War is... free? Let's dive into this prequel of the Darksiders trilogy!
Darksiders Genesis is a hybrid game that merges together hack&slash with shooter elements, with an isometric view. The game was developed by Airship Syndicate and published by THQ Nordic. In this prequel we'll manage the War+Conflict team, trying to stop Lucifer's evil plans.
Graphics
The graphics are well made and the models are well done, so much that I'm asking myself if the isometric view was used just to make Conflict's gameplay easier.
Setup e prestazioni
Installing the game via Steam is fast and easy, performance is good but you can notice some seemingly random frame drops at higher resolutions .
Sound
Sound is excellent, even though sometimes the dubbing of certain characters can be unintelligible due to either "demonic" sound distortions or simply due to a bit of a lackluster mixing.
Gameplay
This game could have been fantastic, but due to platforming, isometric camera and collision detection bugs with some terrains, anger can take the best of you: Leviathan's Landing (luckily it's not mandatory) is a black hole that will absorb all your will to play from your body.
The game has solid characters, as well as solid fighting controls, although I hated Conflict's "Aether Spark" ability (come on, it's just a puzzle with a rolling ball!) which comes out as frustrating yet again.
Conflict is as sharp-tongued as Spider-Man and sees some good development during the course of the story, fighting is satisfying, the story is good and flows well, abilities are well differentiated... Sadly there are some big issues that will weigh on the final judgement.
Conclusions
It is a supreme source of anger seeing a game with so much potential in a game being ruined by few elements that come out as frustrating and uncared for.
Un behind-the-shoulder view like the other games in the series, a better care for testing and replacing "Aether Spark" with something better would have helped the game greatly, so much so that it would have easily become my second "favourite of the series". Instead it places at the same spot of the first game, with the exact same score: 75/100 .
If you want to see the other reviews in the series, I'll leave them below:
- Link to Darksiders: Warmastered Edition's Review
- Link to Darksiders 2: Deathinitive Edition's Review
- Link to Darksiders 3's Review
Thank you everyone for reading, see you in the next post!
Penaz.