DARKSIDERS III REVIEW

[| TG |]

- We haven’t seen many games like Darksiders III in the past decade or so. It’s a third-person action game that isn’t afraid to grind your progress to a halt for an hour or more until you figure out how to beat a seemingly-impossible boss. It doesn’t seem to aspire to match the visual polish of this year’s biggest blockbusters, and its design philosophy completely disregards all the hand-holding and coddling that has become the norm outside of Dark Souls and its brethren. But the combat is satisfying – and, you know, maybe not every game needs to be a giant open world with a million things to collect and a never-ending supply of side quests. Darksiders III fits comfortably in that spot.

- Your appreciation of the characters and stakes of this roughly 20-hour story will get a boost if you’ve played at least the first Darksiders. Each game puts you in control of a different Horseman of the Apocalypse in a unique and interesting setting: a ravaged Earth where a war between angels and demons has pretty much left humans extinct. Your Horseman this time around is Fury – the only female Horseman – but her debut isn’t especially memorable due to some cheesy dialogue and forgettable voice acting.

- As for the graphics, while there have been games this year that have truly stunned me with their beauty, Darksiders III is not one of them. The stylized, cartoonish characters are plopped into a pretty generic-looking world that lacks detail. A couple of the Deadly Sin designs are cool, though: Sloth, for example, is a giant, beyond-morbidly obese slime bug who is carried around on a throne of slave beetles.

- The bosses in Darksiders III are not messing around. While the first couple might not pose much of a threat, eventually you’ll encounter one that doesn’t seem to respond to any trick or attack you’ve learned up to that point. Not to ruin any surprises, but don’t be shocked if a boss doesn’t go down as easily as it seems they will. It can be frustrating to suddenly have the tables turned on you, to be sure, but with persistence success eventually (mercifully) comes. In this way, Darksiders III feels like it’s of another time – a time when designers weren’t afraid of scaring you away with difficulty.
Boss checkpoints could have been tweaked to better respect our time, though. In one case, losing to a boss sends you all the way back to a checkpoint with all sorts of enemies blocking your path back to round two (and, if we’re being honest, for me it was rounds three and four and so on). In another, you’re sent back to an area that’s far away but with no enemies in your path, so you just have to spend a few minutes running back to the fight. The bosses here are tough enough that these inconveniences add up after a few failures.

-  Instead of open world, I’d describe Darksiders III as a connected-world game. It’s a series of smallish rooms connected by hallways and tunnels, and the nearest Deadly Sin is always marked with a skull on your radar at the top of the screen. So playing Darksiders III means running down hallways from room to room, keeping that skull centered, and fighting any monsters in your way.

- That’s 90 percent of it, with environmental puzzles making up the remaining 10 percent. These puzzles are a nice break from the action, and one or two were tough enough to stump me for more than a few minutes.

- That doesn’t leave much room for rewarding exploration, but I did enjoy hunting down the upgrade items that are hidden all over the place behind corners and just off the beaten path. There is a bit of backtracking to previous areas, and you’re bound to notice opportunities that weren’t previously available to you because you didn’t have the right ability yet. Those moments flesh Darksiders III out a bit and make it feel like more than just a simple action game.

- The straightforward simplicity of Darksiders III is a refreshing change of pace after exploring so many dense open-world games. That simplicity doesn’t refer to the combat or boss battles, though, which are complex and almost startlingly unforgiving. Its throwback philosophy is comfort food for action gamers of a certain age, but it would’ve been nice to see the third game in the series introduce some new concepts to relaunch Darksiders in the modern age.
 

Edited March 30, 2019 by | TG |