Have you ever played a game and realized that it was actually the mechanics from several other games stitched together to make a new game? Well that’s kind of what Darksiders is. It takes mechanics from games like God of War and Legend of Zelda, but it stitches these mechanics together amazingly well.
Darksiders: Warmastered Edition is a remaster of the 2010 original. Developed by Vigil games and published by THQ Nordic, Darksiders: Warmastered was released on Xbox One and PS4 on November 22, 2016, on PC on November 29, 2016, and on Wii U on May 23, 2017.
Darksiders is an action-adventure game where you play as one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War. You answer the call of the apocalypse, but find that you have been wrongfully summoned and framed for causing the end of the world. After a century, you are sent back to find the one responsible for the end of the world on the behest of the ones you serve, the Council.
To ensure your loyalty to the Council, they attach a demon, the Watcher, to you. As soon as you hear the Watcher’s voice, I’m sure you’ll recognize it as the fantastic voice acting of Mark Hamill seeing as how his voice is almost identical to Hamill’s Joker.
Let's start with the basics, War’s health and wrath. War has a standard health bar, but above there are things called life cores. It’s kind of like a boss where you empty one health bar to reveal they have another one underneath. Along with War’s large pool of health, he has wrath cores which allow him to use special powers in combat.
The combat is very reminiscent of God of War. It’s very hack n’ slash with a focus on combo moves. You can chain together your three weapons along with abilities such as Blade Geyser and Stone Skin, which consume wrath when used. Similarities can also be drawn to Zelda’s combat mechanics with a sort of z-targeting.
Along with your wrath powers, War has his Chaos Form where he transforms into a giant dragon and dolls out massive damage, but it doesn’t last very long. It feels like you only get to swing your massive fire sword for only a few seconds.
Also similar to God of War, there or some enemies that you can grapple and kill instantly with an animation that you’re sure to see hundreds of times because there are plenty of these enemies.
And if you can’t just instantly kill them, all you have to do is beat them up enough until the prompt appears over their head. Hit the button and you’ll be cleaving demons legs off and smashing skeletons into dust in no time.
There are three main weapons to acquire as you play. War’s sword that’s larger than War himself. Then there’s Harvester, a scythe belonging to War’s brother Death. Lastly, there are the Tremor Gauntlets that can shatter any obstacle, be it a barrier or an enemy.
All three of the weapons can level up with use, granting them greater damage and increased wrath generation. Each weapon can level up four times, but when it will level up is kind of vague. The only indication you get of when it’s gonna happen is a progress bar that doesn’t tell you the number of kills needed or anything.
Also, in your travels, you can get runes which you can put into your weapon to add a bonus like always gaining currency from destroying furniture or causing fire damage along with the damage you would normally do.
The one comparison that can’t really be made to God of War and some other hack n’ slashers is the amount of gore. The is a fair amount of blood, but not really any viscera. But because of the amount of blood and the aesthetic of the game, it’s almost cartoonish.
Now, outside of combat, the game becomes more like Legend of Zelda or a Metroidvania. There’s puzzle solving that occasionally requires a recently obtained gadget or ability. There is also backtracking to previous areas because you now have things that can unlock areas that used to be impossible to get to.
I do have an issue with some bits of the game where you are blocked from going into an area, so you must do a certain number of arbitrary tasks to unlock it and find that in the area you just unlocked there is another set of arbitrary tasks.
Also along the lines of Zelda, there are chests hidden throughout the world that hold things like shards of life and wrath cores. If you collect four, you will gain another core. There are also chests that hold pieces of the abyssal armor. If you collect all 10, then you will gain the abyssal armor which makes you nigh invincible.
If you play this on PC like I did, then I would recommend you either use a controller or rebind the keys, because the way that the hot menu for combat abilities are bound make it difficult to seamlessly integrate into combat.
Even with the couple of small issues this game has, it was quite fun and would recommend it to anyone looking for something like God of War or Legend of Zelda.
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