So I frequently browse the Devil May Cry board on IGN. Its a pretty shitty board, barely anyone is there and there is very little to talk about other than the typical circle jerk about how terrible D.m.C. is going to be.
Anyway, so some prestigious members mentioned how great DarkSiders is so I bought the game.
Game was okay.
That's a huge let down man.
The thing is though, its hard to figure out WHY the game is just okay instead of great.
It seemed to do the formula fairly well:
Fight gods.
Big monsters.
Aggressive Enemies.
Puzzles.
Weird ass weapon things.
But it just wasn't enough. Lets break down what was missing.
1. Combat:
Defensively the combat on paper seemed pretty good. The enemies were aggressive so you had to actively dodge and block. Active = good. However, the problem was that it was stale. You never felt particularly agile. Generally battles flowed in a very mechanical attack->block->attack way. You didn't have to manipulate enemies much and you really couldn't because you weren't agile enough and things like the hook-shot like weapon didn't work on the enemies it would have mattered for and the little ones it did it took to much effort and time for it to be worth using it.
Coupled with the terrible offensive aspect of attacking and the combat became EXTREMELY stale. The main issue with offense was that every attack felt WAY WAY too similar. Firstly it was dial-in combo heavy which made it already a bit stale, especially since the dial in combos often did way more damage than the make-your owns. You didn't have the really slow but powerful attack, the short range but strong, the long range and weak but fast so its good for stunning enemies and hitting large numbers of them.... etc. Instead you just had medium range attacks that did a medium amount of damage all the time.
This spiraled into retardedness when weapon damage was largely based on how much you leveled it up, based on EXP. This meant it was WAY more strategical to just use ONE WEAPON all the time. Especially since the combat was stale and enemies tended to have a shitton of HP so you generally wanted to finish the fight as fast as possible.
So now you have this unagile character who's most damaging thing to do is essentially mash the attack button, (Or maybe one move on the scythe weapon, you know what I'm talking about if you played the game), AND basically should only use one weapon the whole game.
Pretty bad right? But the game is supposed to be zelda-esque more so than DMC-ish.
Its supposed to be about the puzzles!
The puzzles...
Puzzles were boring as hell.
Some of them actually were the right amount of difficulty but the problem was they were INCREDIBLY annoying to actually perform. They usually required more labor than actual puzzle solving: jumping through a big room full of boring easy platforms, WAITING, so much waiting, for things like bridges and platforms to come by etc. When a puzzle takes 1 min to figure out, and 10 min to actually do because the level is too big, and you have to spend a massive time waiting etc. thats a huge problem and the puzzle goes from a puzzle to a chore...
The music was bland. I don't even remember anything particular about it. I don't think I mention this enough but music is everything. Take a shitty movie, replace its soundtrack with someone really good, BAM you got at least a decent movie. You'll have people leave that movie thinking you know I don't know why but I liked that movie.
Not enough people recognize its largely the MUSIC.
And the music for this game... was bad.
The story was also stale.
You only got tidbits of the story every now and then. It started out super interesting, crazy war going on. But then you just have fetch quests. "Hey, go over here and beat this boss, do this for all 3 temples."
I bet some developers thought "Hey! they do this in A LOT OF GAMES (like zelda) I'm sure its fine" but they were wrong. The reason why Zelda worked even though it was essentially just "Do a bunch of temples." was because the journey to the temple was extremely entertaining. You met A LOT of awesome characters, and really interesting environments. You really got a feel for what the world was like and you did some really weird things.
Here though, almost everything is abandoned and you can count the NPCs on your fingers. The few times where the game WAS good was when you interacted with some of those few NPCs (The irish-hammer-guy, and when you got your horse back). Thats about it. Those two moments were the only ones that were particularly good.
Hammer-irish guy was awesome because it brought a sense of "Hey who is this guy?" "Woah hes pretty awesome, hes totally raping these angels!" and well the hammer-irish guy had a pretty awesome personality. He HAD A PERSONALITY. Which is more than one can say for a certain chained up demon (Samael) in this game who was hyped up and SEEMED very cool, but never really did anything, or said anything particularly distinguishing.
The horse was awesome because it actually brought about possibly the most emotional moment in the game. Here you were trapped in an arena and you refused to fight (a pretty tough opponent too) because of LOVE. Love for your horse and not some arbitrary, throwaway female character thankfully. Bam, your devotion was rewarded and your horse was returned to you. And the horse was AWESOME. Why? Because one, it let you TRAVEL FASTER and defeat one of the most boring things in the game, giant fields which took forever to traverse, and it let you get past GIGANTIC sand worms. They did a good job on making the sandworms really seem like GIANTS. They did this largely by making them UNKILLABLE, and very easily able to kill you. So when you got that horse, it was like a thousand orgasms.
Anyway, those were the good parts of the game. The rest were terrible mostly because for most of the game NOTHING HAPPENED. Lets compare this to Devil May Cry 3.
In DMC3 every mission brought upon its own cutscene which furthered the story or were just entertaining to watch because they were humorous or satirically over the top. The game also had a huge plot twist in the middle, and the relationship between Dante and Mary and Vergil was actually somewhat deep and not very cut and dry. You wanted to kill your crazy brother, but he was still your brother who you loved. The final scenes where Vergil chose to stay in the demon world was haunting. You knew it would cost him his life essentially and you could tell he was staying there because he just didn't feel accepted by the human world.
The ending to this game on the other hand just felt like a way to advertise the next game. You killed the bad guy, and possibly started a war. A war you would have to fight with only yourself and your brothers. It had a tinge of emotion: feeling that brotherly love. Things FINALLY got exciting. But that was it. It was over. You got a exciting tease for an ending instead of a real ending. This isn't that surprisingly though, how can you make an ending good when nothing really happens in the whole game.
Sure you get have douchey-angel-king-badguy betray his kind, but it was INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS he did this. It would be okay if this betrayal plot happened toward the beginning but NO. Instead you spend the ENTIRE GAME, doing very arbitrary things, that didn't even lead to anything. Just arbitrary obstacles that do not matter. They have you play through the ENTIRE GAME, just for this tid bit of very obvious information. They could have done so much more. You RELEASED A SUPER DEMON just to create a portal to go kill angel-badguy. They hyped this up making it seem like releasing the demon would cause a chain of events that would actually make the game interesting but NO, he opens the portal, leaves, and you never see him again.
That's terrible writing.
Not to mention you have absolutely no reason to care for this main douchey-angel-badguy. He is quite literally a guy you see for about a minute in the beginning of the game, and a guy you randomly kill at the end. Terrible...
Most likely they left out ALL OF THIS INTERESTING STUFF, so they would have something to do for the sequel. But you know what fuck that. I didn't buy and play through this stale game (I'm abusing the word stale because it is the PERFECT WORD for this game) just for a tease.
I feel scammed practically.
Anyway, this game still had huge production values, and wasn't down right terrible but I have to say the God of War series was much better (and I don't even like much). Put simply its almost entirely because the pacing was LEAGUES better for GoW. You didn't have giant ass empty fields to cross all the time. GoW's combat was pretty stale too but it was still more active than Darksiders, and the puzzles didn't have as big of a giant-chore factor too them. The story too had so many more interesting characters, and you ACTUALLY DID CRAZY THINGS in GoW with plot twists that were actually intriguing. When you interacted with legendary beings, you ACTUALLY interacted with them, they didn't just open a portal and leave. You god damn killed witches who controlled time!
Damn Darksiders makes me appreciate God of War so much more...
Overall I would give Darksiders a 7.2/10
I would give God of War 2 a 8.8/10 for reference.
Bayonetta- 9.4/10
And Devil May Cry 1/3 a 10/10
Damn you IGNers... I am disappointed in your taste.
