Darksiders III

PC, PS4, Xbox One

Hidetaka Miyazaki has a lot to answer for. Sure, he wasn’t to know his games would inspire a slew of poor imitators, but we’re beginning to tire of playing modern action games that pilfer Dark Souls’ square pegs and strain to push them into round holes. Darksiders III is, in places, a brazen offender. It’s most apparent in the way returning merchant Vulgrim has essentially been repurposed as a Souls bonfire in demon form. You’ll return to him when you die, minus the souls you’d previously gathered (which must, of course, be retrieved from where you fell). And it’s there, too, in the way the game arbitrarily withholds information – before revealing all during tips that pop up on the (lengthy) loading screens. These include such pearls of wisdom as ‘Time your dodge to avoid damage.’ Thanks, Darksiders III, we’d never have guessed.

Doing her best to avoid damage is Fury, the third (and least male) of the Four Horsemen. After a short preamble, she’s forced, much to her chagrin, to find and defeat the physical manifestations of the Seven Deadly Sins. They’ve apparently been causing havoc on Earth, though there’s little evidence of that since they’re usually just waiting for you in a large arena at the end of a long stretch of smaller enemies and sub-bosses. She’s voiced well by Firewatch’s Cissy Jones, who delivers every line of dialogue with an eye-roll, a curled-lip sneer or both. And yet you might ask yourself if this is really how she should be characterised: for the most part, Fury merely seems Mildly Exasperated. You’ll understand how she feels, since she’s accompanied on her quest by a Watcher, a smug chaperone who becomes as bothersome to the player as to Fury herself. But she’s hardly the white-hot ball of rage her name would suggest.

In battle, Fury should feel like a force of nature. Yet she’s far from unstoppable. In fact, Darksiders III does its best to make her feel pitifully weak. She feels slower than Death, less powerful than War, and for someone whose getup and weapon – a long, bladed whip – makes her look like an armoured dominatrix, she isn’t really one for punishment. You’ll tap out basic square-button whip combos, interspersed with triangle for your secondary weapon, gained after defeating each of the Sins. Doing so builds a Wrath meter, though unleashing this is a double-edged sword – you do appreciably more damage, but the effects that accompany it not only make combat harder to read but tank the framerate. On a standard PS4, triggering Fury’s lightning special when surrounded by a group of enemies in one cramped little room can temporarily turn the game into a flipbook.

There are, alas, a lot of cramped little rooms with groups of enemies, which would be less of a problem if the camera were fit for purpose in claustrophobic interiors. It is not. Directional indicators for incoming blows are so small as to be almost entirely pointless, and they only alert you to melee attacks. You can lock onto individual opponents, though it’s only worth doing when you’ve cleared out the rest; dodging at the last second triggers a slo-mo effect reminiscent of Bayonetta’s Witch Time, letting you respond with a powerful counter. Yet doing so when surrounded is as likely as not to leave you wide open to the rest of the mob. In the end, the combat is neither here nor there. It lacks the mindless pleasure of a loot-hoovering buttonmasher, and it’s neither precise enough to stand close comparison with the Souls games, nor nearly as responsive as, well, Bayonetta – or the rest of PlatinumGames’ catalogue, for that matter. It does, however, have its moments. Though it takes aeons to trigger, Fury’s Havoc mode offers a fleeting cathartic release, as she finally becomes powerful and angry enough to smash smaller enemies to pieces and even tear up sub-bosses, recovering health all the while. And the fights with the Sins are impressively staged, creatively designed – the junk-hoarding Avarice is a standout – and challenging in the right ways.

Otherwise, this all-powerful Nephilim spends a lot of time crawling slowly through vents or waiting for lifts, and she has one of the feeblest double-jumps we’ve ever seen. A flame ability gives it extra height, at the cost of a long mid-air pause, during which you’re vulnerable to projectiles – and you’d better believe there’s a section with a group of annoying little gits all too keen to take advantage of that. Yet that’s typical of most enemies in Darksiders III. They’re like raised paving slabs: obstacles designed only to trip you up, causing you to swear or mutter under your breath. When this happens, rather than waste one of your Estus flask equivalents before a genuinely testing encounter, you’re often better off deliberately getting yourself killed. Defeating certain enemies will sometimes refill one of them, but there’s no guarantee that’ll happen, and reaching Vulgrim makes no difference, since he only sells consumables.

Beyond that you’ve got puzzles involving pressure plates and switches that only occasionally find the sweet spot between overly familiar and wildly obtuse, with several featuring peculiarly strict timing windows. Navigation is made more awkward by the lack of a map, though the compass at the top of the screen directing you towards the nearest Sin still makes you feel like you’re being led by the nose – at least, when it doesn’t start behaving erratically. Some of these complaints might seem picky, but collectively they turn the game into a slog. If the idea was to get you into Fury’s angry mindset, then job done – though in truth you more often feel like one of her lesser-known cousins, Boredom or Irritation. From heavy-metal Zelda to diet Souls, it’s been quite the decline. By the end, you’ll want the fourth Horseman to show up, if only to get this whole apocalypse business over and done with.

Enemies are like raised paving slabs: obstacles designed only to trip you up, causing you to mutter under your breath