Great little game for a relaxing time spend micro managing your little town. You can always pause to get a hold of any given situation, and then speed up thing by up to x3 when you feel you have a grip on everything. Cool mix of rouge like progression, leveling with permanent bonuses in skill trees and individual games of town management. Each game has a mix of available resources and random choose one upgrades/blueprints/buffs that make every one unique. Hooded Horse took known elements that show up in a variety of other games and mixed them up into something unique and fun. Wish more developers did this. Worth the money, full price.
The game doesn't stand on its own marits. It runs slow, the AI is brain dead and the UI is clunky as hell. Just try to sell your consumables, you will get what I'm talking about. Brawling controls are a mess, lethal vs non lethal is trivialized because you can get a mod that makes your guns non lethal (wtf). It also didn't hook me on the RPG/storey aspects either. Avoid on full price, wait for an edition with all the planned DLC at a discount. I have learned my mistake and am not preordering ever again.
TL;DR: The game is not a good example of a Darksiders game. Lacking in puzzles, tight controls and better writing. The shortness actually helps so you don't need to play it too long. The port is poorly translated to PC, even with good spec (i7, 16GB RAM, SSD and a GTX 1060 with 16GB of RAM it still has stutter and low FPS issues. Got on sale if you want to complete a collection, or better yet, replay one of the first 2. Puzzles: This game has almost completely removed puzzles. It is replaced with tedious terrain traversal, where it seems that the game mechanics work against you in hopes of making the journey seem longer. The way it does that is by not having nearly the tightness of traversal control the previous 2 games had, and therefore forcing you to attempt, fail and try again on a piece of the journey... The few puzzles that remain are simplistic and solved easily, things that you would find in the first few hours of the first two games. Combat: Ok but the camera is sometimes your worst enemy. If you get into a brawl with too many enemies it can quickly put you into a situation where you cannot even find time to dodge, can get frustrating at times. Character progression: Itemization is basic but tight. They integrated the powers that you gain for more terrain traversal (... yay I guess) with the secondary weapons you get to use. It is fun and makes sense. Upgrades are simplistic but functional. Armors seem to be really boring but I don't miss the diablo like itemization of Darksiders 2 anyway. Level ups/skill points are done in a flat stat boost type of way, honestly it could have been done as an automatic change on a level up, no need to force us with choices like +hp, +dmg% and anothet +dmg% (for different parts of combat). Should have been just delegated to automatic growth. Story: Meh... Port: Just plain bad: crashes, frame drops, load times I can complain about more things, but there is a limit to the gog review length so let us stop here.
This game is hands down one of (if not the) best fantasy role playing games I have played. I don't need to tell you the good parts, this game has an avg rating of 5/5 for a reason, so I'll just say that your horse is an idiot, and that some pathing through mountains could have been done better. Everything else is stellar. BUY THIS GAME!!!!
