THQ's armageddon-themed hack-'n-slasher returns, this time with Death as the lead horseman of the apocalypse
Although generally well reviewed, the original Darksiders was bludgeoned senseless with comparisons to God of War – as a result, it possibly never attracted the audience it deserved. Sure, like Sony Santa Monica's trilogy, it's a gigantic fantasy hack-'n-slash thrill ride with endless enormo-baddies and swords the size of transit vans. It has upgrades and war gadgets, and it has an apocalyptic world in which the gods have gone mad and just want to wreck everything like vast omniscient toddlers.
But Darksiders has quite a different feel to other generic hack-'em-ups; its vision of War, the apocalyptic horseman brought back after the end of the world to patch up a few cosmic issues, is confident and interesting, and its combat system is singularly engaging. It deserved a sequel - and now it's getting one.
Interestingly, however, this is not a straightforward continuation. Darksiders 2 takes place at roughly the same time as the original game, but this time centres on another horseman, Death, whose task is to figure out how the apocalypse was triggered. Instead of wandering though a shattered Earth, Death's story takes place in the underworld. "Since we're not on Earth anymore, we don't have a scenery filled with broken buildings, " says Jay Fitzloff, studio marketing manager at developer, Vigil Games. "It's much more of a fantasy based-game so there's no limit to what we can do". And just to illustrate this he shows me a demo of the game in which a vast citadel is being dragged through the skies by giant flying serpents. Yep, that's realism out the window.
Below it is Death astride his horse, despair. "In the first game, you didn't get your horse until about a third of the way through," says Fitzloff. "A lot of players were mad about that and we understand – I mean, you were a horseman of the apocalypse. So we give you the horse right away this time. And the game's bigger too, so you'll need it to explore."
In the level I see, Death has to get into a throne room to see the Lord of Bones, effectively the administrator of the afterlife ("seven billion people have just died, so he's pretty busy"). But in order to gain an audience, death must travel to a gladiatorial arena and bring back the head of the champion. It sounds a little like something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but what the heck, we'll go with it.
Once again, the game is a combo of puzzle-solving, exploration and combat, and again, at every stage, a new weapon or item is unlocked to introduce fresh slaughtering capabilities. One that Fitzloff shows me is a ghost hook that gouges into enemies and yanks them toward Death (although with larger foes, it'll pull Death toward them); it also lets you grab stuff that was inaccessible earlier in the game, like treasure chests tucked away on higher platforms. All very Metroid.
We walk through vast Cathedral-like buildings and brutal landscapes lined with dagger-like hills. We fight weird beetle enemies with giant iridescent wings. "Compared to War, Death is a lot faster in combat," explains Fitzloff. "His combat is quicker – if we explained them in terms of D&D classes, War would be a warrior, Death is more of a rogue. He can't block, he only dodges attacks."
A loot system has been added to the game. Most enemies will drop something when killed, the more powerful they are, the more valuable the item is likely to be. It'll be stuff like gold, armour, weapons and secondary weapons (of which there will be a far greater range this time round). There's also more of a story going on. "We joked that in the first game, War talked to three NPCs and he killed two of them," says Fitzloff. "This time we have more people to meet, there are side-quests and there are hub towns where you can sell extra items and buy upgrades. So in the last game, if you and I were four hours into the game our characters would look roughly the same. In Darksiders 2, there's no way. We'll have different equipment, different skills, we'll have gone in totally different directions."
Our demo ends with a boss fight against a towering bone giant, who'll actually remove his own head to use as a pummelling weapon against you. But that ghost hook provides a handy way to rip those bones from him. As a fan of the first title, this looked like another joyously unselfconscious dungeon stalker, with plenty of epic locales and a good eye for ridiculously histrionic monster fights.
On the subject of dungeons (we were never going to stray too far from them in this game), there will be more to explore, but they'll be smaller so gamers won't have as far to backtrack if they miss anything – a welcome alteration. Darksiders 2 won't be winning any awards for stark originality, but it clearly has a dedicated team that knows its universe inside out and understands what fans want from it.
I get the feeling that there will be plenty of crossover narrative moments between Death's story and what we saw happening in the first Darksiders. And I'm intrigued to see what the team at Vigil do with the other horsemen if this sequel is a success. I dread to think what special attacks Pestilence will inflict on his enemies.
Darksiders 2 is set for release on PC, PS3, Wii U and Xbox 360 in spring 2012
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/aug/30/darksiders-2-preview
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