Darksiders II Review

This game, while just as enjoyable as the original, is filled with some seriously questionable design decisions & game-breaking bugs that make it hard to recommend as something worth playing. Beyond even that, the looting system in this game is one of the worst I've ever used, making this a pretty terrible loot-fest game. The inclusion of RPG-like inventory management, looting, and stat management is not only executed horribly, it is totally unnecessary, taking away from the true focus of what makes Darksiders such an excellent game & genre: its exciting yet challenging combat & bosses, strong story & lore, and the excellent & creative third-person Metroidvania/Legend of Zelda puzzle platforming. As a result of these & plenty other bad game design decisions, it's a lot harder to wholeheartedly recommend this game. Let's try to break down as much of the experience as possible:

Combat is far more dynamic and enjoyable compared to its predecessor, and looks beautiful with the seamless animations, 60fps, and plenty of visual flair. The needless looting system detracts from this, since you spend a lot of time trying to manage your super small inventory. There are many game mechanics which are never explained at all, leaving needless confusion. Things like what the Arcane stat does, what Reaper Energy is & does and how it is collected, what the special abilities of Legendary weapons actually are & do, how to activate some advance-tier combat moves, and many more are left unexplained from start to finish. In a similar predicament to the first game yet made even worse by a skill tree twice as large, there's not nearly enough assignable keys for your abilities & tools, forcing you to often go into a menu to activate them mid-play, which is really bad. Executions are finally not guaranteed, making them more desirable & rewarding, as compared to the first game, where it just got really repetitive & boring due to its consistent occurrence. Boss execution cutscenes are pretty cool & cinematic too.

Problematically, the game is filled with bugs, many of which have proven to be completely game-breaking. The game itself crashed on me at least a dozen times over the course of my 25+ hour playthrough. Sometimes it crashed mid-combat, sometimes when I would try Alt-Tabbing out of the game, and sometimes at predetermined points in the story. In one instance, the game would consistently crash at the end of the cutscene when meeting the Archon. After looking into it, and finding out it was a known bug by the dev with an easy workaround, I was dismayed to realize that after all these years they still never patched it. I encountered some other serious bugs too, including pre-max level XP locking, seriously faulty shading FX, and sound effects fully disappearing until game restart. Visually, the game looks no better than its predecessor, from lighting effects to texture quality, which is pretty unacceptable considering its release years after the original and its supposed 'remastered' state. Even the loading icon is the same from the first game, leading me to believe the devs were so lazy they could not even replace that asset with a new one matching Death's horse. For a remastering, this isn't all that great.

So many of the mechanics are new or modified, so the game ends up playing remarkably different from its predecessor. That's quite a feat, to have playing as Death play so differently than with War, and still have it feel like a Darksiders game. Nearly all his equipment are new/different from the ones War got to use, allowing for a new range of puzzle-solving scenarios. We are finally given a horse from the start, and dodge roll in place of fast movement is more bearable now, thanks to 3-stage rolls instead of 1-offs before you get momentarily movement-locked. It's pretty odd that Death can't do a double jump at all, like War can, but it does make for different platforming circumstances. Whoever thought it was ok to make an unnecessary swap of the buttons used during underwater swimming, so that the controls are needlessly different from the first game's (which were fine) and make it even worse and less intuitive by making the button which sensibly went up in the previous game go down in this game, should rethink their job in game mechanic design.

The final boss fight & the ending are both truly lackluster, anticlimactic, confusing, and do absolutely nothing to advance the main storyline. This game's ending is practically non-existent, compared to the stellar ending of the first Darksiders. They also pull a Halo, never letting you see what is underneath Death's mask, even when he does finally take it off. There are some seriously epic-scale bosses, towering figures that sometimes present challenges similar to in Shadow of the Colossus, which can either be identified as a cheap ripoff of or a nice nod to that masterpiece (whereas this one certainly isn't).

Stupidly, your inventory is really small, forcing you to have to either sell, merge, or drop nearly all your loot. There's also little incentive to ever care about trying to use any non-Legendary ranked equipment, since the Legendary ones are abundant and far more powerful than all the regular loot. There's also so many Legendary weapons and so little inventory space for them, that if you collect all them, the inventory is barely large enough to even contain them all, let alone storing any other found loot. Health and Wrath potions are stupidly capped at 5, even though you need to use them way too frequently yet encounter an absurdly imbalanced number of them in loot boxes, nearly all of which you cannot end up carrying. Multiple times, I've encountered one of the dumbest things I've seen in a game - I'd open a loot box and 3 Health potions pop out with nothing else, while my inventory already has 5 of them, so I can't do anything with them and they just disappear for good as soon as I leave the area, with the loot box never respawning. Speaking of, the loot boxes are inherently random & inconsistent, which pretty much forces you to rely on the Legendary weapons you are given anyway, so their inclusion really is pointless.

Comparing equipment stats is executed horribly, making comparisons far more difficult & time consuming to do than they ever really needed to be. You cannot directly compare the stats of two equipment, not even compare one to the one you have equipped, so you have to constantly navigate between two to do any comparisons. The stat increase/decrease indicators do nothing to show you how MUCH of a difference is being made, so you still have to navigate back to the other equipment to manually do the math. The quick-equip upon looting option is also pointless, since no comparison is made to your equipped versions either. You can't even mark any of the numerous pieces of loot you get as ones to keep or garbage to merge/sell, leading to some iffy inventory memorization and overload. This is not how a loot system is supposed to work. Whoever thought this version of a loot system suffices should pay a price. They should have looked at a game like Borderlands for what a loot system is supposed to be like.

You end up with far too much gold from your loot, with nothing to spend it on. The equipment available for purchase are always weaker than your current equipment and are never warranted. I went through the entire game without ever using my gold for anything other than purchasing new combat moves, which still left me with an obscene amount to sit on. Vulgrim is an unnecessary and useless addition to this game, including what you can get from him. What an absurd design decision it was to have a limited-quantity collectible be used to purchase level-dependent random lootboxes, which basically discourages me from ever buying non-max-rank loot boxes from him and only after I'd maxed out my character level.

The map is massive, far bigger than the first game's, and offers plenty of variety across locales. Plus, there is far more content here than in the previous game, adding at least another 10+ hours to the initial playthrough, provided you go for extras, with many more hours in extra campaigns and NG+. There are tons of dungeons, all really well-crafted & fun, which is at least something done right here. An insane amount of hidden map items are present too, rewarding exploration & experimentation, and leading to some pleasant surprises & challenging critical thinking moments. Fast travel is finally done right, a much-needed improvement over the previous game. The main menu background is pretty cool & innovative too, always dynamic to wherever you left off. Loading times & screens are practically non-existent, just as with the first game. There are some puzzles which I could not figure out on my own, since their design wasn't intuitive enough. I had to look up the solution to some environmental puzzles, which is something I never had to do for the first game. This problem is exacerbated by how the game would occasionally crash when I try Alt-Tabbing out of it to my browser. Something else I noticed - character mouth movement is nearly always rigid & choppy for some weird reason. If that was intentional, that was a mistake, since it sure doesn't look natural. In your inventory, equipment pictures are often not representative of the actual design when they are equipped. While there are some really badass equipment designs, a lot of them are repetitive, are exactly the same design, or just make a small modification to a design. There are too limited a number of equipment designs for the sheer amount of equipment you come across. Also, you cannot preview the equipment in the inventory without actually equipping it first, which is pretty dumb. Even stupider is how the character preview does not zoom out when you have a heavy weapon equipped, so nearly all of it remains obscured by the interface - you can't even get a clear picture when rotating your character with long weapons like hammers or axes.

In the end, I'm pretty split regarding this game. While I greatly enjoyed so much of it, especially the puzzle platforming, there was an equal amount of devastatingly faulty aspects that detracted from the experience. It's a great puzzle platformer & combat game, but a pretty horrid loot-fest game with a ton of bad game design decisions. So my suggestion is that if after reading this review, you still want to play it, then go for it. Just don't be surprised when you realize that there are so many bad aspects to this game.