This article originally ran under a different banner/website in December of 2018 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!! GATHER ROUND!!! I have been patiently waiting for Darksiders 3, and it finally has been released. Just in time to distract me from all those multiplayer shooters I take no pleasure in. After finishing Darksiders 1 and dipping a little into Darksiders 2, I always felt as if Darksiders took a couple of steps back and really focused on its own identity it could be a beloved series. It has been six years between Darksiders 2 and 3, so did all that time help Darksiders 3 develop its own identity? I, unfortunately, would have to say no.
The game starts with Fury being tasked with taking down the seven deadly sins, a task that you think be simple, but it slowly starts to unravel. She’s called to the Charred Council where she is given the task, but War is also there, chained up for his crimes of breaking the seven seals. Immediately, I assumed Darksiders 3 was taking place during the first game, but then Fury’s horse, Rampage, is killed off. Having recently finished Darksiders 1, I know this can’t take place during that time because we see Fury on her horse at the end. So along with fighting the seven sins, Fury is trying to deduce who killed her horse, Rampage. She suspects the angels and demons are involved since he was killed by a sword of an angel. Then someone called the Lord of Hallows gets entangled in this plot by giving Fury these items called Hallows, which change her secondary weapon and assists her with puzzles. Though, honestly, I don’t get where in this confusing lore, the Lord of Hallow is supposed to fits. One could think he controls Hell since the Hallow is drowning in skeletons, but he kills both angels and demons. On top of that, humans are alive when they were definitely extinct in the previous games. Don’t worry my followers, I am just as lost as you. I just wanted to kill the seven sins, Darksiders 3. Your lore really needs some cleaning up.
While the lore is confusing and convoluted, Darksiders 3’s combat inspiration isn’t. Keeping with the tradition of having each Darksiders being God of War with another game bolted on, Darksiders 3 tries to take a crack at being a mix of God of War and Dark Souls. You know what that means? Replaying sections of the game, because YOU DIED. Vulgrim pulls double duty as both a shopkeep for souls and bonfire duty. When you die, you drop the souls you were carrying, you respawn at Vulgrim, have your healing flask refilled, enemies respawn, and you must go get those lost souls back. All par for the Dark Souls course and isn’t unwelcomed in the series.
What I would say isn’t too welcomed for the series is the brutal difficulty this game is cranked up to. For a series that was traditionally a mindless hack and slash, Darksiders 3 has abandoned that mentality to ape the steep difficulty curves of Dark Souls. Now before, I hear cries saying Doomsayer doesn’t like hard games, I will say this: hard games are great when they are fair. The number one thing I hear from players of Dark Souls is, yes, the game is hard, but it is also incredibly fair. If you take your time go slow and you will get into the groove. I took that mentality to Darksiders 3, right off the bat got my teeth kicked in. Many enemies, including basic starting enemies, would stagger or fake attacks. I remember one enemy was so good at this, I would dodge roll right into his attack. I eventually would approach enemies and just wait for them to attack first so I could get a dodge in. Which I kinda felt was very uncharacteristic for Fury, but charging into enemies did nothing but result in controller snapping death.
This was especially true when fighting multiple enemies. In previous Darksiders games, gathering up multiple enemies would be fun, but in Darksiders 3 it is almost impossible to capture that same satisfaction as multiple enemies rip through your health bar. The camera also appears to be on the enemy side as it is reluctant to switch its focus from enemy to enemy. What I will admit is satisfying is when you successfully dodge an attack; the game will slow down and give you a small second to land a counterattack. With the way, Fury is able to move with her whip, these counterattacks are very smooth and have a satisfying weight and punch to them. You can almost feel the air breezing by Fury following by the immediate crack of her whip in retaliation.
Now, surely, a game inspired by Dark Souls would include some interesting enemy design similar to the games they are inspired by. Sure, Darksiders 3, has some angelic and demonic enemies similar to previous games, but then it also has some really plain enemies like standard skeletons and elementals. Even some of the seven sins are really uninspired too. I only like the designs for Lust and Gluttony and the rest are pretty weak. Envy is a humanoid bird and wrath is just a bulky dude. I remember a comment I heard on a podcast: Imagine if FromSoftware designed the seven deadly sins. So I decided to take a shot are designing some Dark Souls inspired seven deadly sins.
To keep this article safe for work, I stayed away from Lust, even though Darksiders 3 points out someone can Lust for power. For envy, I imagined a giant green smile that would cover the whole dungeon. She would have small arms that would continuously try to grab Fury throughout the level, and when you finally face her, she forms as a copy of you and you have a sort of Dark-Link-inspired fight. My Wrath has a similar look as Wrath in Darksiders 3, but as Fury continues to fight him, he would go in both physical size and anger to the point that he towers over Fury. While Darksiders 3 went with a treasure goblin-like design for Avarice, I had a look that feels like a mix of Paracest and Machamp. A big lumbering monster with a shell made out of his riches, with multiple arms to reach and claw at any treasures his beady eyes can spot. Darksiders 3 went with a bug lord for their Sloth design, which doesn’t make much sense when you watch ants or bees. No, some massive hibernating mammal seems more fitting. One that has been asleep so long, moss and trees have grown around him. Maybe some wildlife could fall off him after a long clumsy swing of his arm. Think Shadow of the Colossus only with a sloth-like creature. I always loved the design of the Leviathan boss in Dead Space, and I feel like a similar design could work for Gluttony. Monstrous fungus on the wall with small little tentacles with mouths and a giant cylinder mouth with rows of razor-sharp teeth; combine cylindrical tube with the force hollows and you could have one interesting boss fight. For Pride, you could say Darksiders 3’s angelic version of Pride works, but you could design more creative attacks with a gigantic griffin as your representation of Pride. Rapid paw swipes, beams of light emitting from his eyes when he screeches, heavenly swords fall from the sky as he stares into the sky with a prideful look. The main thing I would want to do with these bosses is making them tower over Fury; the massive scale would make it all the more satisfying when the player finally downs them.
It is starting to be commonplace for me to say this, but Darksiders 3, I am not mad, just disappointed. I have almost become a fatherly figure to the video games industry for all the times I say this phrase. I am not mad, just disappointed. When I criticized Darksiders 1 for being a shameless Zelda ripoff, I wasn’t looking for it to move away from the Zelda-like dungeon formula. On the contrary, with the promise of fighting the seven deadly sins, I was looking forward to seven sins inspired dungeons. Rather than design dungeons around a hook shot or portal gun, Darksiders 3 could have designed dungeons around the various Hallows given to them. Unfortunately, Darksiders 3 falls upon its kleptomania tendency and rips off the interconnection world that Dark Souls is known for. Which isn’t bad, nothing Darksiders 3 mimics from Dark Souls is badly done. It just makes it obvious how desperate Darksiders 3 is clinging to other popular ideas. What’s next? Is Darksiders 4 going to be a battle royale game? Should we expect to see Fury in Fortnite next? No, Epic, that was not a request. Darksiders, I must tell you something that I have learned in my youth: people can tell when you’re not being genuine. We can see by the schizophrenic swapping of other game mechanics that you are lost when it comes to your own identity. In times like these, I will always tell a games series to look at Mighty No. 9 and Shovel Knight. Mighty No. 9 tried too hard to be like Mega Man and was chastised for it. Shovel Knight pulled from numerous side-scrolling platformers, even threw in some Dark Souls mechanics, and was critically acclaimed. Hell, I even sit patiently awaiting the next expansion to Shovel Knight. Darksiders would greatly benefit from this strategy. The developers need to sit down, decide what kind of game they want to be, and pull multiple different ideas from multiple different sources. It would make Darksiders more than just a clone. It would take the game from mediocre copycats to a series players will love.
