If one of your two playable characters “dies,” you’ll automatically switch to the other, with the dead character becoming available again after a short wait. When playing alone, you are able to switch between the two playable characters on the fly, with each having their own health bar and special meters. The two kill demons, and fight their way through rare and somewhat uninspiring puzzle platforming. Players have the option of playing as the original Darksiders protagonist War, or his brother, the new playable horseman Strife. That just about brings you up to speed, even if you’ve never played another Darksiders game before. To sum it all up: The devil is bad, you have to stop his plan, and the game may look like Diablo and its ilk, but it still plays like a third-person brawler with very simplified versions of Tomb Raider-style puzzles.
Lucifer seems to be plotting something down in hell, and has been making a series of deals with archdemons to consolidate power. This is still a game about hitting things with light and heavy attacks while occasionally platforming across heavily signposted climbable surfaces, running around in circles looking for a way to open a door, and then returning to beating things up.ĭarksiders Genesis’ story is pretty simple, and you don’t need to have played any of the previous games to make sense of it. You aren’t constantly collecting loot and leveling up your character.
While the shift in perspective does offer some slight changes to the flow of the game’s combat, Darksiders Genesis still fundamentally plays like a Darksiders game.
The trailers and screenshots deceived me, however. Genesis looked like it might have been a clone of Diablo that was skinned with Darksiders characters and lore.
Where previous Darksiders gamers were third-person action titles, the most immediately visible change present in Darksiders Genesis is the switch to a zoomed-out, three-quarter perspective, giving it the illusion of being a dungeon-crawling, loot-collecting hack-n’-slash game. The trailers for Darksiders Genesis made me think the game would take the series into a new genre.