Reviews// Darksiders II

Posted 14 Aug 2012 17:01 by Mark E. Johnson

It's all very, intensely videogame-y. Unashamedly so. Refreshingly so, in fact. Darksiders II is decidedly not of the 'gritty, realistic' school of fantasy game. You know you're playing a game, Vigil knows you're playing a game, so if the development team want to have titanic architectural mechanisms powered by rolling big stone balls into cups, they're damn well going to. Darksiders II picks up the gaming tropes you know and love from days gone yore and drags them into 2012.

Adding to this game-y-ness is the increased focus on Darksiders' RPG elements. The last game felt more like an action/adventure game with skill progression. This time out, Vigil has included stats. You can see hit points float off into the air when you whack someone and there's plenty of data to be had on how this scythe compares to that scythe.

There are some genuine choices to be made about how you want to shape Death, but there's also always the soft option of letting the game decide what the best bit of kit in your inventory for a given job is.

The difficulty curve has been steepened a little. Not too much – we're not into Dark Souls territory here – but a bit. Enough to make Darksiders II a decent challenge.

The upshot of many of the above changes is to make Darksiders II a bit more 'core' in its focus. It's not a massive shift, as the first game was hardly casual fare, but it's noticeable.

This approach is not without its pitfalls, though. The pacing feels off, sometimes. The dungeons can get a little tedious at times. Similarly, the incremental improvements to gear are barely – if at all – noticeable sometimes. Building your character's all well and good, but if it happens at such a rate that it doesn't register, what's the point? There's occasionally a sense that Vigil is trying to squeeze a little too much game out of not enough content.

And, while Darksiders II shares in its predecessor's strengths – good design, fun combat, solid puzzling – it also shares in one of its flaws. Namely, linearity. While poking around the environment will stand you in good stead as you uncover little treasure troves, there's not a vast amount to really explore. There's a lot of game world here, but there aren't really many ways to tackle it. At the end of the day, even if you shuffle the order you go about certain sections, you're not likely to see a vast amount that other gamers don't.

Similarly, there's only one way to deal with the puzzles. Often solving them isn't a logical process so much as a case of poking round the area you're in and seeing what you can interact with next. That's not to say they're not fun – just that there's a sense of inevitability about them.

Moans aside, there's a lot to recommend Darksiders II. It's a bit like going round your mum's and discovering she's started using apple and leek sausages with a dollop of mustard in the bangers and mash. It's still pretty much the meat and potatoes you've known and loved all your life, but it's just a little bit fancier.