I have a complicated history with Darksiders, I suppose. I always loved what the series tried to do in terms of their style, their world, their characters, their ideas. But there haven’t been a single game in the series so far that I could’ve easily recommended or fully liked. Original was often annoying for all its cool (if borrowed) ideas. Sequel was extremely long and got boring by the end, despite its really inventive take on mixing hack and slash with action RPG elements. Third one was… well, it was just bad, no way to dance around that. But Genesis is a slightly different beast. It’s less of a straight action adventure hack and slash and more of an isometric action RPG shooter. This change of perspective, a literal one, once helped Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light be the most fresh and fun take on the Tomb Raider series. Does a similar approach help Darksiders? It kinda does, actually.
To get this out of the way from the start, this game still feels very much like Darksiders on practice. If you’re playing as War, the game feels as if you’re simply playing a slightly changed original Darksiders, except now from a different perspective. You still hack and slash, still do the old God of War finishers, still dash, block and parry, still have the access to several recognizable special moves and special weapons. War does learn to run along walls just like Death, but only vertically and otherwise it’s the old double jumping and gliding again. The puzzles in general are recognizable as well – the exploding bomb seeds and breakable walls, timed buttons and levers or a simple “kill them all to progress”. And same goes for bosses and mini-bosses.
The game doesn’t completely change when you play as Strife either. He’s more about dodging and ranged combat, of course, but he can still melee if needed, has same general moves and behaves on the horse similarly. Interestingly, he’s actually slightly worse at continuous dodging, just like Death was, whereas War can just dodge-move infinitely with no limits or somersaults. So while you do think differently when playing as Strife, the game doesn’t change completely.
But there are some new additions and changes. There’s a way to upgrade your characters by grabbing “cores” of enemies, which drop randomly when you defeat them, in a way that is somewhat similar to the Dawn/Aria of Sorrow games, I suppose. It’s a pretty neat little thing that surprisingly never got annoying or grindy for me, even though these types of things tend to. The basic upgrades are more or less unchanged since the original game, though you never directly change or upgrade weapons, even if you do get new tools-weapons as you play, unique ones per character. What is very different is that for the first time the game is divided into separate levels that you access from the hub area that becomes available after the first level.
This change is, most likely, done for the sake of making the game coop compatible. I played the game solo, in which case you just switch between the characters whenever you want, but the game can be played in coop, in which case you take control of one of the characters and need to partner with someone else to perform some tasks in the game. The idea is neat and I bet that it’s pretty fun when it works. But I also heard that the game has a ton of issues when played in coop, which I find easy to believe since it has quite a few bugs in solo mode as well.
Apart from bugs, though, there are enough really weird decisions the developers have made that range from weird to just infuriating. A lot of optional collectible areas feature ridiculously tight platforming that would be super hard in a purely platforming game with mechanics and camera designed for that. But in this game with its perspective, some of those feel like the developers are just testing player patience intentionally. Same perspective also often gets in the way of exploration and action. You can randomly find yourself behind some object that limits your vision and while you get the outline of yourself and enemies, you have no idea what geometry is around you and where to move to. And the combat balancing is just bizarre – you can go from cakewalk to “character died” in a blink of an eye without any sort of visible reason for why this could happen.
This is all a real shame because the core is fantastic. The levels are really good, even if they are technically reusing the locales that we’ve seen in previous Darksiders games. The music is really-really good, probably on par if not better than the Jesper Kyd’s music for the second title. The character banter is fun, if predictable. And while the story is not particularly vital to where we are at in the Darksiders plot at this point, it’s not utterly stupid or completely pointless either. And actually feels far more interesting than what we got in Darksiders 3.
If this game was better polished, slightly better balanced and rethought some of its approaches to puzzles and platforming, I could’ve easily recommended it and possibly even called it the best in the series so far. As it is, however, it’s just a really good but also pretty flawed game. With some technical issues that haven’t been fully addressed yet and who knows if they will be. It’s enjoyable, it’s worth playing if you like the franchise. And worth checking out if it just looks curious but you haven’t played the series before. I just hope that whatever comes to the series next will be closer to this, than to what we got in 3.