Darksiders (2010) and Darksiders 2 (2012)

It’s Not Death That You Should Fear

Recently, I’ve been trying to think of ways to make it easier to accomplish these reviews; things to make my reviews easier. It’s occurred to me that most critics review one episode of a TV show at a time, whereas I review entire seasons in each review. Well I put out a lot of reviews, and should spread those out so I can get more reviews out of one DVD set. …That being said, today I’m reviewing two games in the same review. I don’t know why, but even as I already own Tomb Raider and know of the existence of Bioshock Infinite, I decided now was the time to play two games in the same series that only ever vaguely interested me. I own the first one because I bought it used for $20, and I could borrow the second one from my friend Hookah, but there was clearly no reason to be playing this instead of Tomb Raider. Either way, I felt like I had to, so I did. Here is my review for the Darksiders series. Darksiders was developed by Vigil Games, published by THQ, with designs by Joe Madureira, and with the voices of Liam O’Brien, Mark Hamill, Phil LaMarr, Troy Baker, Moon Bloodgood, Lani Minella, Vernon Wells, Keith Szarabajka, J.B. Blanc, and Fred Tatasciore. Darksiders II includes the voices of Michael Wincott, Simon Templeman, André Sogliuzzo, Claudia Christian, Phil Proctor, Barry Dennen, Jamieson Price, Jessica Straus, and Nick Jameson.

For all my atheist readers, Heaven and Hell do not get along. In fact, one could say that they are at war. And Earth is often caught in the middle of that war. A balance is maintained by a group called “The Charred Council (Fred Tatasciore)” using the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – War (Liam O’Brien), Death (Michael Wincott), and for some reason Strife and Fury instead of Conquest and Famine. The balance is broken and war breaks out on Earth, and War awakens to restore the balance, but alone and depowered because the necessary paperwork was not filed to summon the Horsemen, so he is defeated by a demon called Straga (Troy Baker). The Charred Council accuses War of jumping the gun and bringing on the destruction of humanity, but War demands a chance to prove his innocence. They agree to send him back to Earth, bound to an annoyance known as The Watcher (Mark Hamill) and still depowered, to give him the chance to find out who was behind his premature evacuation.

In a fairly chronologically confusing setup, we now play as Death, who has set his sights on clearing his brother’s name by reviving humanity using the Well of Souls. I guess this part takes place just after War goes to Earth and gets defeated, so we’re playing this part in the several hundred years while War is talking to the Charred Council. Death first goes to the Crowfather (Keith Szarabajka) – who is NOT Bruce Lee – to find out what he must do, but Crowfather is all bitchy because Death made him carry around an amulet filled with the souls of the Nephilim who didn’t turn out to be Horsemen material and were then killed by the Horsemen. Death then goes to the Forge Lands, and finds that a lot of the realms are being taken over by this Corruption stuff that is kind of Death’s fault because it’s all caused by this guy named Absalom (Simon Templeman) that Death killed a while ago.

These games were fine for what they were, but there were issues to be had with them. None of these problems were really with the story … because I wasn’t paying that much attention to it. Well, I was paying attention to it, and I even played the game twice, but it was fairly inconsequential. I like a game that incorporates the Four Horseman. I’ve had a fascination with them ever since I first learned about them … in Marvel comic books. Of course it wasn’t in the Bible! I ain’t reading that thing! But that also means that I was thrown off because the Four Horsemen in this game didn’t include Pestilence and Famine, which wasn’t even accurate to the Bible that says it was Conquest and Famine they changed for their game. But Conquest doesn’t even seem to fit into the group, so I’m okay with him being gone. And Famine and Pestilence would just be sickly and frail, so they probably wouldn’t fit this game either. But the biggest problem of all is how little sense Death makes in Darksiders 2. How the hell is Death’s ultimate goal in the game to bring all of the humans back to life? Someone needs to change his fuckin’ name before trying that bullshit.

I really appreciated the look of this game, and mostly because the creative direction was left in the hands of my favorite comic book artist: Joe Madureira. This guy’s art is the bomb! I literally have one of his pictures as a poster on my wall AND as the desktop of my computer. So I love the artwork that created the game, but I did feel that the atmosphere of the first game didn’t really fit the theme of the game. It seemed a little too bright and almost cartoony while they were going for a darker theme. There were levels that seemed to reflect it better – such as the spider level – but the greater majority felt like they should’ve been darker. War definitely benefited from Madureira’s artwork because he loves to make heavily armored and intricate characters, and that fit the look of War really well. But then Darksiders 2 comes around and Death feels like a topless member of Slipknot. But aspects of Death can be changed, which is something that’s a little problematic for me. Part of me appreciates it when the gear I change actually changes the gear being carried by my character, but another part of me hates that my logical side needs to have the best equipment on while the artistic side of me wants my character’s gear to match and look badass.

Okay, the biggest annoyance I had with the game all came from the gameplay. The gameplay itself could be boiled down to your basic hack-and-slash game, which is fine by me. It’s a solid stress relief to hop into a mindless game and beat the shit out of your X button. The problem I had with both games was how much they flat out stole from other games. I had heard a little about this stuff before I even played the game. I was told that it was very similar to God of War meets Zelda, which is definitely true. Hack-and-slash games all kind of feel like God of War, and some of the music in the first game felt like it was taken right off the soundtrack. And the puzzles were vaguely Zelda, but the maps were EXACTLY Zelda. They even have the skull to indicate where the boss is located. But the thievery does not stop there. They have a portal gun in the game! It’s not a gun, but it is stolen straight out of Portal. The portals are even blue and orange! You can’t just call it a Voidwalker and fool me, Darksiders! And the Abyssal Chain is straight up the hookshot from Zelda. At least for Darksiders 2 they changed it enough by making it a spectral hand that Death reached out with. They have an aerial battle where War rides a griffin that feels very Starfox as well. Darksiders 2 changed the gameplay a lot, but they did not change the amount that it was all stolen. Instead of your basic hack-and-slash, it became more of a Diablo-esque dungeon crawler, where you were rewarded with loot and gold instead of the God of War-style soul orbs. This was also a bummer because you could often get better gear from fighting random weak creatures than you could from surviving 100 levels of the Crucible, or 10 levels of the Soul Arbiter’s Maze. Then, they decided they needed to get some quality platforming in their game. What better place than Prince of Persia? They had all the wall running that helped the Prince of Persia games be so good, but lacked the polish that made them great. And the big colossus boss battle was pretty reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus, appropriately. I actually got to the point with these games that I was thinking that I had not played enough games to accurately pick out every game that they were stealing from. The biggest annoying power wasn’t actually stolen from anything, but it was annoying for an entirely different reason. You’re not able to enter the realm of the spider people until you get the ability to make your horse – Ruin – run between two pillars to cross a chasm. The reason I found this annoying was that this was the ONLY TIME YOU EVER USE THIS POWER! What a fuckin’ waste!

The achievements in these games weren’t that bad. I was able to get all of them in both games. They weren’t easy, but plenty were annoying. They both did a lot with collectables which means you’ll be wandering around the maps over and over. Darksiders 1 even had one that was for riding a certain amount on horseback, which meant I spent a lot of time running around in circles on horseback since I didn’t do nearly enough normally. You’ll also probably want to play the game twice to get all the achievements, which makes it much easier while also making it take more time. But the most annoying achievement is the one you get for just getting the portal ability in Darksiders 2, because they called it “I can has cake.” Come on! You’re not even trying to mask that you steal from other games!

Darksiders and Darksiders 2 were decent enough games with next to no story, fantastic art design by Joe Madureira, and some fun and mindless hack-and-slash action. The biggest problem I took with the game was how clearly and blatantly they assembled their game with the cobbled parts of better games. I just don’t know if I can call this game worth buying. It’s okay, but there are better ways to spend your money. If you can get them super cheap, or if you can rent or borrow them, they’re decent enough to play if you have nothing else to play. Darksiders and Darksiders 2 gets “You would fight this war alone?” out of “The greater risk is to do nothing.”

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Dungeon Siege 3 (2011)

Healing is For Sissies!

I’ve knocked out a pretty good amount of game reviews recently, haven’t I?  Well here’s another one!  I remember being vaguely interested in today’s game when the demo for it released.  I had played it and thought it was decent enough, but not quite good enough to inspire me to purchase it for $60 when it came out.  But the beautiful thing about smaller level, decent games is that they will eventually drop in price.  When I noticed that the game had dropped to the $10 range, I decided that was good enough for me.  That game is Dungeon Seige 3, developed by Obsidian Entertainment, published by Square Enix, and including the voices of Crispin Freeman, Amanda Philipson, Anna Vocino, Dave B. Mitchell, Catherine Taber, and Barry Dennen.

You play as one of the four members of the 10^th Legion, and you’re trying to bring the Legion back to the land of Ehb after it was all but destroyed by Jeyne Kassynder (Catherine Taber), who killed almost everyone in the Legion and turned the rest of Ehb against them.  Through your actions, you can decide who lives and dies along your journey, as well as trying to repair the damaged reputation of the Legion.

There are a lot of things they did in this game that deserve some praise, but I can’t say that I enjoyed the experience that much.  The story was one of the things I liked about the game, though.  Sure, it was a fairly typical sword and sorcery story, but it had enough changes in the story to be interesting, and there was some funny stuff in the writing as well.  The basic story of the game is your quest to defeat Jeyne Kassynder and to bring the Legion back into a respected position.  That stuff is only different from the norm in that the main villain is a girl, but that doesn’t necessarily mean bad.  It makes you feel like you have a lot more control over your destiny by giving you a few choices in the dialogue, but mostly things are going to turn out roughly the same.  Whether you save the Queen first, or you go to help the town of Stonebridge first, it turns out the same way.  It doesn’t matter if you take rewards from the people of Raven’s Rill for helping them out, it doesn’t matter if you give Leona Gunderic Manor or not, it’s all pretty much going to end up in the same place.  I know that because I’ve played the game 4 times now, mainly because there’s an achievement for beating the game with all four characters, but it’s only really shown me that the choices you make aren’t really going to change the game significantly.  I kind of wanted to see what changes would come up in the story, but it only really changed what your character said to people (what they responded with was roughly the same), and where you would meet your companions.  But, even with all that, the story was pretty good, the characters seemed to have complex reasons to do the things they did so that even the bad guys had understandable motivations.

The look of the game is really good and very detailed, but I feel like most of that’s lost because of the camera angle.  It pretty much views your character from the top down and, of the two camera angles, the one that works the best is the furthest out.  At that point, most of the details of the surroundings and the characters are kind of lost.  The ground looked great though.  One of the bigger issues I took with the look was the way you held conversations.  The camera is looking over the shoulder of your character and the people you’re talking to are just standing across from you, barely moving and never emoting at all.  It was a super dull and boring way to spend a good chunk of the game, since you spend a lot of time chatting people up.  There’s a point in the game when the Queen finds out she’s related to Jeyne Kassynder, the biggest villain in all of Ehb, and the Queen can’t even be bothered to lift an eyebrow.  I would say that they were very good at capturing the atmosphere in the look, particularly in the very end of the game.  The entire trek to where you were heading definitely felt like the world was ending.

The gameplay of this game was the part that I took the most issue with.  It just wasn’t fun, and I found it more frustrating than anything else.  There are four characters, and each character has two different stances to choose from, but I found that most situations boiled down to just pressing A until everything but you was dead.  That wasn’t the real problem though.  The real problem for me was that conventional healing was ignored for this game.  You didn’t find health packs or have potions, and getting out of the fight for a little while did not cause your health to start going back up.  Instead, you had a power that you could use that would make your health go up at roughly 1 point of health per second, but with as harshly as your health is cut down, I found that fairly insignificant.  So, on anything other than Easy, you will probably die frequently.  Your companion could revive you, but they’re also semi-retarded.  I know that there are some people that like really difficult games, but I’m not one of them.  I just don’t want to put my controller through my TV.  I also don’t want my games to frustrate me.  Challenge me, perhaps, but I’m usually playing games to relax after a day of work and I really don’t want them to annoy me further.  There are bosses that inflict damage on you just from being next to them!  They don’t have to hit you!  If you’re in a circle around them, you take damage.  That’s a shitty decision for a game that has a character that has nothing but melee attacks!  That I also coincidentally picked for my first play through!  This game also does something that I’ve always hated in games, but why do companion characters have the ability to get in your way?  You ever play a game like this when you go into a corner to pick something up and your companion follows you, therein trapping you in the corner?  WHY?!  Why can’t I just walk through them like they’re not there?  Is it to add to the realism, so that you would feel like you were actually in a battle situation with a moron with personal space problems?  They did do something I really appreciated with the companion characters though.  If you just finished a battle and piles of money were laying down that fell from your defeated enemies all you would have to do is stand in place for a little while and your companion would go and pick up the money for you.  YAY!  I can be lazy in a video game as well!

I don’t think I’d call this game “good times” for achievements either.  They’re not difficult to get, but they’re way too time consuming.  You have to beat the game with all four characters to get a few achievements (such as the achievements for beating it with each character and the one for beating it with all of them, as well as the ones for leveling each character to 20) and, at about 10 to 15 hours per playthrough, that just seems like too much.  I actually wrote, “Fuck that,” in my notes about having to do that, since I had no intention of doing it … and then I did.  I don’t know why!  I have Borderlands 2 sitting next to me right now!  What am I doing?!  Alright, wrap it up…

Final verdict: Dungeon Siege 3 is pretty good, and I can’t really say I regret paying $10 for the thing, but I also can’t treat it like anything more than what it is.  It’s okay, it’s kind of fun but way more frustrating and irritating than I generally go for, it looks good when it’s not staring at the ground, and the story is pretty solid but not ground-breaking.  If you like Diablo-like gameplay, you might dig this game enough to be worth the low price you can find it for.  If you don’t, then you’ll be just fine skipping the game.  Dungeon Siege 3 gets “Play the game four times?  Go fuck yourself!” out of “…Okay, I will…”

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The Dark Crystal (1982)

I Hate Your Whimper!

I may have the day off for Thanksgiving, but I don’t have the day off my reviews.  Thems is non-stop, all day every day!  Turkey Day’s movie is a movie picked at random from Netflix Streaming, as I have been doing recently, and is also one that I’ve heard about for a really long time, yet never gotten around to watching.  It’s generally regarded as a classic, but it has eluded me until this Day of Eat Turkey.  This movie is The Dark Crystal, written and directed by Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and David Odell, and starring the voices of Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Lisa Maxwell, Billie Whitelaw, Percy Edwards, Barry Dennen, and Michael Kilgarriff.

Jen (Stephen Garlick) is the last of an Elfen race of puppets called Gelflings who lives with a manattee group called the Mystics until his master dies after telling him he has to find a shard of the Dark Crystal and ram it into the back door of the greater part of the Dark Crystal.  Jen sets off to look for Aughra (Billie Whitelaw), a crazy old lady who lives in an observatory.  Jen retrieves the shard from her and is immediately attacked by some black crab creatures called Garthim, sent by the big bad creatures, some evil, Vulture-lookin’ things called the Skeksis.  They’re trying to stop Jen because a prophecy has foretold that a Gelfling will stop them from achieving immortality at a planetary alignment that happens in a few days.  Jen escapes and soon comes across Kira (Lisa Maxwell), a female Gelfling and cock-blocker for Jen’s former title of “Last of the Gelflings”.  Jen forgives her, and together they go to fulfill their destiny.

Unfortunately, I fell like this movie also suffers from the same curse of being talked up too high as other movies I have reviewed.  This is a good movie, but the talk I had heard about this movie was that it was amazing.  I would probably give it my assumption that this movie was pretty amazing at it’s time, but I didn’t see it then.  Since this movie preceded Labyrinth, this is the first big, puppet movie that I know of.  Unfortunately, I feel like my current age causes a certain degree of disinterest in puppets.  That being said, it’s still an accomplishment and enjoyable to watch, but it feels a bit dated.  The settings and props in this movie were all pretty spectacular and well built.  I especially like the the observatory contraption in Aughra’s place.  You could tell a lot of time went in to these sets.  The puppets themselves, however, were occasionally hit and miss.  The puppets for the Mystics and the Skeksis allowed for them to put a lot of personality into the performances, but the Mystics were barely in the movie and they just went overboard in making the Skeksis seem overly disgusting, especially in the dinner scene that served no purpose other than to show their awful table manners.  The Gelfling and the Podling puppets, however, did not allow for a lot of emoting from their mask-like faces.  It didn’t matter for the part ewok, part Jar Jar, part Fraggle Rockian Podlings because they were scarce in the movie, but the stars of the movie were those Gelflings.  I feel like they should’ve put a little more articulation into their faces to keep them from looking so creepy.  Those crab-like Garthim things, though, were pretty badass and scary.

The story of the movie is pretty classic, but still good.  You’ve got the whole rags to riches type thing, though the riches is more just fulfilling his destiny.  You have a love interest, a big bad guy, a potential cataclysm, and a happy ending.  The thing that struck me as strange about this movie is that it was a Jim Henson movie and seemed like the kind of movie that would attract kids, but there was a lot of hardcore fucking in it.  No, I’m kidding.  What actually surprised me was how much death was in this movie.  In the opening narration, every other word is “death”.  A lot of things died during the course of the movie as well.  It wasn’t gory or anything, but it seemed to include more mature topics than I would expect out of a movie I assume is for kids.  There was also one part that made me laugh.  Jen and Kira came up on a place that made Kira say “Bad things happened here once.  Now we don’t go in there.”  That must really limit the amount of places you can go, right?  Bad things have happened a lot of places.  “Oh, I don’t go in my bathroom.  I stubbed my toe in there once.  But I REALLY haveta go.”

I kind of talked about the performances already when talking about the puppets, and since there wasn’t really any live action in this movie, I’ll have to skip the performances.  The sound did occur to me at one point.  For the most part, the sound was very good.  It seemed to be an orchestra and usually fit the scene, but there were a couple of points where something exciting was happening and the music wasn’t really swelling as it should in such a scene.  It seemed like the music was there and trying to support the action, but someone forgot to turn up the volume.

I wish I had seen this movie when I was younger, so that the memory of loving it then would help me love it now.  I saw Labyrinth when I was younger, and I still really like that movie.  I still appreciated this movie for it’s achievement, but also wish the main character’s puppets had more articulating faces.  The story was fine, the sound could’ve been mixed better, but it was a fine movie.  I feel comfortable saying you should watch this movie, but you probably won’t like it as much as you would if you saw it when you were young.  The Dark Crystal gets “Sometimes good.  Sometimes bad” out of “Heal the Crystal!”

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