Darksiders III

In the Darksiders series, you play as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The first game you play as War, the second Death, and the third Fury. The Horsemen serve The Charred Council who aim to bring balance between the warring factions of Heaven and Hell, with Humanity caught in between.

Fury is tasked in finding and defeating the Seven Deadly Sins with a “Watcher” accompanying her on her quest. It's not that important to have played the previous games, although the story does tie in.

As her name suggests, Fury has a fiery personality, very belligerent. She is quite a refreshing change from the standard protagonists. Initially, she doesn't seem a nice person, and has a dislike for Humanity. But she does have a personality ark, so develops as the story progresses.

The first game was strongly influenced by The Legend Of Zelda, the second game focussed a bit more on combat and platforming, and now the third takes strong influence from the Dark Souls series.

The puzzles have been stripped back, and the difficulty ramped up. Now, enemies can often take you down in a few hits, so you have to learn enemies attack patterns and be much more cautious. Sometimes the game can feel a bit unfair, but in other moments it is very fun.

The problem with the combat is that the camera can often feel a bit too zoomed in, meaning you don't get a good view of the surrounding enemies. All the fancy effects can obfuscate the enemies too. The enemies are well animated, and give you clear visual and audible cues to when they are attacking.

Normal attacks do damage based on your weapon and Strength stat. Strong attacks and counter-attacks do damage based on your Arcane stat. You are encouraged to counter since Arcane damage is higher, many enemies can block, and enemies deal out large damage when attacking. So this means you have to play more cautiously and look for an opening before attacking.

Once enemies are defeated, you collect enemy's souls which are used to level up at the Vulgrim points. You can assign a point to Health, Strength or Arcane. Vulgrim is a shopkeeper and trades in souls. These act as check-points which you respawn at when you die. They also act as warp points should you want to revisit an area to explore previously unreachable areas.

When you die, you drop the souls that you have collected and you can retrieve them by returning to that location. You can never permanently lose them, so failing to collect them before you die will still keep them available. This system means it is possible to grind out levels by repeatedly defeating the same enemies when you respawn. Fury has a limited use healing item called Nephilim's Respite, which is replenished when you respawn. I found it annoying how it doesn't get replenished when you visit Vulgrim, since you can force a respawn in the menu which will replenish it.

At certain points you unlock new forms which give you different powers and a different alternate weapon. The Flame Hollow gives you a vertical boost jump, can set fire to cobwebs, walk on flames, and a small chain weapon. The Storm Hollow gives you the ability to glide, ride wind currents and a lance weapon. The Force Hollow allows you to destroy rocks, walk underwater, turn into a boulder to traverse certain spots, and a mallet weapon. The Stasis Hollow allows you to wall-jump on certain walls, walk along water's surface and freeze it, can freeze objects, slow enemies down, and a blade weapon. These forms are aesthetically cool as they change Fury's hair colour.

There's plenty of items to find as you explore. These either give you a temporary stat boost, extra souls, or resources to upgrade your weapons or runes. Upgrading weapons gives them extra damage, and runes can be assigned to a weapon to gain an extra effect.

The graphics are very pleasing, and the sound design is very impressive too. Initially, the game decided to default my settings to the lowest setting. After cranking them to Ultra, the graphics still looked very blurry. Seems this is a bug which can be fixed by modifying a config file.

I've found the other Darksiders games to be okay, but the games that they are influenced by do their style way better. I actually though Darksiders III is the best in the series. The combat system is good once you get used to it, and I found myself enjoying the game more as the game progressed. I think it does a good job breaking up the action with the occasional puzzle, and the game is well designed so you get the feeling of exploration, and unlocking shortcuts to reduce the tedium of backtracking.