Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition

This game never gets old. A lot better than what is being produced today.

Following the almost perfect mold of the previous game, Darksiders 2 took it a step forward into the right direction. Even MORE stuff to discover, battle, gather, explore than before. Less liniar and more.. loved than the previous game. Pros: Took the best parts of the previous and added interesting mechanics like the skill tree. The gear, while simmilar to a point to the one of War fits perfectly Death and the beutifully crafter world. Cons: Has some tedious quests where you walk / parkour too much and some... annoying bosses. Also some of the legendary gear is not as legendary vs a more generic one. Finish it twice... and I would play again.

The first 8-10 hours of the game is amazing, where all aspects of the first game are improved upon. Combat is really fun and gaining new loot is exciting. The areas are much more open despite being linear at heart. The story is engaging and entering new dungeons is always a thrill. Unfortunately the 2nd half of the game is really bad, and the tail end of the game feels very rushed. The Kingdom of the Dead is absolutely awful because it turns into a series of fetch quests where all of the dungeons look identical and are 90% puzzle solving. You enter a room and kill 3-4 enemies before being forced to complete a 20-30 minute puzzle which revolves around pulling switches and opening doors to progress. It is awful in terms of pacing because it comes to an absolute stand still during these moments. I very nearly gave up on the game because of that. The late game quests devolve into fast travelling to various parts of the map and feels very inorganic, turning Death into a glorified errand boy. There is a satisfying part where he expresses his frustration at being forced to complete so many fetch quests, which is some well appreciated self-awareness, but it comes a little too late and sure enough you fall back into the same routine. There is a lot of fun to be had and there is a lot of content to go through, but the bad quest design and overabundance of puzzle dungeons prevents this game from being better than the first Darksiders. I'd only recommend this one if you are interested in the story because the writing is quite good and there are some decent twists and turns in the plot.

Darksiders 2 are the last game I've been enthusiastic about before the release, loving the first game which was an old styled console TPP platformer. Not to mention the brilliant theme. War is a fucking badass and everything he does overspills with badassness constantly. So there came time for the second game. Ugh. I was so hyped to play this game and bought it on day one to play Death and witness even more badassness from him. Because, fuuuuck, Death >>>>>> War, am I rite? Was I wrong, oh boy. It's one of the most disappointing games of recent years. The publisher must have gotten into developing process and forced the checks on the market targeting list. This is basically "fantasy: collect 3 X, the game". Death is some kind of pansy that is being used by literally everyone in the game, beginning with warcraft dwarves fighting rock golems ending with demons. He just says "yes" on every single demand he hears. And then goes on an epic adventure of riding through empty locations on instantly available mount (the sense of progression is gone) to generic dungeons where he moves some stones and collects the loot/kills the quest mob. Yawn. Even the story is literally the same as in Darksiders 1. They even used the old outro (!!!). You have everything in here for a perfect filler content sold to everyone possible. It doesn't matter in the ultimate scheme of things presented in the game, you fight some generic bad guy who is somehow related to you, you even meet your own mother in a dramatic, cringe-inducing reveal, followed by disturbing camera focus on her jiggling tits while a subtitle "MOTHER!!!" persists on the screen. No matter where you are in the game, you do the same. You fight generic mobs in generic locations trying to collect/kill 3 things. Rinse and repeat. Level design is abysmal. The ending boss encounter is way too lazy to believe that developers cared about their product. It flopped as it should have.

I just bought it, downloaded, patched, and game starts fine, no stutter etc, but there are graphic artifacts in the tutorial where it does not show the controller icons for the actions they are telling you to do. I am using an XBOX 360 controller. Other than that, great so far.