To be honest, I’ve been dreading the Darksiders post a bit. It’s because I think I might kinda hate Darksiders, but there are also so many factors that play into this hatred that I knew I’d end up writing for ages. Of course, the game also has some great parts, so I’ll do my best to touch on those too.
In fact, I want to start with some of the good here, because part of what bothers me about Darksiders is that when I first started playing, I was pretty into it. The combat is juicy and responsive. The animations are solid, both in terms of War’s attacks and the enemies reactions. The enemies and the world have good visual variety and distinctive environments. There are a lot of good ideas and systems, they just don’t always feel right for the game.
Darksiders has pretty standard console action combat, based around timing combos and dodging out of telegraphs. This isn’t totally my jam, but I enjoy it when executed well. The problem with Darksiders is that it seems well executed on the surface, but there’s very little depth there, and over time I started to be frustrated by many of their design decisions.
To elaborate, you have your standard attacks which you can chain into a variety of combos like you’d expect in a console action game. To be honest I never learned these, because I never had to bother with them. In most cases, your combos take longer enough than the monster telegraphs that the best way to get one off is to start attacking from a few steps away. Sometimes I’d take advantage of this with the ‘pause slightly between attacks’ combo by early-starting a few meters back, but I mostly had no reason to, and I’d rather attack my enemies than the air.
The only other combo I used was the one where you hold down attack, which stuns your enemy and damages them a bunch. This is obviously very good when fighting a couple of enemies, especially because it also knocks the enemy and you up in the air where it’s harder for other enemies to hit you, and follows up with a spin attack that hits the stunned target and anyone behind you. When holding down your basic attack button feels more impactful than executing complex combos, that may be a problem in the long run.
On top of the attack combos, you also have special abilities, which cost wrath. You build up wrath slowly enough that you are intended to use these infrequently, and while they do a lot of damage, I mostly found myself hitting them to take advantage of the invincibility frames granted by the animation. What did these abilities do? I’m not sure for most of them. It was poorly explained and awkward to swap abilities, so I mostly just used the spikes one. I think there was one that made you take less damage, one that burns nearby enemies, maybe a couple others, but similar to the combos, using them didn’t feel better than just the base combat. They felt superfluous because they didn’t actually add depth my normal play patterns, they just existed alongside them.
You also have executions, where you can fatality a low health enemy. Some of these are cool, and they give you some invincibility frames, so you are heavily incentivized to use them when you can. For some situations this mechanic works well, in others it becomes tedious to execute a series of small enemies, or even to sit there for the long animation of killing a large enemy. It’s a fine line between “cool fatality” and “I’m so tired of waiting for this animation”. Of course, you could just keep attacking them instead, but some of the most depth I found in the combat was around optimizing use of these execution invincibility frames. While that’s not necessarily bad, I wish the depth came from some of the other systems (there are so many) instead.
Perhaps some of these systems had more depth and I just didn’t pick up on it. For example, there was also a weapon mastery system, as well as bonuses you could slot into your main weapons. Unfortunately, all that having levels tied to my weapons did was make me hesitant to try new weapons later in the game. The bonuses I could slot were mostly vague or uninteresting. I think I went with one that made me do more damage! Maybe some other options would have made frustrating parts of the game easier for me? If so, I had no way of knowing and few incentives to find out. For the most part, that’s how Darksiders feels. It’s a bunch of systems smushed together, and some of them are fine systems, but the game is entirely lacking in feedback around how to use each effectively.
There is potential there though, and it’s too bad, because it feels like if more time had gone into polishing up these core systems, the team could’ve pulled off something awesome with Darksiders. For instance, I often wished that hit interruptions were more consistent. If you hit an enemy as they were attacking, it would often interrupt them. But not always, and I never could figure out any indication as to when I’d be able to get an interrupt in or not. I’m sure there was some (even if it was just a count or timing pattern), but I never picked up on it. If I don’t understand a mechanic, I can’t use it strategically, so I’m going to just ignore it if I can. I wish more of the game’s dozen hour playtime had gone towards showing me the depth in its mechanics.
On the standard difficulty, Darksiders doesn’t require much of you strategically. While enemy visual design is actually pretty good, it doesn’t really matter because each enemy occupies the same mindspace in terms of gameplay. Some enemies have different attack patterns, but rarely different enough for them not to blend together in my mind. You just always hit dodge when they do their thing.
Some of these things are powerful attacks that need to be dodged. Many of them suffer from not-great telegraphing. They tend to be unforgiving too: a swipe in one direction, then back the other direction, then a smash. If you get hit by the first, chances are you’ll get hit by the second and third, which means most of your attention has to be on these big enemies. Pretty late in the game they actually introduce a big skeleton guy with a shield who feels like the best designed enemy I ran into. He has clear, intuitive telegraphs and good windows of vulnerability. He also has a progression over the course of the encounter as his shield gets broken and he goes berserk. He was really the only enemy that stood out to me though, and didn’t appear until later in the game.
The main differentiator between enemies is what I’d call gimmick enemies–they are trivial to beat if you can remember how. There is a section where you need to pull the shells off of these mite creatures before you can do damage to them. There isn’t much room for skill expression here; you just have to remember to do the thing. This isn’t making an interesting decision, it’s being asked to remember how to tick a box. There is a lot of that in Darksiders, and it just feels like dated gameplay to me. I don’t feel awesome when I remember to do the thing the developer is forcing me to do to move forward, I feel like I’m taking a quiz.
Another interesting decision was to have no enemy healthbars, even on bosses. I mentioned before that I thought Darksiders did a poor job of giving the player good feedback, and the lack of healthbars was a huge contributing factor here. Health bars are by no means required, but damage optimization is a pretty key part of combat, and the player can’t optimize their damage if there is no way to differentiate effective play from ineffective play. It’s not fair to say there is none of that, but especially on bosses, I didn’t like how static combat felt. The combat encounters had unclear goals and progression. Even when the bosses have phases, you don’t know how many, which means each fight is pretty much trial and error until you figure out the sequence of actions the developers want you to do.
Darksiders’ standard encounter formula starts with the player walking into a large room, followed by a quick cutscene of the doors being blocked, and then enemies begin to spawn into the room and you kill them until they stop spawning. With no feedback on how you are progressing through each fight, combat began to feel contrived and tedious. You just fight until you don’t have to any more, then move forward and repeat, and the juicy combat can only keep that fun for so long.
What frustrated me the most were the bosses in this game. I think I might hate action game bosse in general, because they tend to follow this pattern of “throw away what you have learned about combat so far and figure out this gimmick”. The bosses follow your standard phase structure, usually where you perform an execution gimmick, hit the boss for a bit, and then repeat.
I have a few problems with this. The first is that there is no room for damage optimization (or was there? I couldn’t tell because bosses have no health bars!). You just hit the boss during each window where it’s vulnerable for as long as you are allowed to and then it’s back to executing the gimmick. Sometimes you have to dodge around for a while for a phase.
Another weird choice is that you don’t start boss fights with full health. You start with as much health as you had when you got to the boss room. This makes sense, except what happens if you die? Well, you get put at ⅗ health for your next attempt. Why not full health? I couldn’t tell you. It means that if you start a boss fight with below ⅗ health, you are extra likely to die on your first attempt. You still try, but then you fail, and then it feels like the game is punishing you for challenging yourself in the first place. Any depth in managing your health as a persistent resource is thrown out the window.
There was this portal robot boss which I liked, except that you have to fight it three times. Oh yeah, you get a portal gun in this game. They do a decent job with it from a puzzle perspective, but the implementation of the portals felt lacking after playing…portal. They’d just suck you in when you went near them, and the actual teleportation was a quicktime event. This made them generally awkward to use in any situation where timing or execution mattered. Combine that with clunky aiming, and I found myself once again thinking “good idea guys, but you didn’t quite pull off the implementation”. That’s Darksiders in a nutshell, man.
The portal boss itself got a pretty fun gimmick, where you have to use portals to jump on top of it. Each time you fight it, there’s a slight variation on this, and you have to accomplish it a few times for each fight. It just feels so contrived: each phase transition, your portal disappears and you have to place it again. Why, game? I wouldn’t have even minded if there was some explanation, but it’s just so obviously there to draw out the boss encounter. You figure out the mechanic, plan, execute, succeed, and then the game says “NOW DO IT AGAIN, FROM THE START! AND AGAIN! HAHA!”. It feels disrespectful. Instead, it should have been one boss with a difficulty progression through the mechanics of each of those 3 bosses over the encounter and it could have been great. Instead, it just feels like they had a good boss design and had to dilute it across three encounters to add more playtime. Bummer.
A couple of final points I want to touch on. There is a section of the game (not as close to the beginning as you would expect) where your quest is to complete a bunch of challenges that ask you to fight in unique ways. The concept here is fine, but the execution felt contrived and uninteresting (I need a thesaurus). I don’t even remember the game’s explanation for why I had to do this, but they felt like chores to me. They had nothing to do with my character’s objectives, just more jumping through hoops for an hour. There are better ways of getting players to vary their play than forcing them to do combat homework before they can continue their quest.
Another complaint I had over the course of the game was that the world huge, but didn’t feel like it had any reason to be. There were explorables to find, but they mostly felt pointless, so the “I can’t wait to come back here when I can reach this blocked area” feeling never set in for me. Rewards are not compelling if the systems they exist in are not compelling.
Then, towards the end of the game, you get a quest which asks you to go back to all of the other zones in the game. I do like this concept because it’s fun to go back with your new powers and feel strong, but I wished I’d picked up more quick travel points on my first way through. I’d also sometimes end up taking the wrong exit in a zone, or going the wrong way to get to the sword shards I was trying to collect. If you do this, there is no ‘take me home’ mechanic, so you’re forced to work through any traversal puzzles again to get out of the place you didn’t mean to be anyway. The original level design is at odds with the fact that players need to be able to move through these spaces at a reasonable speed later on.
You may have noticed I hardly mentioned the puzzles in this game, despite the fact that they do make up a huge part of playtime. I thought the puzzles were fine. The game is no portal, but for the most part I enjoyed the puzzles and thought they were pretty good. Some of the interactions felt unintuitive to me and I wished the puzzle mechanics interacted with each other more (instead each mechanic is mostly relegated to its own section, where you learn it and then throw it away), but that was all minor compared to most of my complaints. High quality puzzle design is difficult. Still, it also would be awesome if, as a puzzle/action game, some of the puzzle mechanics factored into combat in interesting ways. Instead, you alternate between isolated combat portions and puzzle portions. For that hybrid gameplay to work though, you have to get the core bits right first, and it seems like Darksiders was already trying to do too much at once.
All in all, Darksiders is a decent game, just one that’s very much not for me. I found this especially frustrating, because while it has the makings of something I could love, it manages to fall flat in so many of the ways that matter most to me. I’m sure there are loads of players out there who adore the game as-is and that’s great too. I just feel like the team was scratching the surface of something truly awesome here, but couldn’t quite pull it off.