DARKSIDERS III
Don’t like it. Never tried it. Every month we force one of our team to play their most feared game
Fury is a lady who knows what she wants. The angriest of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, she just wants to use her thorny whip, the Barbs Of Scorn, to mess people up. I can respect that. As she makes her meteoric descent upon Earth to sort out the Seven Sins I’m just as ready to crack my whip and dig my heels into demons as she is.
What I’m less prepared for, after I make a descent from an overgrown tree into a subway and some sewers, is just how fractured my furious combat will be. Quite how Fury has the patience to pick through multicoloured bugs to throw them at walls of matching colours, or to slowly crawl her way through vent shafts, I have no idea. I certainly don’t, and I’m not the one literally named Fury.
Things pick up when I receive new powers from the Lord Of Hollow, which handily changes Fury’s hair colour at the press of a button (a deep orange for her first power: flames). With an extra weapon in hand Fury’s moves feel much more like real combos. But then there’s more dire puzzling to do between the button-mashing fights. And developers: making a cute, wry comment about how puzzles always require the player to find three objects doesn’t then mean you can get away with making them do it!
By this point the lack of combat depth has become obvious. Mash, mash, mash, dodge. Another hair colour means Fury can now access parts of the world that were blocked off before – she can reach Sloth across a canyon. Perfect. Let’s just take a look at the map to see the areas she couldn’t get to before. Ah, wait. There is no map. For a game that requires backtracking to progress, I finally feel worthy of the name Fury myself. Talk about sins.
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PUZZLES INVOLVING SLOWLY THROWING BUGS?