Darksiders 3 Reviews | PC Gamer

Darksiders 3 feels special when you fight small groups of demons in the agile role of Fury (one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse). She is nimble and receptive when you tell her to avoid, and she sweeps her arms through flashy arches of elemental magic that send sparks dancing from one enemy to another. All this looks fantastic. But when faced with larger packages, the cumbersome camera makes fighting frustrating, and outside of combat, the platform and the puzzle are much too light. The last game of Darksiders has passed since six years, and it is far from the return that I hoped.

The Charred Council commissioned Fury to end the apocalypse by eliminating the seven deadly sins. To reach these bosses, you will travel in a semi-open world, fight your way through enemies, solve puzzles and browse platform sections.

The grunts are of an awesome variety: toxic chuck goo demon children, winged angels invoking clones and four-armed brutes are hiding behind steel shields. Their unique abilities combined with Fury's fragility (she will undergo three powerful strikes) mean you'll have to fight with caution, noting the types of attacks before diving.

I enjoyed this cumbersome approach facing four or fewer enemies. By pressing the left trigger, the camera is locked and you can switch from one target to the other by flicking the right stick to direct your keystrokes. Dodge like an enemy and trigger slow motion, setting up satisfying markers that you can combine, attacking with your default whip and one of four other weapons you'll capture at specific points in the story.

But when you fight multiple enemies, which is most often the case, the built-in camera does not play. The enemies at the back or on the sides often jump off the screen and hit you with one gesture, which is unfair. A white marker warns you that it will happen, but it's too difficult to keep track of those markers, enemies in front of you and distant rangers, and I felt constantly as if I was struggling with the lock-on focus on the right target.

The difficulty is therefore uneven: it suits small groups of powerful enemies, but it is frustrating to fight against larger groups of often weaker enemies. The difficulty of the boss is also discordant. Head-to-head battles, including late in the game, are too easy: learn the attack pattern, dodge at the right time and counter-strike. But when I fought bosses summoning henchmen, such as Sloth, a giant insect, I had the same camera problems as when I was dealing with large groups of grunts, which made them feel bad. l & # 39; ease.

The seven sins appeal to familiar tropes – underwater sea monsters, giant insects, a huge man armed in the fire – but they all have different quirks that keep them from feeling bored. Sloth, for example, sits on a throne carried by small insects, directing his army. Take off his health bar and he will jump out of his seat by swinging a giant club.

He is also wonderfully sarcastic and has a sharp tongue, more than one can say for most actors. I saw the abundance of coldness that had brought me to the first two games, but Darksiders 3 takes himself too seriously. The fury changes too much in the story and too suddenly to feel like a natural bow, which complicates care for the finale.

Outside of the fights, the platform games and puzzlement are disappointing. As in Darksiders 2, there is no wall that runs or climbs: you will swing a lot between well placed metal bars, which offers few challenges. The puzzles are not imaginative at first: I lost count of the number of times I had to point an insect towards a puddle of fire, watch it fill with flames and throw it on a spider's web to reveal a path.

The riddles are better in the last third, where you will have to quickly combine the powers that you recover during the story. In one of them, I used my strength to hit a beam in a circle, then stasing it to freeze it while it was perfectly positioned for me to be able to. 39, use as swivel anchor point. Barely taxing, but at least it made me think.

Environments also improve as the game progresses. During the first four hours, I was stuck in generic sewers to crush insects, but above the ground, it's very pretty. I've fought demons on a ruined highway, in underwater ruins and in a torn city in which giant trees snake through windows. The artistic style is classic, but it's bright and colorful.

I like the flexibility in the order in which you can deal with some of the seven deadly sins, too. Your compass tells you the closest, but you can go back and explore to find others. Unfortunately, the lack of loot – you will not find any weapons or armor – gives you little reason to search the environments. Lateral paths yield resources to upgrade your weapons, but you simply increase the damage and there are only a few unique enchantments to insert into the weapons, like the one that heals you when you inflict damage, which is not particularly interesting. .

With less loot to recover, a simplified platform and easy puzzles, Darksiders 3 relies more on his battles than previous games. And while Fury hits hard, the scruffy camera makes fighting more frustrating than it should be. This does not condemn Darksiders into oblivion, but it is the low light of the series so far.