Darksiders for PlayStation 3 Reviews by Gamers

Darksiders has what every game should. A solid story with a few plot twists, an interesting protagonist, decent game mechanics, and enemies you're more than happy to put down. It's got it all...Primarily because it takes obvious inspiration from several other franchises.

The combat is hack and slash, with some graphic context sensitive moments (God of War). The exploration and puzzle solving is vary linear, requiring the use of recently obtained items (Zelda). The story and character line up are akin to Saturday morning cartoons for teens (Batman...Complete with Mark Hamill).

The story is predictable, but pretty satisfying, and the star studded voice cast does a marvelous job. The cinematic aspects of the game (sound, design and acting), are what really stand out.

The combat gets a bit old, unless you're into the hack and slash style. Truth be told, just as you're getting a bit tired of the combat, they switch it up on you with a boss fight or new puzzle, all of which are pretty entertaining.

The exploration is fine, linear and pretty darn simple (you can acquire almost every item and nick knack in one, maybe two trips to an area), and the game tops out at 20 hours.

Take Zelda, God of War and Batman, and mix them with some slightly altered biblical myth.

The above mentioned franchises, for various reasons, are great. Slapping them together into a single twenty hour experience sounds good, right? That's the best word to describe Darksiders: Good. It's good...not great, but worth a look.

By now most people know this game took liberties from quite a few sources. However the developers still have some thing good on their hands ,but not quite a classic. Suprisingly the combat is where this game drops the ball. You don't expect that in a action adventure game but that is the case in Darksiders. Number one the combat animation is weak, your character is short and wide and layered. You cant see the range of motion or effort in the attacks. By todays standards the character animation was plain. The enemies for the most part were mindless bait, the combos...who cares what ever came out came out there was never any reason to prefer one over the other. The movement of the main character, well the contextual view was flat out troublesome to use. The dodge and jump mechanic always felt a bit slow or a bit short. These areas all needed to be fine tuned.
Where they did well was the puzzles and the traversing. That was top notch. Some puzzles were overly difficult but its good to mix a few of those in there. The story was compelling enough and the voice actors were at least believable. Maybe with Part two if they streamline the animation and make the combat more compelling then we are talking about a hit but until then, this was a good rental and a decent trophy grab.