Review: Darksiders: Genesis, by Airship Syndicate
by
Stuart Holland
This review was originally a series of tweets, which is why it is structured as it is.
Over Christmas, having reached my 60% #BackCatalog target (+ a little more), I decided I wanted to play a new game to celebrate!
What did I play? Darksiders: Genesis
I love the Darksiders series - it’s got great character and is always very satisfying to play. Darksiders: Genesis is isometric, where the others were third person, but it’s still a Darksiders game
And I have now 100%ed it! Genesis is honestly an awesome game in so many ways, but it’s unfortunately buggy too. It would be much better with those fixed, not necessarily with any actual functional changes
But I’ll come back to that! In Darksiders you play as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (one horseman per game so far, except Genesis, where you play as two of them switching back and forth)
It’s an interesting series that changes a lot. Darksiders 1 is quite like Zelda gameplay-wise (where you play as War). Whereas Darksiders II is much more loot-oriented, like a third-person-action-Borderlands (where you play as Death)
Darksiders III (my favorite) is a Souls-lite (lite, not like) (where you play as Fury)
Genesis plays like other isometric games most of the time (Diablo, etc), but it’s not focused on loot - it’s focused on combat and puzzle solving (where you play as Strife and War). So a return to the first title in a way!
I said I’m a fan of the series and the achievement percentages show it. TrueAchievements.com has a notion of “series”, which I score pretty well on for Darksiders
Genesis has fun and satisfying combat (when it’s working correctly). It has a sensible collectible system - you can revisit chapters and the game tracks which pieces you’re missing. Higher difficulties are challenging but not unfair.
Because I’m all about the audio barks, Genesis has some great ones.
War: “Mindless beast!” crushes monster’s head in gauntlet
The demons Samael and Vulgrim are always amazing
I’ve mentioned it’s buggy, so I’ll go into that, because it unfortunately hampers what would’ve been a much better experience.
You sometimes get snagged on tiny geometry, especially while dodging, which can be a particularly annoyance in combat
The in-game UI showing enemy health and execution options sometimes… disappears
Which means you don’t know how much health they have left or when you can execute them to finish them off (which is one of the most satisfying ways to fight!)
The execution windows are also… weird. Sometimes I press B to execute an enemy that does have the prompt and… nothing happens. And then they whack me in the face, because I’m not moving, expecting to be in the middle of an execution animation.
The biggest flaw though: it crashes. Like, just every now and then, all locks up for a few seconds then back to dashboard. If I were to guess, it’s presumably leaking, because it happens kinda randomly after you’ve been playing for a long time
That last issue was a problem for the final achievement, which I got today, where you had to defeat waves upon waves of enemies in the “Arena” challenge mode.
The health bar UI issues also become more prevalent the longer you remain in a single level
I’d gotten good enough at the game that actually winning the Arena was not difficult for me, but it takes time to finish and it crashed just short of the target on me twice, which took about 1.5 hours each time :(
All that said, I kept going back to Darksiders: Genesis because it’s fun. The actual minute-to-minute gameplay loop is awesome and the combat is so good most of the time.
I also love the fiction of it - the Four Horsemen are extremely powerful, they’ve been around for a long time, and they know it. You fight embodiments of sin, generals of hell, scions of heaven, vestiges of humanity. All the goods and evils that really earn their titles
Genesis is billed as a spin-off, so I’m hopeful there’s a Darksiders 4 in the works, either focusing on Strife or with all Four Horsemen!
Darksiders: Genesis
