Darksiders: Wrath of War (Xbox 360) > Reviews (4)

I'm not much of a Hack N Slash gamer. If I need a Hack N Slash fix I'll just stick Devil May Cry in and bang around on that for a little bit til I get bored and go back to my [insert any other genre here]. So when a friend told me to play Darksiders I was a little dubious but as he bought me a copy (he wanted me to play it THAT much) I didn't have much to lose. I was pleasantly surprised although it did take me a while to get engrossed in it, but once I did I played it right through to the end hardly stopping for breath :)

=Plot=
To preserve the balance between the three worlds; heaven, hell and man the independent 'Council' utilise the four horsemen to create a truce. The council create the seventh seal, in the event that the truce is broken the seal would also be broken thus summoning the four horsemen to basically make both sides sorry they disrupted the balance.
Fast forward to present day. The armies of heaven and hell decide to have at each other using earth as a battleground. One of the horsemen (the playable character) War arrives on earth and starts dispensing judgement i.e death on everyone who comes near him. He comes across the heavenly general Abaddon who during the confrontation reveals that the seventh seal has not been broken and War broke the truce by appearing without his brothers. Abaddon and War both perish at the hands of the demon Straga, but War is saved by the council who mostly just want to know why as a neutral party, he saw fit to start the apocalypse when the seal was not broken. War is suitably narked first of all for being prematurely summoned without his brothers and secondly for being blamed for kicking the whole thing off. Determined to prove his innocence and thus find those responsible for summoning him prematurely War agrees to go back to earth and kick some heavenly and demonic butt and clear his name. Whoot!

=Setting=
Although you occasionally venture into other worldly type locations the vast majority of the game takes place on Earth. But it is an earth that has spent a century being ravaged by the apocalyptical machinations of the armies of heaven and hell. Visually the setting is stunning presenting a semi-post apocalyptical locations where in some cases mother nature has come into her own and tried to take the world back.

=Gameplay=
As a Hack N Slash game it doesn't introduce anything spectacularly new to the genre in terms of gameplay. You have an array of attacks ranging from light to medium and a variety of weapons with which to perform them. A nifty feature is that the more you use a weapon the more experience it gets and it levels up, doing more damage and allowing you to purchase more moves for it. War sports a number of special 'wrath' attacks that are powered by yellow souls gained when defeating enemies. As a super special attack you can periodically transform into War's 'Chaos' form which basically just makes you a lot bigger and a lot angrier. In this form you can lay waste to any number of enemies with little difficulty.

The puzzles aren't particularly taxing though I found myself consulting a walkthrough on more than one occasion to find some of the harder secret items. Bosses aren't defeated through repeated hitting and instead require some level of either puzzle solving or development of tactics on your part to take down.
As the game progresses certain weapons affect your environment so you can later on re trace your steps and explore new areas using weapons to destroy obstructions. You can double jump and all that jazz and later on in the game you acquire War's horse Fury and can ride around on him rather quickly and deal some serious damage to your opponants. Nothing particularly new here except perhaps later on you get a portal gun, sort of like the one in Portal. Anything that incorporates Portal even vaguely wins in my eyes!

=Graphics and Soundtrack=
The graphics don't push the xbox to it's limits but they're still pretty decent. The environments are sometimes beautiful and the gory finishers you can pull off on the bosses are fantastically bloody. The soundtracks lend a wonderful ambience to the locations and fit the game very well. Perhaps the best use of the graphics is in portraying scope and scale. When you see War next to your average human person he's pretty big, yet the bosses mostly dwarf him which never fails to look impressive.

So what sets this apart from other games then? So far it just sounds like any run of the mill Hack N Slash game. What makes it fantastic and ultimately engrossed me is the compelling story and the mindblowingly good voice acting and cut scenes. The voice acting is simply superb, which is impressive in a game where most of the speaking characters are demons twice the size of your average house. War is just brilliant and the cut scenes show his character off wonderfully. As the story progresses it just becomes more and more intriguing and once you hit half way through you really do want to know what's been happening and who set you up.
What did impress me, though it probably didn't impress anyone else, was that in a game so obviously based in Christian mythology it managed to avoid any outright mention of God or the Devil. Instead God is the 'creator' and the devil is the 'destroyer' neither of which actually feature in the game personally, their armies do the fighting for them. This probably didn't make anyone else go wow, I just thought it was neat for a game that takes its protagonists from the Bible not to feel religious in any way, shape or form.

Also the ending is fabulous. It is worth playing this game for just the last few seconds of this five minute cinematic.