I'm a true gamer. So I played the original Darksiders on PC, where it was a bit more polished than on the consoles. I almost didn't have any bugs and I enjoyed it so much that I played it several times. Surely, it was no God of War but it had just everything I needed: A Zelda-esk game-play, modest puzzling, a tactical fighting system and a great comic-book story.
Darksiders II on the other side seems like a DLC to the first title, completely blown out of proportion.
It's story isn't told at all. You just meet people, have no clue who they are supposed to be and they vanish again. Neither the introduction nor the ending are really told. Both are just comic-strips that retell parts of the original Darksiders.
The world is empty and lacks details. Surely, the world is bigger but there aren't any areas that stand out. Remember Darksiders, where you had to climb floating pieces of a building while Azrael kept them steady through lightnings? None of that here. Just blown up areas where you mostly run, nothing happens and your enemies re-spawn way too fast.
The combat system is basically hacking. Sure, there are more weapons, but what difference do they make, when you rule out most of them and stuck to three different ones - most times the ones that leech energy from your opponents. You can win over any boss by doing teleport slashes and hacking. And yes: the end-boss is far too easy, let alone that I still don't know who he is.
There are a lot of bugs... They had to patch it twice, because it did have SEVERAL A-bugs, meaning bugs that prevent you from going on in the game. Plus I had to restart 16 times because of clipping errors, the game stopped unresponsive, I couldn't defeat the scribe because of a glitch, etc, etc. The game was running on the same machine that Darksiders did.
Overall it feels rushed, done without love, borrows too many elements from titles like the Prince of Persia Franchise (esp. Warrior Within) and is just a frustrating experience.
This was the game I was hoping for the most this year. Turns out it's a game that I never want to play again.
