Darksiders III - PlayStation 4

I gave this game five stars because I can overlook its shortcomings. I am a HUGE fan of this series and was very excited for this third installment. Each Darksiders game has been different from each other, there is no doubt about that. However, there is a common feel to them that make the lore, environments and gameplay, very exciting. Cons: -The first thing you should know, is that this game is NOT easy. The difficulty from this game arises from its issues, rather than its overall creation. I can't do a great technical job of explaining what is going on, but mainly, the enemies hit really hard and it's very difficult to avoid damage. Dogging is a bit of a joke in this game and it's pretty much the only means you have for getting out of the way. Enemies can hit much farther than you can dodge and there's no running away. Mobs will overtake you and you will often feel like you've been cheated out of a successful fight. Regular enemies will prove to be a challenge to most people, as they can easily gang up on you and take you out. Some simple enemies will seem to be able to take two thirds of your health in one hit, it just doesn't make sense. The difficulty spikes are all over the place. So, you will often end up trying to run through a section and avoid combat, so that you don't lose all of your health resources before you get to a boss. -Check points are often terrible. You can spend a long time clearing out enemies to get to a boss and then the last simpleton takes you out, causing you to have to do the entire map over again. I'm not sure why they though this was a good idea, as it really only leads to frustration. - A little bit of loading issues in some sections. The screen can often freeze for a few seconds when running between some map areas. This is likely just the extended areas loading, but it's not game-breaking. Pros: - This game is really fun, overall. The lore, and environments are amazing, to me. Granted, the lore is not quite as epic as the first two games, but you can still tell it's a Darksiders game. Don't believe people who tell you different. - The maps are fantastic. There is a ton of opportunity for secrets, and exploring. It's important to know that these maps are not the huge landscapes that we saw in D2, but they are certainly attractive and very interesting. The developers did a great job of making you spend time in a smaller map in such as way that you feel like it's a huge place. I never got bored with exploring or finding secret paths. As you start the game, you will see lots of places that you want to get to, but won't be able to until later in the game. In other words, you will need to revisit the same map areas, but with different abilities. This is actually fun, since the new sections of those maps are quite interesting. Fast travel will be available. - Graphics are good, but certainly not Red Dead Redemption good. They are a bit stylized for the genre, but that's what you would expect. The colors are brilliant, the lighting and environments are often fascinating. - You HAVE to explore. There are so many places that you will NOT discover if you do not snoop at every corner. There are a lot of tiny tunnels that you will not see if you don't look. Those tunnels often lead to additional boss fights and rewards, as well as huge sections of maps. Jump, climb, float...all of it. As you gain those extra abilities, you will be able to reach many of them. If you see an enemies standing in an impossible location...you CAN eventually get there. - Plenty of gameplay hours Notes: Yes, there are Cons, but this game is really fun, overall. You can tell the developers put some heart and soul into it. It doesn't feel lazy, just occasionally underdeveloped from a lack of resources. I think they are learning and tried to take this in a different direction. Most of it worked, but some things need tweaking or reversing. Don't expect this to fulfill your Darksiders Lore encyclopedia, it won't, but there is enough story there to make it interesting. Don't skip out on this game because of a few bad reviews. If you are new to the series, then I'd say that you must buy the remastered versions of the first and second game and play through those. Each experience will be different, but you won't regret it. By the way, the first game has some difficulty spikes as well, but it's well worth powering through.

I play games a ton. Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War 4 and Zelda Breath of the Wild being the recent ones. This isn't an open world like HZD and Zelda BotW, and doesn't have the incredible, realistic graphics of GoW4. What it does have is the gameplay value we enjoyed with Super Metroid and the classic Zelda games where you find places that you know you can traverse or probably need some power or item to solve but don't have it but you take a mental note of that spot and come back. That was great adventuring when I played those games and Darksiders 3 does that very well with the gameplay. The combat is great as well. It relies heavily on combos and dodging but it does it well like what you might have experienced in Darksiders 2. It is very rewarding about mid-game when you are timing the evades perfectly most of the time and are able to take on multiple, hard enemies at the same time. The boss fights are kind of straightforward but take practice especially at higher difficulties. You get a different weapon that can be used as part of the different Hollow powers you get and they have different ranges and stuff that change how you fight. I will admit it would have been nice to have them be more unique and cause you to play differently and add more variety like in DS2 but sadly they didn't and this is pretty much my only real pause with this game. The story is great. They come straight in to the story, for those that are Darksiders fans, where the horseman War is accused of causing the Apocalypse. Fury, his fellow horsemen is tasked to find and capture the 7 deadly sins and she is given a Watcher to attend to make sure she completes her task. Fury finds out more about what happened with War and Fury starts to see the role that they play in the whole scheme of the story. There are many elusions and there are unanswered questions in the end and I think that is great because it causes you to want more from the series. The voice acting is amazing. The voice actress they got for Fury really gives her all and all the deadly sins gave great performances. They cast this great and scripted this really well. The graphics are fine. They aren't God of War 4's graphics and maybe a little less than Herizon Zero Dawn. That is fine. The Darksiders games have always been a little more cartoony anyway and not meant to be mega realistic. Also they seems to be focussing on exploration, just not mass exploration like you would get from Breath of the Wild. They also obviously didn't have the budget for something so massive. Exploration: Great! There are great puzzles there are hidden paths, there are hidden enemies, etc. You really have to use all the tools they give you to find everything. This isn't as straightforward as a game as other reviews say. Sure they give great segways to the next area they want you to go but there isn't a marker on your map or anything forcing you there. You can port to any area and explore. Actually, I killed the deadly sins in the wrong order from what some would say. I thought that was awesome since I wasn't fully led and handheld in that respect. Puzzles. None of the puzzles were terribly hard but neither are any of the other games that we play now. There were some where I had to take time with trial and error but it was still fulfilling when I figured stuff out although it is pretty apparent when you scanned the area what you should do. It was fulfilling because they allow you to manipulate the world in unique ways that make sense without needing to throw a fairy at the thing you need to manipulate to lead you to do the thing you need to proceed. I loved seeing a color on a certain thing and thinking, "if I use this tool, I can probably shift that thing around so I can jump and swing here", and then it worked. It was just enough for a player to actually use their brain. Again focus on that they didn't have to put map markers or indicators on the world to help you along the way. Menu and UI. Needs to be a lot better. It was hard to toggle items in the middle of a fight and the menu wasn't terrible but didn't have a smooth flow. But I wasn't using items for the majority of the game or needing to use my menu for much more than giving points to certain attributes and such. Overall it was a great experience. I did almost all the trophies except beating the game on Apocalyptic. There are few collectables so it doesn't feel like a collectathon. I completed on hard difficulty and used a fair amount of consumables on boss fights. But I was heavy on some consumables in the end. I am sure on Apocalyptic that I would have to buy those same consumables rather than have 10-12 in my inventory. Please get this game. It is worth it and was a lot of fun and I would really like it to do well enough to do a Darksiders 4 and improve on the current one and maybe pull in some cool stuff from the other Darksider games.

I rarely write reviews, but I'm still bummed about the bad rap this game's been getting for the past few months - which I hoped might change after the patches. I pre-ordered this, and after reading a few of the reviews that trickled in on its release, decided to wait for the first patch. Given all the complaints about difficulty (more on that later), I opted for story mode, which was made easier by the first patch, and honestly, *it wasn't very difficult*. I wasn't above grinding and farming a bit to keep my level slightly ahead of where I thought it should be, and I was fine. (Of course, I get that the whole point of playing a "story mode" is to not have to do that, but I really didn't mind. Maybe people just don't want to farm and grind anymore?) On the other hand, I've been watching my wife play God of War, by all accounts an A++ release, and while I do agree that it is in all ways a superior game to DS3, the number of times she's been killed by Valkyries, and the amount of time and energy she's spent collecting mist echoes in Ivaldi's workshop, searching for Odin's ravens and other completionist tasks, etc... All of that seems more tedious and frustrating than anything I had to deal with in DS3. The only reason I bring this up is, one of the biggest complaints about DS3 has been its difficulty, which makes me wonder why people are willing to subject themselves to torture and tedium in one game and give it 5-star reviews, but not this one. I also don't understand the frustration over any lack of checkpoints... Are people so spoiled by auto-saves and checkpoints in other games that we've forgotten how to manual-save frequently and proceed into new areas cautiously? Seeing THQ Nordic pander to the fans by adding more checkpoints - along with other unnecessary "HERE THE GAME IS EASY NOW STOP WHINING" "fixes" - makes me shake my head and roll my eyes... Let's just suck all the challenge out of the game, because no one's willing to invest time in challenging games anymore... *sigh*... Another thing people seemed to consistently complain about was the camera angle problem. Yeah, that can be frustrating, but again, not to bring even more GoW comparisons into this review, but *this problem is not exclusive to DS3*, and I've watched it happen countless times in GoW... The solution is simple: Not sure if someone's behind you? Get better at dodging! I get that people want a smooth gaming experience, but do we also expect combat to be so auto-pilot that we can just hack and slash without any awareness of surroundings or ability to find a direction to dodge in? Even more perplexing to me is that some of these negative reviews are have come from people who claim to be huge fans of the first 2 games, which certainly were not without their flaws. (Especially the 2nd one, and I'm still amazed DS2's many glitches were not fixed for the re-release... Where are those patches?? At least they fixed the DLC, because does anyone remember having to delete inventory from a save file just to get the DLC not to freeze on the 360? Pepperidge Farm remembers...) While I might be inclined to agree this is not the strongest of the 3 games, I still enjoyed and even obsessed over it as much as I did the first 2, and had no problem looking past any of its flaws. With all of that being said, again, I played it after the first patch, and so many of the bad reviews seem to have come in before that was released. I didn't experience the same clunky, unplayable, not-ready-for-release game some of the more eviscerating reviews described. I hope those reviewers are willing to give the game another shot. Honestly, I'm happy this franchise was resurrected, I think this is a worthy installment, and I hope THQ Nordic and Gunfire learned enough from any of the critical feedback to make the next one even better. If you are a fan of the other Darksiders games, don't mind a challenge (although who knows what's even left of that after the 2nd patch), and can look past the slightly dated graphics, I think this game is worth your time.

I bought the game February 2020. I held off from buying it because of all the bad initial reviews, but for $13 and how much I loved the prior two games, I pulled the trigger. They may have fixed most of the bugs in earlier versions. I found the first boss challenging, but once I got past it, the game opens up and gets a bit easier (especially if you spend souls to level character). My boys (5 & 12) both love the puzzles and the game play. My 5 year old usually just whips non-stop and will die on challenging mobs, but still loves to play. The first game was great and a little more puzzle solving. The second was great, more open to explore and customize. This game is a little less than the prior two, but still fun. Not as many hidden items, but mostly you are just grinding souls to level up weapons and or specials. All the special skills come from her different forms which are given to you as the game progresses and not from finding them. Still found it interesting and fun. For around $15 bucks, it isn't a decent game to pick up and play through. Feel like the 4.3 star rating is right on, if not a little on the low side, for the cost.

it is a great video game.

Perfecta condición

At the very first this reminded me of God of War facing off against the Valkries; dodging, patiently waiting to attack. It's tough but so fun. One of the things I really like is that if you perform a last second dodge you can follow up with sweet attacks depending on your weapons. Dodge forward with an arrow shot at you? You can reply with a lightning bolt. Dodge sideways from a sword slash? You can jump up and fling the baddie with your whip. You can float on whirlwinds, walk through lava with the power of the different hollows. Once you get a weapon called Salvation you can break enemies parries and blocks. It takes some finesse and practice but is extremely fun. I'm farming for souls every chance I get to upgrade my health and attack points. The DLC crucible is awesome. It's challenging and fun. The levels are like a maze with lots of going back to areas you couldn't access before and getting some more goodies which I find very fun.

There was nothing special about this game. It is just an average game. To bad if you paid full price, only worth getting if it is under $20. A quick list of pros and cons. Pros: Controls are fluid Game layout is pretty good and the environment isn't terrible. Easy Platinum, can get it with 2 plays. Cons: Story is generic, not as unique as Darksiders or Darksiders 2. The story is essentially the same as Darksiders 1, just with a few minor adjustments. Short game, not many extras to go after or work for. You could probably platinum it on a weekend. DLC is absolute garbage. -Keepers of the void: Takes a few hours to complete and the additional weapons/armor are useless. The bosses are exactly the same and the "new" enemies are just regular enemies from the main game that are re-skinned. -The Crucible: Absolutely a waste of time. This was a feature that came with Darksiders 2 and was a real grind to complete. The Crucible for Darksiders 3 is just a watered down money grab. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME OR CASH ON IT.