Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition

The terrain is so overdone it gives headaches, also gets you lost most of the time, having to pass by the same area 3-4 times to progress, enemyes drop items like in an online mmo, buggy climbing walls, spent 10 mins to pass 2 meters of wall designed for console poorly ported to pc. Realy wished this was good so i could know what happens after the first one.

I loved the story, loved the combat (apart from some occasional enemies towards the end which have attacks that are annoyingly hard to dodge) and loved the overall atmosphere of the game. The locations you visit throughout the game can be very stunning and are in general quite beautiful. The protagonist, Death, is very straightforward, quick-witted, but not rude. That made watching cutscenes very enjoyable for me. The loot system was a bit odd though especially since the first game didn't have that at all. The game could've done without that. 2 main weapons like the first game would've been better. Another negative point would be the overly long 'fetch quests'. The entire game is based around this and it feels so artificial lenghty. Everytime you enter a new area the main quests makes you gather certain objects or people in order to progress. This would've been fine if it was 2 times at max, but there is atleast 4 or 5 of these that take a very long time each. I liked the story enough to go through this, but I definitely wouldn't play it again.

Just as the first game, this game has FAR too much backtracking! Time after time you go through areas that you can not access parts of without certain abilities/keys, so you need to backtrack time after time to do/get something that you were not able to do/get earlier. On top of that there is also FAR too much game padding in the form of having to go through vast amounts of loot and decide what to keep, what to use, what to sacrifice and so on. The same thing goes for items and characters that you need to waste A LOT of extra time looking for if you want to find a large fraction of them. As in the first game, you meet enemies a couple of times that you MUST kill in a certain way. This game is better than the first one in the sense that this game at least gives you a hint on how to kill those enemies. The acrobatics that you have to perform a lot of in this game is often irritating. Especially when you are forced to practically do an obstacle course as you have to do a couple of times in this game within a time limit. If you do one single mistake, you die... And if you time a jump between moving objects wrong, you die. I died A LOT more in this game due to failed jumps, being pushed over an edge into lava/an abyss and so on, than I did facing enemies :-( The puzzles was not so bad in this game as it was in the previous game, so that part was better, or at least less bad. I liked the story and the characters of the first game better, but they are also good in this game. In this game "Fast travel" is introduced, which is good, but the large amounts of backtracking in this game would have made this game insufferable without it! Saving in this game was not as bad as the previous game. When reloading you at least continue close to where you saved. But you can not save during a hard fight. So if you have REALLY big problems getting past an area/an enemy, you are doomed to try again and again and again and again and again... All in all I give this game a strong 3/5.

There is no doubting Darksiders 2 is a great game in it's own right. It has it's flaws, sure, but there is really little on the gameplay side to get in the way of an epic story and a great time. However, the game is also notorious for technical difficulties and I can also attest to this as well. If you have the patience to deal with these issues from time to time and like your action/adventure games, you will have a great time with it. If you played the first one first, you will get even more out of it as the events allude to those in Darksiders, but even as a newcomer, there is nothing important you will have to guess at without that experience first. Unless you don't like action games, I can't see a reason to at least give it a try.

I will keep it fairly short The good: + No technical problems in 2019 except sub par ALT+TAB handling + Fun combat and abilities + Puzzles are nice and are fairly fresh throughout the game + Pretty well done boss fights The 2 major flaws: - Between the 3-5h and 15h mark, for me, the story felt spread out very thin and it felt like I was doing things just for the sake of doing things - The loot system is just bad. Nothing you get feels meaningfull.