The Dark Souls of Darksiders.
Darksiders always borrow their formula from other games, and in this case it's Dark Souls. I hate the souls games, but this one is fine, I had some trouble in a few sections but I never dipped below Normal on the difficulty settings. That said, it's got everything but the parry, deadly enemies, souls that can be used to improve your stats and are dropped upon death, etc.
While the new emphasis on combat was controversial, to say the least... I actually liked it. I loved fighting enemies, since your attacks feel so crunchy. I much prefer this to the more flowy combat of the previous two games, plus, the level cap is so high, combat always feels purposeful.
There are still some puzzle elements here and there, but it's nothing like the previous games, and platforming is nowhere near as prevalent as it used to be. Not to say there's any of it, as all four weapons come with their own traversal additions to Fury's abilities: Flame comes with a triple jump and the ability to walk on lava, Stone comes with the ability to walk while below water, break rocks and magnetically attach to walls, Water comes with the ability to freeze water, and lets you stand on water, as well as freeze certain objects and wall jumping, while Air allows Fury to glide and... yeah, that's all it gets you.
It's very Metroidvania in design, and it can also be a bit... vague on how to proceed, so the game expects you to back track and re-explore areas once you obtained a new weapon. I didn't mind, I love exploration, but there's that. Some bits are a bit... poorly designed, if anything. There's an area in which you must avoid a Tornado, but you might think you are doing something wrong since the timing is so precise and very little room for error when it comes to outrunning it. And not too long after that, the same tornado will push a block you need to place upon a switch, turns out you can actually freeze it with the Water weapon. There's not a single hint in the entire game that you can actually freeze the block in place, heck, hitting it with the weapon doesn't coat it in blue, unlike very other single object you can freeze, which is just baffling. Oh, and there were a few places in which the third jump wasn't as high as I needed it, so it felt as if I had to exploit environmental oversights, which was just weird.
Leaving aside those quirks, what kills this game is how broken it is. Many times the game just gives up loading parts of the environment, so your best bet is to quit the game entirely, thankfully, it saves upon exiting, but man if it isn't annoying. It's probably some sort of memory leak issue, because the game crashed quite a few times. And that's not to mention all the frame stuttering and micro-freezes it suffers from, and these CAN get in the way of combat, heck, most of the time you swap weapons it freezes for a second or so as it loads the new weapon. Oh, and the loading times are kinda lengthy, which is a kick in the pants when the point of the game is being hard, and sometimes they feel a bit too frequent.
The core of the game is fun, it's really fun, up to par with the previous two games I'd say, but in a very different way since it's quite different from both of them, sadly, the technical issues really get in the way of it reaching its full potential. Just another reminder of how terrible modern games have become.... and this game isn't even all that new, yet exhibits all the same technical issues new games do. Still, when the game works, it's really fun.
6.5
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