filling his death sentence anyway.

So I played it, and during the entire first hour, I thought two things:

1. The colors and the presentation here are great, I love that it's not another Brown and Bloom fest.
2. I'm pretty sure I'm playing God of War.

Note that second one, because I don't mean it in a wholly bad way.  Any comparison to God of War is a good one, but I am saying that in combat, Darksiders doesn't really feel terribly different from God of War in any way.  Besides the specific combos and weapons that differ between Kratos and War, combat takes place at a pace almost exactly like God of War's.  War even has finishing moves like Kratos's, but they lack the quicktime events of the latter's game, for better or worse.

So after a flight on an "Angelic Beast" (basically a griffin that functions almost exactly like an Arwing from Starfox, barrel-rolls notwithstanding) I got to the first dungeon, the Twilight Catherdral.

I loved the look of it, and by this point of the game, I was pretty sold on the atmosphere of it.  I'm a sucker for Heaven vs Hell and Revelations-type plots anyways.  So I got in the cathedral and solve a couple puzzles, after which I quickly realized that this is a fire temple.

Someone got lava all up in this church.

Oh, and that sweet throwing blade War has there?  That's basically a Zelda boomerang.  It's badass in every way, don't get me wrong, but if you played Twilight Princess, you already have experience with the targeting system.  Later in the game, you find a hookshot.  Darksiders calls it the "Abyssal Chain," but really,  anyone who's played a Zelda game from the past decade-and-a-half knows it's a hookshot.  It functions exactly like the famous Zelda weapon, and it even has that same satisfying burst sound effect when you launch it.

Towards the end of the game, you find a neat little artifact that lets you open voids in two different areas.  You can jump into one void and come out the other.  The voids come out colored orange and blue.  Yeah, War finds a portal gun.  Aperture Science didn't manufacture it, but except for Valve's physics engine and one difference you need to figure out to solve a puzzle, the "Voidwalker" functions just like the famous gun from Portal.

The game suffers from some typical qualities of new IPs.  War can grab onto ledges and pull himself up, but half the time, it feels like the game is arbitrarily deciding when he can and can't grab onto something.  I made War take many a fall into the abyss because of this.  In a related problem, a lot of the urban environments can get repetitive and easy to get lost in.  This is something that is hardly exclusive to Darksiders, though.

Darksiders is like a patchwork of all the games I've been playing through this console generation.  This would be a bad thing if it didn't all work so well.  They've taken the best qualities from many different games, including the recent jump in voice acting and storytelling we've seen in games like Arkham Asylum and the Assassin's Creed games. It's like listening to a "best of" album from an amazing tribute band.  And as an added bonus, you get to play as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!  It's a fun ride, and if you find this game in a bargain bin, I can't really give you a good reason to pass this up.