Reviews// Darksiders

You're also empowered with 'Wrath' abilities. You build up wrath as you collect a certain type of soul on your travels and you can deploy it using attacks such as the Blade Geyser (shoots blades from the ground around you) Immolation (makes you all firey) as well as more defensive moves such as activating Stoneskin (makes you less susceptible to harm).

Cranking it up yet another notch is your chaos form that you get access to as you progress. As you fight, you build up chaos, which will eventually give you access to your big red über-powerful chaos form, enabling you to dish out even more pain for a limited period.

You can upgrade your weapons and abilities thanks to Darksiders' aforementioned RPG elements. In between hurting baddies, you can visit Vulgrim, a tricky wheeler-dealer of the demonic realms who will sell you new moves, weapons, abilities and upgrades in exchange for souls you've collected on your travels.

Breaking up all the bruising you do with your fists and melee weapons is the occasional shooting section. Some of these involve Panzer Dragoon-style flight, some involve more straight-up third-person shooter action, such as when you have Redemption (great big energy weapon) in your hands, and some involve your Crossblade, which you can sling around to pick up various environmental effects. The former two gameplay elements are welcome breaks from the main thrust of Darksiders', the Crossblade... can be a right old pain in the arse.

For puzzling, it's fine. You can select multiple targets and use it do handy things such as pick up fire to set off explosives. In general combat it's fine – I was happily firing it off - without using the targeting - to cut up enemies. If the Crossblade needs to be used for a specific purpose during combat, however, it can tap into a further mode – Rage. Rage comes not from without, but from within. Within me.

I discovered this during a (SPOILER ALERT!!!) boss battle against a bitch-titted demon called Tiamat. Oh, the Rage! I had been making my way through the rest of the game just fine. It was challenging, but the learning curve was steep without being punishing. Then Tiamat showed me that I must surely be a bumbling n00b. Vigil clearly loves its boss battles and that's great. The bosses are of the old school variety that involves something big attacking you in a fairly fixed pattern. You suss out the pattern, you take them down. Great. Except that with Tiamat I sussed out the pattern, then still had to spend absolutely f%*king ages fighting her/him over and over again because the combat mechanics, while spot-on for the most part, fall over in certain situations.

Specifically, multiple targeting with the Crossblade is just too damn fiddly when a demon's roasting you with fireballs and the camera movement's enough to make Jenson Button run into a wall. Like many brawlers, Darksiders has a camera that re-focuses on your behalf to make sure you're looking where the action supposedly is. That's fine for relatively slow ground-based opponents, but when the dude you're fighting is flapping around the screen, trying to keep the camera pointing the right way is enough to send you boggle-brained. Sure, the left trigger will keep the focus on your foe, but it's just a pain in the arse to use. Anyway, the result was Rage of a kind I haven't experienced since my housebound vegetarian uni housemates stole my meat feast pizza while I was staggering home drunk. I was really looking forward to that pizza.

Conclusion

Ignoring the fact that we finished up on a negative note, where does all that leave us? If you like brawlers with a bit of thinky stuff, Darksiders is worth your cash. The design is slick, the puzzles are challenging and the combat fun, save for the odd instance where it becomes overly complicated and makes you want to do bad things to your telly. There's nothing startlingly new here, but that's not to say there isn't a lot to enjoy. If you want something with more speed and pizazz and less pressure on the old grey matter, get Bayonetta. That's also out this week. The really short version of this review goes: Darksiders is good without being great.

SPOnG Score: 82%