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by Gutsby 04/25/2014, 11:47am PDT |
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I'll do this instead. Darksiders is a western attempt at Zelda ca. Image Comics. This means that you'll play through a bunch of levels with their own gimmick interlinked by an overworld. It's really long - way too long - but all of the things in it work a bit better than they should, so I was impressed enough to enjoy, but not finish it. It has a workmanlike sense of not being designed as a whole thing - the encounters aren't as good as they could be, the pacing is off, the various types of gameplay are too segmented and every single instance of them goes on just a little bit too long. I liked the idea of it it so much that I actually bought Darksiders 2 on release, hoping that it would have the spark that was missing from the original. It turned out to be a worse game despite fixing all the little mechanical problems in the first one - the actual problems that drove me from finishing the first one were amplified. This reminds me of something I wanted to say about Binary Domain - it has good encounters. It has a lot of superfluous shit, but there are a lot of well designed fights in that game.
Lords Of Shadow is a European God Of War. It's both gayer and less polished than its American counterpart, but contrary to Darksiders I was actually compelled to play this thing just because it sells the idea of a quest really well. You're constantly moving forward through gloomy forests and crypts and shit. Its entrepreneurial spirit makes it one of those games full of good and bad levels - I am happy to play these, because I think it's okay to try a few things in your game. It runs like a dream on PC, but if you're thinking about playing the console version you might as well drop it - an action-adventure game that consistently drops below 20 isn't worth playing. It is, like Darksiders, too fucking long.
These two games are ultimately flawed gems, both of them containing amazing art direction and a generous heaping of stuff to do and see, but not quite becoming real games. Look at some screenshots and let your sensibilities guide you - the alternative is playing both of them to see different continents attempting to recall what "action-adventure" means. I recommend Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger, Need for Speed: Rivals (it turned out it was an open world Outrun), and Harvester more than either of these games. |
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