The New Classics #69: Darksiders Genesis

 

The Backstory: The whole Darksiders series was recently ported to the Switch, allowing us portable aficionados to discover it at long last. I was drawn in by the lush graphics and the Hack’n’slashy gameplay; and while I managed to resist the urge to purchase all four entries at once, I sure hoped that my experience with Genesis would prompt such a purchase.

 

 

The Game: That’s a gorgeous game allright, full of vibrant colours and lovely details. That being said, it’s also very obviously a game that was designed for home consoles and PCs — in other words, for fat, wide screens. The MC sprite occupies the tiniest part of the screen — a screen that, in the Switch Lite’s case, is not that huge to begin with. I have top-notch eyesight, and yet I found myself bothered by that lilliputian sprite. 

 

 

I could have gotten used to it, mind you; but other things bothered me as well. Things such as the confusing layout, which had me going in circles, or the MC’s speed, which was a little too low for my taste and made crossing areas a chore rather than a thrill. Talking about this, the ratio between the size of environments and the size of the MC sprite is way too skewed in favour of the former for my taste. Also, enemies are too few and far between, meaning that you spend too much time running around and trying to find your way and not enough time hacking and slashing. 

 

 

The Verdict: Although I was really intrigued at first, it dawned on me after a bit of playing that I was simply not enjoying myself after all. I’m a bit disappointed, because Genesis has a lot of things going for it; however, not all is lost. The things that bother me in Genesis may be absent from its predecessors; and so, I will check other Darksiders entries before swearing off the whole series — and by ‘check’, I mean study them through pictures, gameplay videos and reviews, and commit to a purchase if I like what I find. Greedy little me is becoming sensible, hooray!