If there is one thing that I'll take away from Darksiders, it's that lead designer, Haydn Dalton wants Eiji Aonuma's job. After hitting switches, pushing blocks, collecting keys to open locked doors, and blowing up [bomb flowers] with the [boomerang], I hadn't even made it out of the first dungeon before I'd all but forgotten that the game wasn't released on a console branded with 'Nintendo.' The level design, camera angles, reward noises, and nuanced cues (i.e. a wall with a viney texture should be climbed) all play into the comfort and familiarity of the Zelda series.
Yet with all of these concepts borrowed from Miyamoto's favorite child, Darksiders manages to avoid feeling like a shameless ripoff. Rather, the game can best be described as Zelda freed from its slavish adherence to tradition. Vigil Games accomplished this by transplanting the Nintendo series' core level design into a completely alien environment. Featuring a post-apocalyptic setting, 'God of War'-sytled combat, and monetary-based skill upgrades, it would be easy to dismiss Darksiders as a generic rehash that brings noting new to the table. Per contra, their coalescence, evokes a freshness seldom felt among its predecessors' current trend of refinement over reinvention.
The story, rooted in the Bible's Book of Revelation, places players in the shoes of one of the four horsement during the apocalypse. But before you dismiss the narrative as a spinoff of the Left Behind series, you should know that the developers used Revelation as inspiration rather than canon. In other words, the narrative is written as though the biblical writers got the events right, but the interpretation wrong. The result is a surprisingly refresing use of religious texts spared from conspiracy theories or dogmatic agendas.
Unfortunately, the combination of characters both familiar and new, and the reworked narrative proved to be a recipe for disaster. Post-apocalyptic stories, almost by definition, reek of desolation. Such an environment serves as a constant reminder of a character's mortality. And in turn, this endless destruction hyper-focuses an audience's attention on these people's struggle. Vigil Games, seemingly oblivious to this concept, chose to open the game by driving humanity into extinction within the first 15 minutes. All that remains are the ruins upon which our world's executioners continue their self-absorbed battles. Such an event is, understandably, accompanied by a notable lack of empathetic characters. Every role from quirky NPCs to alpha warrior opponents are presented as suffering entities, but lest we forget, they killed every last one of us without regret. Such an event produces a large barrier for an audience to feel compassion, to say the least.
Even if you can let bygones be bygones, the story's appeal still fails on a fundamental level. Heaven and Hell, save for a temporary ceasefire, have been battling throughout all eternity. War is the norm, but it's unlike any war in human history. There are no civilians; no innocents caught in the crossfire. Everyone in the story (after the first 15 minutes in which humanity goes extinct) chooses to kill simply because that's what they've always done. Not only do they kill without remorse, trauman, or conscious, everyone yearns to exterminate all who don't look like them. The end result is a story that at first glance seems interesting, but falls apart because there is absolutely nothing in its world to imbue with compassion. And while a game doesn't necessarily need a story, a game based around characters does need a sympathetic core to pull players in.
There's an excellent game here -- in theory -- from combat to level construction, but Darksiders' solid fusion of mechanics and design just can't overcome the failure of the story's pitfalls.
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