Darksiders II (2012)

Darksiders II expands on the original with a bigger world, deeper RPG mechanics, and faster-paced combat. The MC now is Death, one of the Four Horsemen, in a quest to clear War's name and restore balance. The game blends Hack'n Slash action with dungeon crawling and loot collection, evoking comparisons to Zelda, Diablo, and Prince of Persia. And the comparisons are respectfully earned, since all the gaming industry, and the community, praised this entry as one that has the same level of quality as the franchises in which it was inspired by.

While some aspects feel bloated or repetitive, the stylish art direction, varied environments, and fluid traversal make it a memorable ride. It’s an ambitious sequel that mostly delivers, especially for fans of action-adventure hybrids. You can easily spend a very high amount of hours playing this game to unlock everything and explore every bit, similar to something like the Ocarina of Time, I really enjoyed to waste way more time than I expected, and I highly recommend enjoying this one slowly and patiently since it is very rewarding. A must-play for any Hack'n Slash and/or exploration adventure fans.

Combat deserves special mention, the MC's agility gives fights a much more kinetic feel than in the first game. Dual scythes, secondary weapons, and a flexible skill tree allow you to tailor your playstyle, whether you prefer fast combos, crowd control, or necromancer-style summons. The bosses are visually striking and mechanically varied, even if not all of them reach the same level of challenge. The OST and narrative elevate the experience, being balanced between epic scale and melancholic atmosphere.

The game's music complements the lonely journey of Death perfectly, reinforcing the sense of a vast, broken universe held together by fragile balance. While the story doesn’t reinvent fantasy storytelling, it’s engaging enough to carry the long runtime and gives meaningful context to your actions. Overall, this title may stumble under the weight of its own ambition at times, but its heart, style, and sense of adventure make it stand out as one of the stronger action-adventure RPGs of its generation.

I'm impressed by how much Vigil Games changed between the first and second Darksiders. Instead of delivering more of the same, Darksiders II boasts a completely new protagonist, an RPG-esque upgrade and equipment system, a more open world to explore and a greater focus on platforming.

I enjoyed it... but not as much as the first game.

My favorite change is the balance of gameplay elements: I'll take platforming and puzzles over waves of enemies any day of the week. The combat that's here (and there's still plenty) felt a lot less tedious, possibly because I could tweak Death's build to suit my play style. And the smaller, more numerous dungeons made for a surprisingly solid handheld experience on Steam Deck.

But as a whole, Darksiders II overstays its welcome. Open worlds are larger, but time-consuming to traverse and sparsely populated. Quests generally consist of finding the three MacGuffins to unlock the MacGuffin that reveals the location of two MacGuffins which you'll need to recover the blah blah blah, yada yada yada. The dungeons began to blur together after a while, disincentivizing the Metroid-style backtracking for collectibles since I couldn't remember which was which. I even grew desensitized to the reward of unlocking new gear since it happens nearly every encounter.

It doesn't help that Death is kind of a smug, obnoxious character, with a story that's literally incidental to War's, confined mostly to more predictable fantasy settings over the original's post-apocalyptic (yet comparatively colorful) Earth.

Don't get me wrong, Darksiders II is a fine game. The platforming, puzzles and Joe Mad art held my interest throughout. I just can't shake a sense of disappointment that a game twice the length of its predecessor feels diminished by comparison.

If you want to walk away from this game with a good opinion of it then you're best off playing to the end of the Forge Lands and then never touching it again. The fight against the giant guardian was so unbelievably cool and it's almost insulting that your reward for getting through it is the chance to slog through the most absurdly long amount of non-content I've ever seen in a singleplayer game. I've never even finished this because I ended up getting stuck on that giant plant Cthulhu thing and I really didn't feel like trying to power through it. The dungeons just get longer and worse as the game goes on and by the end I wasn't exactly looking forward to what ever might have been on the other side of that boss fight.

Also this isn't like a significant contributing factor to my opinion of the game or anything but I'm not really a fan of that Xbox 360-era pseudo-cartoony artstyle that makes everyone's skin look like it's made from raw meat. I guess that saturated look was probably a relief to the people first playing this game in 2012 when the market was dominated by drab, filthy-looking military shooters, but god damn it's not exactly easy on the eyes.

Intro

DS2 is a third-person action game with platforming and puzzle elements. You walk/climb/jump along a pre-determined path, killing enemies and solving simple puzzles (i'm terrible at puzzles and i did fine).

The Good

• Nice environments.
• Combat is alright.
• You can be a sort of necromancer.
• In open areas pressing C instantly makes you ride a horse.
• If you die you just get reset.

The Bad

• Controls are kinda weird on PC. You aim with Q but then attack with MMB?
• I hate the cartoony giant rubber armor WOW style.
• IMO too much platforming/puzzling in relation to combat.
• Nothing is particularly interesting (items, skills, enemies).
• Really lame worldbuilding with lazy bible/fantasy stuff.
• Super-duper linear.

Conclusion

I really didn't care for DS1 but this was mildly amusing for about 2 hours. If this was an open world game instead of a linear one with tight corridors i might've actually enjoyed it.

5/10

About halfway through playing Darksiders II I went from playing every day to playing only once or twice a week (not because of the game, mind you), which may have contributed to my sense that the game was starting to drag. Regardless, my main problem with DII is the same problem I have with every Legend of Zelda game: it just starts to feel a little tedious. And while DII doesn't have quite the momentum problem that I game like Majora's Mask has, it also doesn't have nearly as compelling a story. The overall arc could have been interesting, but I couldn't be bothered to give a crap about most of the individual quests. All of your time in the main storyline is spent just doing favors for people, and not actually engaging with the plot of the game. If you were to list the actions that Death takes that directly affect the main plot of the game, it's a short list. Like, really short. There's two items on it. One happens right at the beginning, the other happens right at the end. Everything in between is essentially busywork.

The world, too, is almost interesting—with a bigger budget and modern art graphics (well, or just the people who worked on Dragon Age: Inquisition, released the same year) it could have been great, but as it is the design more implies cool stuff than actually shows it off.

The combat, too, is almost interesting. There's a pretty wide weapon variety, and that would be cool if there was every any reason not to use the giant hammers that do 2-3 times as much damage as any other weapons in the game, and you can find one pretty early on that's so good that I used it for about half the game or more. DIII sort of has a similar problem, in that every time you get a new weapon type it's better than the previous one, but at least you spend some time with each, and there is some worth to switching weapons for different enemy types.

The big strength of the game is the puzzle-solving, and this too comes from its LoZ inspiration. With a surprising amount of mechanical variation (you can tell the mechanics came first and the story followed after) and not a lot of handholding, there were a fair number of puzzles in here that made feel pretty clever when I finally solved them, and a solid handful that had me scratching my clearly not clever head. And I liked that each dungeon had its own character, a thing that some modern games forget to do (heck, even Horizon: Zero Dawn, which I love wholeheartedly, could've stood to give its Cauldrons more individualized designs).

I think I probably would have liked this game more if I'd played it when it came out. But the length, the almost-interestingness, not to mention the janky platforming, the numerous (and occasionally game-breaking) bugs, the sections where it randomly turns into a third-person shooter (and not a very good one), and the fact that they randomly cap your level at 22 without telling you—it just doesn't quite hold up as well as it should.

At least my horse didn't get brutally murdered in front of me, though. That was a plus.

Darksiders II is a highly entertaining platformer masquerading as an action RPG. The platforming and puzzles are super fun and you have a real sense of play as you swing, climb and wall-walk all over its world. You slowly gain new movement abilities that let you solve puzzles in a way and battle wacky bosses. The controls are smooth and feel very intuitive. Same with the camera movements. It really does remind me of the 3D Mario games.

The RPG-lite elements are, well, light. You have points to allocate to your "skills", which are all basically combat spells. You can pick your weapons & armor. And you get more powerful as the game progresses, but there are very few places where you can wander into an area with over-powered enemies (and most of those are side quest bosses) so leveling up doesn't really change gameplay that much.

A downside, or maybe upside, it's definitely some kind of side, is the art & story of the game. It's a sharp looking game, to be sure, but the character designs all look like they were done by a horny teen who was really into 90s Image comics characters and was scribbling them in his notebook during Trigonometry. The plot, such as it is, also sounds made up by a teen. You're literally Death and you're fighting Corruption and other generically named things like The Guardian and The Lord of Bones. It's so dumb it's good.