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Darksiders 3 has a crisis of identity. On the one hand, the stylish and action-packed combos at your disposal suggest a game with combat encounters reminiscent of the kinetic action of Devil May Cry. Yet, your fragility and the difficult challenges your enemies present actively discourage you from learning to fight in combat, preferring a more methodical approach emphasizing tact and escape. The Darksiders series has always worn its inspirations on its sleeves, but at least there was a sense of concentration and consistent design ubiquitous in all its moving parts. These first two games may have been derived, but they took concepts and built them in a fun and engaging way to enhance their strengths. Darksiders 3 is the antithesis of this approach: it feels confused and fuzzy, with an uneven conception that reverberates and negatively affects each of its disparate systems.
After War and Death had fun in the predecessors of Darksiders 3, it is now Fury's turn, still angry, to take the reins of the third rider of the apocalypse. Fury uses a blade whip known as the Barbs of Scorn, which offers both a decent range and a satisfying return to fleshy success once you are up close and personal facing the face of a demonic entity. Throughout the game, you'll get Hollows that will provide unique secondary weapons – such as a heavy mallet and quick-fire chains – and will allow you to optimize your crossing options with different elemental effects. The combinations are relatively easy to execute, with a button dedicated to primary attacks and another one to the above-mentioned secondary strikes. Button beating is enough to get through most games, but the combination of slight delays between button presses will allow you to make aerial combos and other similar style moves. This is certainly part of a flamboyant action game, but these flashy combos are only really possible against weaker enemies.
Darksiders 3's clearly inspires Dark Souls. Fury's weak survivability forces you to tackle the fight in such a way as to hide his exuberant combos. The enemies are fast and hard hit, and find themselves regularly in groups. Without a stamina counter itself, the focus is on dodging and maintaining the danger that deviates from the strict use of energy management by Dark Souls . Each perfectly synchronized dodge is rewarded with slow slow motion and the ability to counter with a powerful arcane attack. Most battles are based on Fury's ability to move away from saber slaps and voracious claws. There is also a wide variety of types of enemies; read their attack patterns and know when to escape is paramount to defeating almost all enemies that you can not ban with a single combo.
All of this sounds good on paper and, taken literally, there is nothing wrong with taking a more thoughtful approach to combat. But Darksiders 3 never bows enough in this method and the vivid frustrations of his flashy counterpoint regularly cause frustration, because there seems to be a split between wanting two very different types of game.
You can have air jugglers and various chains of deadly movements at your disposal, but you often have to settle for safe combos, because anything else will leave you open to a devastating attack. Then there is the way you stick to the enemies. This remained relatively unchanged from Darksiders 2, opting for a 3D targeting system similar to that used in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This has been clearly designed with head-to-head fights and certainly does not match such a difficult game. Darksiders 3, there are undoubtedly formidable enemies, but the real difficulty comes from facing more than one enemy at a time rather than a singular threat. It works in two ways: groups of enemies are inherently more difficult because of their numbers, and the cumbersome locking and awful camera make these fights much more difficult than they would otherwise be. The camera tends to block your view with nearby walls and objects, which is exacerbated only by the claustrophobic environments that dominate most of the game. Dying because you can not see, or because change of target is too complex, are constant trouble. Not to mention the number of times you are hit by off-screen attacks. There is an indicator of incoming attacks, but it is extremely difficult to discern at the heart of the action and no such warning exists for projectiles.
Dying because you can not see, or because changing target is too complex, are constant trouble. Not to mention the number of times you are hit by off-screen attacks.
Darksiders 3 also removes much of the RPG elements from its immediate predecessor. Killing enemies rewards you with souls that can also be found in the game world in clusters of consumables. Whenever you reach a checkpoint, you can trade it against a demonic merchant to enhance three attributes: health, strength, and arcane. It is a very simplistic progression system, and although you can lose souls by dying and then you have to recover them again, the threat of losing them and losing them all will never cause you tension because you can put souls in reserve even if you do not have enough souls. higher level.
Weapons can be upgraded to increase their damage, and upgrades will increase your arsenal with upgrades that could make you 4% health every successful hit or add more frames of invincibility to your dodge. But there is no individuality here, and fights never change because you only increase your damage. It does not take long before the rehearsal is installed.
It's a problem when the fight encompasses everything. Some rudimentary puzzles are scattered everywhere, but they are rare and usually involve hitting a big jellyfish creature so you can use your head to reach higher platforms, move blocks and use explosive bugs to access different places. None of this is particularly interesting, and this also applies to the rare cases of platforms. Grasp the edges is way too capricious, and Darksiders 3 lacks a consistent visual language that makes some sections of the platform more complicated than they should be.
The apocalyptic desert of Earth is just not as interesting to travel. The interconnected world consists of dilapidated office buildings, grubby metros and flooded industrial areas. Each of these areas is wrapped in soft colors dominated by beige and gray, just a few areas away from this bland design. Your quest might be to hunt down and kill The Seven Deadly Sins, but the environments in which you find yourself rarely reflect the diversity of their personalities, which looks like a wasted opportunity. Laziness is a big grotesque insect. So it makes sense that you find cascading eggs around the walls of his subway hangout and that you face arachnids and creatures on all fours. Yet, oddly enough, gluttony – a vulgar creature resembling a plant with several mouths – also resides in a covered subway of eggs and insectoids to fight.
Verticality plays an important role in these environments, but the scale is not obvious when you are regularly confined to narrow corridors in subways and caves. It's a shame too, because if Joe Madueria has retained his comic cartoon style, even in the excellent character designs, even if he is not directly involved in Darksiders 3, the scenery of these larger-than-life beings is this generic and tasteless world. And although the visual department is disappointing, Darksiders 3 is still plagued by framerate issues, even on PS4 Pro, which add to crashes, sound problems and other technical concerns.
There are other things to note, like how the game's length is supplemented by the exclusion of a vague map of the game that makes quick moves unnecessary since you never know exactly where you go, or the counter-intuitive way Killing the enemy is the best option for restoring your healing items. But to say more at this point is simply too discouraging. Darksiders 3 retrograde on its predecessors with a fuzzy approach that constantly strikes itself. There are vestiges of a good game here, buried in the perennial combinations of a fighting style that this game does not want to embrace. Unfortunately, it is buried far too deep to be saved.
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