Date played: August 14th
Platform: PC
Session fun rating: 9/10
I've been pretty hyped for this game for a while. I LOVED the first Darksiders and this one looked to be much improved. I stayed away from media coverage though and when I started playing, I was very surprised and pleased with the changes that were made.
The game starts with Death trying to find a way to bring humanity back to life from the apocalypse to absolve War from the accusations against him. This takes him to the land of the Makers, the race of giants that made the ... universe I guess? Either way it's all a little convoluted but Death has to get to the Tree of Life but tons of stuff stands in his way. So far, I've repaired the cauldron of fire that the makers use to make weapons and such. Now I have to go repair another piece of the giant forge. It's all very dumb but the important part is that the game plays well.
There are a few things that stick out right away that are quite different from the first game. There is now loot, and I'm talking Borderlands/Diablo type loot. Death has a lot of equipment slots and weapon slots to customize. Loot drops randomly from enemies, bosses and chests. Also, damage numbers are now displayed on screen, again, similar to Borderlands which is very helpful in gauging which attacks are best. There is also a real overworld now, kind of like Zelda games which adds a real sense of scale. They have also added fast travel which makes things a lot easier to navigate.
The biggest improvement is combat though. First, the block is gone, replaced with a more aggressive offense and a very effective evade. It feels a lot better because it's faster and easier to chain combos together. I'm playing on PC with 5.1 and my HDTV but I had to drop the resolution down to 720p. The frame rate was fine in 1080p but there were vsync issues, even with vsync enabled. It still looks great though and it's smooth as butter for the most part, a huge improvement over the PS3 version of the first game. I can't wait to play some more.
Platform: PC
Session fun rating: 9/10
I've been pretty hyped for this game for a while. I LOVED the first Darksiders and this one looked to be much improved. I stayed away from media coverage though and when I started playing, I was very surprised and pleased with the changes that were made.
The game starts with Death trying to find a way to bring humanity back to life from the apocalypse to absolve War from the accusations against him. This takes him to the land of the Makers, the race of giants that made the ... universe I guess? Either way it's all a little convoluted but Death has to get to the Tree of Life but tons of stuff stands in his way. So far, I've repaired the cauldron of fire that the makers use to make weapons and such. Now I have to go repair another piece of the giant forge. It's all very dumb but the important part is that the game plays well.
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| Darksiders 2 looks great, even if some textures are a little muddy |
The biggest improvement is combat though. First, the block is gone, replaced with a more aggressive offense and a very effective evade. It feels a lot better because it's faster and easier to chain combos together. I'm playing on PC with 5.1 and my HDTV but I had to drop the resolution down to 720p. The frame rate was fine in 1080p but there were vsync issues, even with vsync enabled. It still looks great though and it's smooth as butter for the most part, a huge improvement over the PS3 version of the first game. I can't wait to play some more.
