Here’s the weird thing about the Darksiders series; the very first game spanned the entirety of the console story. There is a 100-year gap between the introduction and the game proper, when War is released to embark on his mission to… do the thing… that he needed to do. The sequels, Darksiders II, and Darksiders III, take place during the 100 years that War is imprisoned and follow Death and Fury respectively. As such, they don’t actually end with a conclusion, as the over-arching story ends with War in the first Darksiders game.
Confused? Don’t feel bad, I’ve played all three games and I still don’t know what the fuck is going on. I’ve even watched a 45-minute video explaining the story and I am still lost. There are just too many biblical angel names to keep track of.
But if Darksiders has taught me anything, it’s that I’m a sucker for adventure ARPG’s with shitty stories that last far, far longer than they should. I’m a glutton (see what I did there) for punishment.
So, Darksiders III, as far as my tiny brain can tell, follows the story of Fury as she hunts down and kills the Seven Deadly Sins. Along the way, she meets people and does things, and the story unfolds in the manner that it does. That’s all the explanation you’ll get from me, because like I said, I’m clueless.
The gameplay this time around was re-designed to be more of a Souls-type game (i.e. hard as shit). Those kinds of games, though intriguing, have decidedly not been my cup of tea. Apparently I’m not the only one, as by the time I came around to the game (thank you Game Pass) it had already been patched to have a play style that was closer to the first two. That being said, the game still handed me my ass repeatedly.
Fury dies easily. Really, really easily. There is no upgrading her armor, only her health, which is a tough call considering that skill point can also be used to make her attacks stronger. Thankfully the game isn’t too stingy with its skill points, and exploring and grinding is rewarded by finding clusters of souls and upgrade materials, which means my OCD came in handy. Even still, a shitty low-grade demon can still do significant damage if you get careless, so if you’re dying a lot, the only answer is to get good.
And got good, I did. Good enough to finish it on normal difficulty, anyway. I don’t have the reflexes that I used to, but I managed. It just made me really, really angry.
The bosses are beatable, and have patterns and attacks that are telegraphed and identifiable, but they do a ton of damage, and you’ll die a time or two before you get it down. And that’s nothing new to video games. I can handle that. What I can’t handle is dying about 15 times. A lot of that just comes from me getting older and slower, but holy shit the game can be downright cheap at times.
Fury can dodge, but she can’t block, and the camera can be so close sometimes that it’s hard to see what’s behind her. One or two enemies at a time is usually fine, but encountering a group of them can get real frustrating, real fast.
The graphics are nice, and they fit the Darksiders look consistently, but the map is all kinds of fucked. Or at least, it would be if there was a map. This was one of my major gripes with the game. The various zones and biomes are inter-connected, and can be fast-traveled via Serpent Holes. This is fine, but there are many, many instances where you’ll come across an obstacle that you cannot overcome (yet), and you’ll make a mental note to come back here, but the problem is that the requisite items may be hours away from acquiring. This might not be a big deal if you’re powering through the game from start to finish, but if you’re playing it a little bit at a time over the span of months like I was, it’s not only tricky to remember where you were going, but trying to remember where things were can be practically impossible. I would have been more than happy to re-visit zones that still held secrets, but there was literally nothing in the game to tell me which zones still had secrets, and using the Serpent Holes to teleport into the middle of a zone makes it really hard to know if you’re going forward or backward.
Upon finishing the game, I’m treated to a similar non-ending like what Darksiders II gave us, and I can’t help but feel like the developers are holding out on us, teasing us on something that may never actually happen. Did they intend to have a fourth Darksiders game? Even the first Darksiders game, which essentially had a conclusion, still ends on a tenuous “to be continued” as War looks off to the horizon and the other three horsemen are seen rocketing toward Earth like meteors.
Darksiders Genesis has since released and it is, by all intents and purposes, a prequel/side story, so who knows if we’ll ever get the conclusion that the first Darksiders teased a decade ago.
It will be interesting to see if THQ Nordic has any intentions on wrapping this up in a neat little bow or if they’re just gonna leave us all hangin’.
