Other than God of War earlier this year, Darksiders III (DS3) was the game I was most looking forward to. I had played through the first Darksiders twice (once at release way back in 2010, and again recently in the Warmastered Edition). And only hours before receiving my DS3 review code did I finish (and nearly 100%’d) DS2’s Deathinitive Edition. I greatly enjoyed both games, and rank them high in my all time list. So, I was understandably stoked when it was time to embark on DS3.
Upon entering DS3, I noticed the quality of the opening cutscenes was different, not necessarily a step-back, but different. Anyhow, War is chained up before the Charred Council, Death is nowhere to be found (neither Strife, who has yet to be a part of the series other than his legendary pistol), and newcomer Fury walks in to talk to the Council. She isn’t too friendly with War, though I came to realize throughout this roughly twenty hour adventure that her name speaks to her general attitude towards, well, about everyone and everything (disgruntled, selfish). Anyhow, the Council is seeking a restoration of balance, and currently the Seven Deadly Sins are running loose on a post-apocalyptic Earth. Fury accepts the task ahead of defeating the Sins to help restore balance. She’s cautioned by War that there is something amiss here, a greater trick being played — the same one that has brought him to trial before the council from events dating back to the original Darksiders. Fury dismisses this warning at first and the adventure begins.
With the opening cutscene over, I jumped into the game and was immediately taken aback by the visual quality, and I wish I meant that in a good way. DS3 is not a terrible-looking game, but it is highly underwhelming. I am playing this game on a TCL 6-series 4K HDR screen on a PS4 Pro, the very setup that I used only hours before to finish DS2. I can honestly say that the visual fidelity in terms of the ‘pop’ of colors was brighter and better on DS2 than in DS3. This difference is more so due to technical differences than art direction. As with the previous DS games, DS3 has a colorful palette — from Fury’s color-changing hair to the vegetation that has taken hold in former cities, to rivers of lava, there’s no shortage of sources of color in DS3, but their representation in the game is disappointing. The colors just don’t have that wow factor and pop that you would expect, instead, the level of detail of the environments and objects therein feel lackluster and largely drab. I had thought this was a full-bore 2018 AAA production, but the budget for this game and the size of the dev team must have been much less than I realized.
Still — DS3 does have plenty of impressive art design and direction. There are a lot of cool looking enemies and animations. I just don’t know why the presentation of these in a purely technical sense didn’ translate through. Worse still, there are some framerate hiccups as well as camera woes and clipping that only further taint the visual experience. As with other issues with the game, I’d like to think that at least some of this is patch-able. I’ll conclude this graphics discussion by saying that, as a fan of old school games, graphics quality is not a show-stopper for me — but I just expected much better out of DS3.
While on the topic of presentation, I’ll mention that the sound package is pretty good. At times, even Jesper Kyd’s score for DS2 seemed out of place or underwhelming, but for the most part, it was excellent. DS1 had very little soundtrack to speak of, and DS3 falls somewhere in between, I’d err on the side of lacking, though. Effects and voiceovers are good — the whipping sound of the Barbs of Scorn is great, enemy growls are good, etc.
Ok, presentation aside, the more important part: gameplay. DS3 maintains that third person action/adventure design of the previous two, but it adds in a great deal of influence from the Souls series. Personally, I’m not a fan of the Souls games — Lords of the Fallen was great, though — but I was surprised to see DS3 take a Souls-esque stance that comes in the form of frustrating difficult spikes and painful checkpointing. This was evident from the opening minutes of the game when you fight Envy — between fussing with traversal mechanics and camera frustrations, Envy can kill Fury quickly, something that can be said throughout the entire game for many, maybe most, enemies. When I first died, I assumed I’d be set comfortably right outside the ‘door’ to fighting Envy — nope, all the way back to start of the game, which, admittedly, wasn’t far but it was an unnecessary time-sink and annoyance that would come up many, many times in the game. Sessions where I had budgeted hours for turned into a fraction of the allotted (and desired) time simply because I was sick of the checkpoint system that required a time-sink effort just to get back to where I was to try something again (and again..). This is a part of old school game design that should be done away with; there is just no value in wasting clock with asinine design. Goes to say that, the checkpoints, rather than being sensitive and accommodating to player’s personal time, are now only provided at Vulgrim plinths (side note — Ulthane from DS1 returns as an NPC and to upgrade your weapons and weapon enhancements). These plinths are a welcome sight, always have been throughout the series, but they’re still not common enough that they should be the only source of check-pointing.
I should mention that the difficulty settings, and there are a few to choose from, include the default setting that I believe was called ‘Balanced,’ that had the description of being “challenging, but fair.” I honestly wouldn’t want to play an action/adventure game any other way than ‘challenging, but fair,’ with an emphasis on the ‘fair’ part. Much of the combat in DS3 is great and satisfying — her Barbs of Scorn, the edged whip that she carries by default, is a badass weapon. Wielding it and the other weapons you get by unlocking (through story play) and equipping new Hollows are also cool and highly usable. The trouble for me came in the form of punishing enemies that often swarm and how the player administers health. In what seems like a very gracious ability, Fury can use her Nephilm’s Respite to recover more than half of her health. This amulet is given to you at the start of the game, is soon upgraded to hold three uses, and is automatically refilled during combat. You can quickly switch to it by pressing down on the d-pad and administer to yourself by pressing up on the d-pad. There are numerous shards in the game as well, most that you’ll find in exploration, but you can also spend souls to buy them from Vulgrim, but note that souls in DS3 are also used as your only means to level up. You have to feed Vulgrim the souls (hold Triangle at a plinth) to level up, which nets you a skill point to be spent on Health, Strength, and Arcane. You tend to level up pretty quickly, I think I was a level 20 within about four or five hours for example, but the enemy difficult stays pretty well in-check, meaning that unless you’re revisiting old locations (a good idea as you can new traversal abilities from the Hollows), you’re typically going to stay right at or above that “comfortably challenging” level of combat. Regarding the shards — there are those that replenish Wrath, Fortification shards bolster defense, Havoc shards boost your Havoc meter (to turn into Havoc form, similar to Death’s form in DS2), and several others.
Using wrath for Wrath Attacks now requires a full bar of Wrath, by the way. Using any of these shards incurs what seems like an arbitrary cooldown timer that keeps you from using any other shards until the timer expires. Further, you have to use your Respite and shards “intentionally,” and by that I mean it’s a “move” that requires you to stop, crush a shard in your hand, and then will its effect kick-in. When you’re surrounded by enemies, or just facing one of the many tough, far-reaching and/or fast enemies, you’re bound to run into the situation of “I need to get some space so I can use this consumable” — and more often than I care to remember, that space was frustratingly hard to come by. I felt like my style of gameplay, and that of what I was used to from the previous games (granted, the newest of which is six years old), was changed for the worse — now I had to be super intentional as to when I was going to use a consumable and hope that I have enough time and space to do so. Fury is not as nimble as Death either, her evasion just isn’t as reliable as Death. Moreover, she can’t take as much damage as either he nor War, so that tends to contribute to the undo anxiety of trying to get space and time enough to heal up, lest you face a pretty long load time and being dumped back at the last checkpoint and having to run through a lot of unnecessary ‘stuff’ again. What further complicates this is battling the camera and the reduced usefulness of the L2 lock-on functionality. In previous DS games, you pressed L2 to lock onto an enemy and used the right stick to scroll between them if needed. This simply does not work as good as it used to, adding frustration. All that said, I am hopeful, even somewhat expectant, that Gunfire will patch this such that combat flow isn’t so arbitrarily stunted and is more freeform.
As with most anything, there is more than one way to view this gameplay design. It need not be tied to what made the first two games so great, and change can be good. There just seems to be some discrepancy in how it seems you’re supposed to play, and how maybe you should instead play, if that makes sense. Being a Darksiders game, wielding a barbed whip, it just seems like rapid, controlled-chaos is the way to go, but I reluctantly found that being more focused and studying enemy movements became key, more than in previous Darksiders games. The Undead Generals in DS2 required some carefully planned movements, especially when facing more than one at a time, but DS3 pushes that to a wider scope of enemies than I personally liked. I thought it also telling that, at many junctures, you enter into a new room or nexus, and not all that far away you can enemies statically positioned, waiting for you to walk into their detection range. Call me picky, but seeing “behind the glass” like this exposes a side of game development that greatly contributes to breaking immersion.
Overall, Darksiders 3 is a good game, and at times it’s very good. It’s just regrettable that it’s not better given the quality of the first two games and the long wait since DS2. Some of the issues can be patched, and may very well be in time; but at least for now, Darksiders 3 falls short of expectations.
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