We reviewed Darksiders Genesis

Driftwood
Thursday, December 5, 2019 | 12:30 AM
3 comments

GSY Review PC PS4 Xbox One

After the Gamescom presentation of Darksiders Genesis, we must say we were quite curious to see the final game and to play it. As we were sent a review copy early enough, we were able to complete the adventure in about 15 hours and now we can give you our verdict. We also have no less than 9 4K videos of the PC version to show you (the game will only be available on consoles in February). Enjoy!

Verdict

Many thought this spin-off of the Darksiders series would be a pure hack and slash game focused on loot but it is clearly not. In fact, it is much closer to the first title released in 2010, with brutal combat featuring a certain amount of combos and attacks, exploration of bigger areas and a bit of platforming. It's not a bad thing mind you, quite the contrary, but because of the game's level based structure, it can get a bit repetitive by the end. Each mission is set in a specific environment, with enemies to beat and dungeons to explore, while some levels are dedicated to bosses and you more or less get to do the same things from chapter 1 to chapter 16. It's still a fun game to enjoy, with beautiful visuals, an awesome music score and 2 pretty cool main characters, but do not expect a lot of variety when it comes to the gameplay mechanics. Strife and War unlock abilities that are required to solve some sort of environmental puzzles, so there's that, but it's not a game changer so you will spend most of your time beating the cr*p out of countless waves of enemies. It's just a shame that we've had to cope with a bunch of camera issues, as the developers chose to underline the main character when he's hidden behind the scenery, but not the enemies... The best solution would have been to make the scenery transparent so we don't lose sight of the action, but for some reason, things were not done this way. We've also encountered quite a few annoying bugs, like losing the possibility to double-jump or interact with chests or levers, the only way around the problem being to switch to the other character and switch back. We had to use the same workaround every time we got stuck somewhere, which happened on several occasions. The game only crashed twice in 15 hours, which is ok, but it happened consecutively during the introduction sequence of the last boss, so it got us scared for a minute. Other than that, Genesis is a lot more polished than Darksiders 3 in terms of performance as we've been able to enjoy smooth gameplay in 4K with our RTX 2080 Ti, which means it should also run much better in lower resolutions on less powerful configurations. All in all, Darksiders Genesis is definitely a game worth checking out, it's not an absolute hit, but it's clearly more than just a mere stand-in while we all wait for Darksiders 4. Last but not least, we can say for sure that it does not sully the name of the franchise, something the Terminator movie going by (almost) the same title failed to do in 2015...

On the upside
Lovely and colorful
Very smooth
More Darksiders than Diablo
Excellent soundtrack
Solo or co-op, your call
2 characters for 2 types of gameplay
Exploring and getting more powerful
Quite varied in terms of locations
War and Strife

On the downside
A bunch of annoying bugs
Why doesn't the scenery become transparent when it gets in the way?
A certain routine

High quality stream and download

Commented on 2019-12-04 19:36:21

Thanks for covering this. Great review highliting the pros and cons, as well as the issues. I waited for Darksiders 3 to get all the DLCs and patches, before commiting to it. I believe I will do the same with this, a lot of better and more polished games to play at the moment, so this can wait. For anyone who's interested in this, I recommend Battle Chasers: Nightwar, it's a brilliant RPG made by the same developers. It's also very cheap now.

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