Darksiders

Darksiders has certainly been a long time coming. Those who have followed its development will remember it held a tentative release date of January this year, a time frame that has since been pushed well back, with Darksiders ushering in the year 2010 instead of 2009.

Our hands-on made clear that this extra development time wasn’t afforded solely to remove Darksiders from the shadow of more formidable Q4 titles, but also to ensure that the brutal pantomime of powerful demons, bloody combat and spectacularly violent finishing moves will meet expectation. The hack-and-slash gameplay doesn’t quite capture the same fluidity as Darksiders’ most obvious inspiration God Of War, but the overall feel of the game is unique despite the comparison.

It’s largely thanks to the involvement of Joe Madureira – affectionately known as Joe Mad to his friends – ex-Marvel Comics man and founder of the relatively young Vigil Games. Madureira’s influence on Darksiders is unmistakable – the character designs are satisfyingly chunky and sculpted, looking dynamic even when viewed static, and the Gothic environments drip with detail.

The game takes place 100 years after War – one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – has been tricked into prematurely bringing about the end of the world. Earth is now a mere shadow of its former self, with wrecked husks of cars and the skeletal remains of once-towering skyscrapers the only remnants of a civilisation now long dead. War’s back to get his vengeance, however, and find the demon that tricked him.

The setting is host to a Zelda/Metroid/Castlevania style of progression that combines exploration with adventure. Like Ocarina Of Time, dungeons are divided by an open hub world, and in typical Metroid style previously inaccessible areas will only open up once you’ve found a new item or power. For instance, you can only cross the deadly Ashlands once you’ve unlocked your steed, Ruin, and some areas cannot be traversed until you obtain wings that allow you to glide for short periods of time.

There are plenty of angelic and demonic forces to slice, shred and slaughter, achieved predominantly using War’s Chaos Eater, a blade that rivals Cloud Strife’s Buster Sword in terms of sheer size. There’s a plethora of combos and moves to learn and unlock, as well as contextual executions that will see War tear the arms from enemies before twisting their heads free of the socket.

War can also unlock a hefty hand cannon that can be used mid-air like Devil May Cry; a glaive similar to that in Dark Sector but able to adopt elemental properties à la Link’s boomerang; a grappling hook; and the Fracture Cannon, a huge weapon carried like the turrets in Halo 3 and able to fire explosive bolts like Gears Of War 2’s Torque Bow. Darksiders’ control setup is intuitive enough to allow you to swap between the melee, ranged, item and magical combat with ease.

It’s likely apparent by now that Darksiders shares similarities with many other games, and we haven’t even brought up the combat’s resemblance to that of Viking: Battle For Asgard or the Crackdown-esque ability to throw cars. There are glimmers of many games woven into the design of Darksiders, but even in a medium that constantly demands originality, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to enjoy something that takes existing concepts and splices them together in a way that feels new, as Dead Space so gracefully demonstrated last year. Just like The Matrix took its ideas from a broad palette of previous works but twisted them into something original, Darksiders distils a range of ideas from various games, evaporating some elements while retaining others, the result feeling effective rather than plagiaristic or clichéd.

For a first title from an untested studio, Darksiders is hugely ambitious, and being compared to such prestigious games as Zelda, Metroid and God Of War sets a high standard to say the least. Yet it also highlights just how diverse and impressive Darksiders’ gameplay already feels.