Darksiders wasn’t the game I expected it to be.

Admittedly, I didn’t pay too much attention to this game when it was originally making the press rounds.  I had initially dismissed it as another game featuring beefy dudes swinging swords and firing guns at other beefy dudes; a game that I had played numerous times before.  As the game neared release, however, I learned that the lion’s share of the writing and art had been helmed by Joe Madureira, who had written one of my favorite comics from my high school years, Battle Chasers.  A comic that featured….beefy dudes swinging swords and shooting guns at other beefy dudes.

What I expected was a straight up action game, and what I got was an adventure game with a lot of elements borrowed heavily from The Legend of Zelda.  This is not a bad thing.

Darksiders is nothing if not a game heavily vested in time-tested videogame tropes, and it opens with one right out of the gate.  The seventh seal has been broken, and the apocalypse is in full swing.  You, as War, one of the fabled horsemen of the apocalypse, have arrived to….well, clean house, I suppose.  It’s never really covered.  But that doesn’t matter!  You’ve got a big sword, and you’re here to kill things!  Tromping through the streets of some unnamed metropolis, War fights angels and demon alike, until, in another well-worn tradition, War’s powers are taken away.  Turns out someone tricked you, and the seventh seal was never broken.  In the depths of Hell, War bargains with the Powers That Be to be given a second chance to put things right, and get whoever actually started this whole Armageddon mess.  With “Chaoseater”, his ridiculously named sword, he sets out to kill the four robot masters and rescue Princess Zelda.

I kid, I kid.  While Darksiders does borrow very heavily from its videogame brethren, it does do enough to keep itself original so that the game feels fresh.  Much like other games in the genre, the game follows a linear progression through an open world.  As you visit each dungeon, you acquire a new piece of “gear”, which will open up methods of travel previously unavailable to you, such as a hookshot to cross chasms, and a big iron glove to smash ice walls.  Eventually you also unlock what are effectively warp tunnels and reclaim Ruin, your old horse, both of which serve to help you get around the map faster.

The interesting thing about all of these upgrades is that almost all of the “travel upgrades” come in the form of dual-purposed weapons, so any new tool that you can use to cross a chasm or shatter an ice wall can also be used to shatter an enemy’s face.  It’s nice that I’m not toting a giant bag of gadgets around, only to pull them out in the specific spots that I need them. For example, the grappling hook can be used to cross chasms, and in addition can be used to grapple yourself onto larger enemies, or reel smaller enemies into combat range.  Ruin himself is also a lot of fun, in that being on horseback raises War’s attack power, so much so that once you can ride, you’re almost disappointed when you get to a point where you have to stop.

My only complaint about the game’s progression is that after what feels like the climactic battle of the game, against the giant enemy that started this mess in the first place, the “actual ending” almost feels like an afterthought.  You find out, of course, that larger powers are at work, and you set off to once again right wrongs by beating the wrongs’ faces in.  This segment of the game, however, feels like more of an arbitrary fetch quest (you have to run around the map and assemble all the pieces of the grand sword of game-ending), and then go fight the real final boss of the game, who is the easiest boss fight this side of Bowser.  Sorry, King Koopa, I love you and all, but you’re kindof a pushover, and you know it.

Graphically, the game is also quite impressive. Madureira’s influence here is immediately noticeable, and the characters all look like something straight off the pages of one of his comics.  Given the amount of detail given to the characters, it would be easy to expect the environments to fall by the wayside.  However, Madureira exerts his influence here as well, with grand, sweeping landscapes and towering buildings that at once look realistic and fanciful.  Hell has taken over here, and there’s not a part of the landscape that isn’t affected by it.  Giant vines sprout through the ruins of office buildings, and deserts place themselves in the middle of urban landscapes.  While it would be easy to find the transition between areas jarring, the developers had taken great care to make the transitions feel very natural.

One of the areas in which the game really shines is in its sound design.  Through the course of the game, you run the gamut of environments, from verdant fields, to a sandblasted desert, to a windswept shadow realm, to towering castles and deep caverns.  Throughout all of these, the environmental sound places you right in the middle of the environment, sitting right there on War’s shoulder.  Normally environmental sound isn’t something I would pay attention to, but given the rapidly shifting environs, the subtle changes in the way in which the clangs of weapons and the echoes of incidental noises is very noticeable and commendable. Voice acting is also very well done, with the inimitable Mark Hamill lending his voice to The Watcher, War’s erstwhile companion.  The music is the only part of the production that I found a little lacking, and I think that’s only because the other parts were done so well.  You have brilliant incidental sound, a stunning visual environment to play in, all scored by “generic fantasy soundtrack #3″.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get through this review without mentioning several of the games bugs.  When playing through the game, I noticed a couple minor glitches, and one major glitch, a glitch big enough that the fact it got through QA is mind-boggling.  In one of the first dungeons, you need to go through several puzzles and then get a key item that will allow you to proceed.  However, when I walked back out of the room, the key item disappeared from my back.  At first I thought this was an additional part of the puzzle, but it turned out to be a problem with the game itself.  When I went back to get the item again, the game thought I still had it, and so I was unable to grab it again.  Given that the game had auto-saved this way, I was completely stuck, and had to start the game over.  Fortunately, it was near the start of the game – believe me, fair reader, if it had been later on, you would not be reading this review, as I would’ve taken my copy of the game and hurled it out onto the street.

All in all, Darksiders is a good game, and a welcome edition to the genre.  With a main campaign of roughly 11 hours’ length, and a hoard of treasure to find giving it lots of replay value, I can definitely recommend a purchase.  For those of you looking for something completely new and innovative, you may want to hold off and wait for the price to go down a bit, but if you’re looking for a solid adventure game, you could do a lot worse.  THQ has what looks like the start of a new lasting franchise on its hands, so you may as well get in on the ground floor.