Darksiders III Review In Progress
Due to time constraints, our full review isn’t ready just yet. We’ll be updating this page in the coming days with a full review with our final thoughts on the game.
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One
Developer: Gunfire Games
Release Date: November 27, 2018
Reviewed by: Matt Gregoire (@Matty_Gregoire)
Darksiders III’s protagonist Fury is the opposite of the game she inhabits. She’s brash, impulsive, and reckless, while Darksiders III is slow, methodical, and tight in its design and gameplay. Like its predecessors, it wears its inspirations on its sleeve, though it almost always feels more like a solidly executed homage than a derivative hodgepodge.
The post-apocalyptic world of Darksiders is as colorful and gorgeous as ever. From the desolate, overgrown streets of a ruined Earth, to the depths of the underworld aglow with lava, to the toxic and rusty Boneyard, there’s no shortage of visual variety on display. The series’ signature comic book art style is the best it’s ever looked here, taking on a whiff of realism that suits it nicely while staying firmly planted in the fantastical. A lot of work has been done on atmospheric and particle effects as well and when they combine with the stellar environmental art direction and expressive character animation, the game looks far beyond what its mid-tier origins would suggest.
Where the game shines most is its world and level design. While Darksiders and Darksiders II used overworlds connected to dungeons in the style of the 3D Zelda games, Darksiders III instead interconnects its entire world a la (I’m going to make the comparison) Dark Souls. Dense, tight areas weave in and out of each other in spatially logical ways that feel rewarding to discover, and every area comes with a huge amount of nooks and crannies to find. One route will take you deep into the earth, getting you completely lost and out of your comfort zone before popping you back to an area you saw hours ago. That area may have been tough the first time, or presented opportunities that hadn’t seemed obvious at the time, but revisiting them with new abilities leads to a number of “ah ha!” moments. Elemental abilities called hollows double as environmental puzzle solving tools and combat options, resulting in a slow revealing of layers as they are given to you and show their true potential. Darksiders II had a lot of fat that could have been cut; Darksiders III uses its space sparingly and efficiently, and to great effect.
Combat in Darksiders III has taken a step back to the original in terms of speed, but has found its own unique style. Rather than the fast, frantic combos of Death’s scythes, combat is made up of the careful, considered strokes of Fury’s whip in between acrobatic dodges. While fights in previous games were often brawls, here they are duels. Even large group fights become strategic exercises of positioning and crowd control. It’s tough, especially in the beginning, but once you grow into it it becomes satisfying to pop into a crowd, get a few hits in, somersault out, take out a large enforcer enemy, and then turn back to pick the grunts off one by one. However, the difficulty in combat can sometimes spike to an unreasonable level, resulting in a bit of frustration, but nothing that grinds the pace to a halt for too long. Additionally, the loot system of Darksiders II has been removed in favor of a focus on a the whip and a handful of subweapons, all of which can be upgraded by items found hidden or just lying around.
The plot of Darksiders has always been a fascinating web of angelic/demonic conspiracy with tons of potential. The end of the first game left fans yearning to see the Horsemen united, but Darksiders III follows the precedent set by Darksiders II of being a sequel taking place alongside the events of the first, showing another Horseman’s perspective of the premature Armageddon rather than following through on the cliffhanger. Fury’s quest to track down the escaped Seven Deadly Sins feels quite removed from both War and Death’s adventures in the first two games so far, though it feels like it’s holding its cards close to its chest in regards to how it will ultimately connect to its forebears. There’s some surprisingly clever writing here both in terms of lore and character, giving more depth to the world and giving Fury a personal story of self-discovery that I’ve began to see develop in the last hour or so, but it all mostly takes a backseat to the gameplay for the first few hours.
One of the true surprisingly standout parts of Darksiders II was its score, composed by Jesper Kyd. Its soft, often dreamy tone with occasional industrial-sounding percussion often lent a unique and otherworldly feel to the game. Here, composer Cris Valesco delivers largely forgettable pieces that try to evoke epic cinematic experiences, but end up fading into the background to the point where it sometimes feels like there’s no music at all.
In my time with Darksiders III, I’ve found a game that’s doing a whole lot with very little, a tight experience that does what it does well and doesn’t try to overextend itself. Some unsightly difficulty spikes and a bland score aside, it’s a solid package. The labyrinthine world, the colorful and unique visuals, the punchy and rewarding combat; Darksiders III is a strong return for the once dead series, and I can’t wait to see how its latter sections unfold.
Darksiders III was played on PC using a review code provided by THQ Nordic
