Playing A Game Darksiders II PC

Back in 2013 I struggled to follow through on Darksiders II: "I've yet to encounter an item, dungeon puzzle, or narrative element that really wows me," I wrote. This time around, I saw more in the game - and played through more of the game - but still lost interest well before the finish line.

The first installment felt a lot like an amalgam of God of War and The Legend of Zelda, and the sequel builds on that concept in some insightful, promising directions. The map is more open and expansive than it used to be; there's optional content to explore at your own pace; you can even upgrade your character with equipment and a skill tree.

Revisiting Darksiders II years later, it's fascinating to see how it nudged in some of the same directions that God of War (2018) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild took their respective franchises. (Hell, this game's even got a World Tree connecting its realms.)

That being said, while I admire Darksiders II's innovative efforts, their payoffs were definitely mixed. As large as its world looks, it feels quite small, with very few secrets to discover and not much to do other than "more dungeons." And managing randomly-generated loot is more often busy-work than an investment in your character: there are too many item slots to scroll through, too many stats to fiddle with, and too many worthless drops that just waste your time.

At its core, Darksiders II is still mostly about going to a dungeon, doing some fighting and block-pushing and wall-running to get to a boss, obtaining a quest artifact and/or item upgrade, and gradually moving the story along. The story itself isn't interesting enough to push this process forward, but the gameplay is its own reward ... to a point.

To its credit, Darksiders II strikes a pretty fair balance between its varied mechanics; War's adventure was exhaustingly combat-heavy, while Death lets plenty of non-combat take the spotlight. So even though many of those mechanics aren't fully-baked - combat is still tedious, the loot doesn't change much, and puzzles are generally remedial - their sum total is good enough to keep the formula compelling.

The issues that get in the way of that formula tend to be more technical. Like, the combat camera: it swings around at exactly the wrong time, whether you're holding the target-lock button or not. Or button overloading: your gun and the hookshot Death Grip are on the same button, but the latter automatically overrides the former if a grab point is nearby -- well, sometimes it does that, and sometimes it doesn't, causing you to fall in lava.

The aiming controls for throwing and shooting are calibrated like an idiot, panning slowly for a microsecond and then accelerating so much that you're facing an entirely different direction. Advanced combat moves, that is, more advanced than mashing fast attacks and slow attacks, require holding the left bumper while target-lockon requires simultaneously holding the left trigger. (This is just poor use of the gamepad.)

Side-quests don't advertise their expected experience level, making some of them surprisingly trivial, and others shockingly impossible. The world map is baffling to navigate, as are all the other menu screens: you can't track multiple quest objectives at once, new items show whether they're "better" or "worse" than your current item but not how much better or worse, selecting an ability in the skill tree is ... unexpectedly difficult, and moving from one screen to another almost never uses the button I'd expect.

All of these issues are small by themselves, but they chip away at the gameplay experience bit by bit. To wit: there is a boss fight in the first third of the game, an epic-scale battle against a building-sized "Guardian," which involves step-by-step moves to counterattack and dismantle the big lug. It's an awesome and enthralling idea that's ruined by the camera leaving you unaware of impending fireballs and ground-pounds; by contextual controls not co-operating as you climb up the beast; and finally by the encounter design admitting its own shortcomings and turning the killing blow into a cutscene.

(At least I finally got to see the "Shadow of the Colossus with a chaingun" concept that Vigil first teased back in 2008.)

That huge disappointment of an encounter exemplified the whole game, to me. It could have been pretty good! It certainly had some great ideas, and adequate mechanics for executing on those ideas, despite a frequent sense of blandness. But those "highs" were weighed down by cascading failures in technical and usability design.

The game could have been pretty good, except for all the parts that weren't.

So wait, I've been talking about unpolished edges in Darksiders II, but how about its Deathinitive Edition? Well, I wouldn't know. I didn't buy the original game in the specific, correct way to get an automatic upgrade, and frankly asking me to re-purchase the game only three years later felt too much like a bait-and-switch.

That's why I've still got the version of the game whose servers were shut down years ago. Because of spite.

Better than: Darksiders: Warmastered Edition
Not as good as: well, unfair comparison, but God of War (2018) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I appreciate Darksiders III establishing a narrower, clearer focus: but since that focus is combat, I feel just fine skipping it.

Progress: Got to the Kingdom of the Dead.

Rating: Meh