It’s criminal that it wasn’t.Īnd if Darksiders II goes the same way, criminal won’t even be the word for it.ĭarksiders II (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U) One of my favorites of 2010, Vigil Games’ appealing (yet ridiculous) action title took the core of The Legend of Zelda and wrapped it in some highly original (and violent) clothes. Every now and then, a game can have all that and just be unlucky.ĭarksiders was one such game.
Darksiders 2 review full#
If only the Deathinitive Edition were more of a director’s cut, then, and less of a studio remaster stuffed full of unnecessary content.A great example of a sequel done absolutely rightĮvery now and then, a game comes along that seems to have the right stuff - it’s got an unforgettable visual style, a quality studio, a respectable marketing budget, and the kind of gameplay that should go over damn well with a crowd. These playful and experimental conceits, born of a sort of “why not?” mentality that’s very much not in Death’s grim wheelhouse, represent the best that Darksiders has to offer. Death gains access to familiar guns and grappling hooks and rides around on a horse named Despair, but he also gains a late-game ability that seems ripped directly from Portal. Splitting the action across different worlds allows the team to experiment with styles, whether that’s the Warcraft-like fantasy of the Forge Lands, the way Realm of the Dead eerily evokes the Legacy of Kain series, or the return to apocalyptic Earth in a fun remix of the original Darksiders campaign.
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Still, when Darksiders II sticks to the actual essentials of the main story and not its so-called Deathinitive features, it’s a solid action-adventure-RPG hybrid. Worst of all, the game is still plagued-at least on the PS4-with stray glitches: My copy crashed during two different cutscenes, gave some characters weirdly pixelated textures (as if they’d been censored), and sometimes caused the audio to cut out. If the Diablo-like loot drops have been rebalanced, it’s for the worse it’s soul-crushingly disappointing to figure out a tricky puzzle only to find that the random gear acquired from mashing through a mob of enemies was better. Corrupted weapons, which you can level up by sacrificing other gear to them, are particularly useless. (They’re a lot like the Chalice Dungeons in Bloodborne in that they stretch out the core game without adding anything new.)Īll the new content also threatens to imbalance portions of the game, with players over-leveled or discovering gear sets that outclass the stuff they’re finding elsewhere. That’d be fine if these extra dungeons introduced new mechanics, but because they’re available as soon as players reach them, they’re generally forced to rely on simple, contextual puzzles. Deathinitive is even bigger, as it contains all the bonus DLC.
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Darksiders II did a lot of good things, but it also tried a little too hard to be epic, and wound up bloated in its constant attempts to outdo the original. This is true, however, only for newcomers to the series.
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Although its dungeons were obviously derivative of The Legend of Zelda’s, and its combat was the product of a talented God of War impersonator, Darksiders II was an ambitious, enjoyable game, and if the Deathinitive release gets it into a single first-timer’s hand, then it’s worth it. In many ways, that describes the Darksiders franchise itself. And yet, given how much of the original team has worked to resurrect Darksiders for the current generation (after original publisher THQ’s dissolution), there’s also a sincerity and passion to the project. After all, the graphics aren’t all that noticeably different, and some of the terrain-traversal puzzles are still tricky on the eyes. Given that the original Darksiders II was released just a little over three years ago, it’s hard not to see Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition as a last-ditch attempt for profit. Benjamin Franklin once said that only two things in life were certain, death and taxes, but were he alive today, he might add remakes and remasters to that list.