Darksiders PS3 review

What can I say about the action hack-n-slash game that is Darksiders? Well the puzzles can be interesting, which should tell you enough about what I think about this action game.

The premise is simple... oh wait no it's not. Angels fight Demons, Humans come along and both want a taste of that sweet human booty resulting in much death until the Charred Council step in to provide balance and send in their enforcers the Horsemen whenever either side steps out of line. A deal is struck that the major conflict won't happen until all seven of some newly created seals are broken. This happens and one of the Horseman, War, descends to Earth to usher in the Apocalypse/Adjudicate the fighting/Go shopping it's never made quite clear why he's there, but he is and all alone. 'What gives?' he muses 'Where are my fellow horseman?'. Oopsie turns out the seals weren't broken and War is out without permission. So not knowing if he's being honest about being tricked or has sided up with the Destroyer the Charred Council send him back to Earth a century later, when all humanity is dead, without his powers and an annoying Watcher* to keep him in check while he finds out what's going on.
*Yep the game highlights all the important things in blue. Annoying isn't it?

So a standard third-person affair as you rummage around the ruins of some city that is in no way based on Generic American City #3. Graphically it's fine and the design does a good job in conveying the tone of both a war and subsequent deterioration of a city perhaps even better than Fallout 3 managed. However at this point things turn predictable. War slowly gains abilities and weapons that allow him to access areas he couldn't reach before and beat up the enemies so as to gain abilities and weapons that allow him to access areas he coul... snore.

One nice point is that sticking with the new trend of understanding the power of the consoles the game is one large level with no loading sections (except when you take a shortcut) and I've only encountered a few couple of second pauses as I kick down a door to access a new area. Other pauses do occur though especially when the action gets heated. It runs at 720p and I'm not sure if it's frame-capped as I get both stutter and tearing at times. It's not bad just jarring at times.

So I mentioned the puzzles and they're not bad and at times you do need to think for a second how to get through certain sections. There are, however, two main obstacles to enjoying the puzzles. The first is that you get no help whatsoever. Supposed you can call up the Watcher who'll give you a hint except he'll happily pop-up by himself to guide you with an "over here" and then fail miserably to explain anything. You do occasionally get a sweeping camera to show you where you're aiming for and on occasion the game will pause to give you a pictured tutorial on how to do something. Sadly in the latter's case the 'acknowledge I've read this' button is the same as the 'I've just tried to jump' button. In one case I was stuck for 5 minutes trying to jump a gap because I'd tried to do so just as the help screen appeared telling me how to do it. No repeat, nothing in the menus oh and no the manual is truly useless; I'm not exaggerating this is a full-on brawl of a game and the manual doesn't even have a section on combat.

The second obstacle is the control system. Half the time you find you're not fighting the enemies you're fighting the controls. It seems the developers went a little mad and tried to cram absolutely everything they could onto the controller regardless of how it interacts. Take something simple like target-lock, this is something that's been sorted by games since the PS2 era. You simply tap L2 and it locks onto the nearest target, hold L2 and you can use the stick or d-pad to cycle through the enemies, to release the lock just tap the button again or hold to select a new target. It's simple and of course Darksiders sneers at it. If you want target lock in Darksiders you have to keep L2 permanently held down. No, bad developers write out a thousand times "I will not make players hold down a key while expecting them to use other keys for the same hand"

[Update - this is also the only game where I've knocked the difficulty down from the default medium to easy simply because of the uselessness of the controls]

Sadly that's not the end of the problem because you have two radial wheels you can use one assigned to the d-pad and another to L1 plus the face buttons. Again not a problem per se, but it is when you have only four slots and can have about 12 different items that can fit to them. Assign your four powers to the L1 wheel and you can't slot a health tonic, an item that you can't even use from the menu itself. Assign the shuriken, the portal gun, and the mask to the d-pad and you can't use the grappling hook. Wait isn't there four? Yes but the last one is reserved for your secondary weapon and can't be altered.

As a result you're constantly heading into one of the two menus to swap things about. Yep two menus and not just the standard in-game menu and a pause/save/load menu that other games have these are full blown in-game menus so complex it took me a while to find the options to actually save the game manually. Making a situation even worse is that the map menu is useless. Oh the map itself is fine and you can scroll around and up and down levels on the local version but you can't zoom in or out so it becomes difficult to plot routes. As for the global level you can do nothing with it not even discover the name of where you are.

The fact that you have to dive in and out so many times is made unhelpful in that a) you can't switch between the two menus without returning to the game and b) there's a significant pause every time you call one up. An example of how little time was spent on these is given by what happens if you enter the Options menu. Back out and you have to wait and watch it save the changes you haven't made.

This laziness also shows up in how information is presented. I bought the first secondary weapon, the Scythe, and up pops a helpful tip telling me I can switch secondary weapons using down on the d-pad. How useful seeing as I have only one secondary weapon. When I later found another the same tip appeared suggesting it's linked to just gaining them rather than checking I possess more than one. Likewise every time I find a key or some sort of artefact up pops a tip telling me what it is. Sure fine if they're all different but they're not. Yes I know that green glowing thing is an artefact I can sell it's the same as the green glowing thing I picked up before and the 10 before that; you don't have to keep telling me this!

[The laziness also shows up in the old bugbear the pixel precise jump - one step back and you won't make the gap; one step to late and you run off the cliff. Add in the unlocking of powers and the lack of help and at times it makes you wonder if you're doing the right thing or are supposed to wait until you gain some fancy doohickie later on]

It's as if the developers have just thrown a bunch of things at a God of War game and then said meh that'll do and walked away. It's a shame because with some editorial control this could have been a good game.

[Update -  One final mark of an unfinished product - if you attempt to quit the game fully i.e. use the PS3 menu quit, while still in the game menu the console will hang and force a reboot]