DARKSIDERS III
Ian Dean visits Gunfire Games to discover how Darksiders III is putting the series back on the right path
Hands-on with Gunfire Games’ action adventure. Feel the Fury!
As we’re shown around Gunfire Games’ offices, the single-floor studio bustling with coders and artists, it’s clear they’re all in good spirits. Many worked at Vigil Games, where there would have been 250 people beavering away. Here there are only 40, but that suits the studio founders. The former Darksiders devs are back on the franchise they launched at Vigil but, like the new studio’s name and size, this third instalment is something different.
“It’s where we want to be,” says a smiling David Adams, president and co-founder of Gunfire, and co-creator of Darksiders. “When we were working on Darksiders II I’d sometimes see someone in the corridor and ask myself ‘do they work here?’, but now I know everyone, and it’s great.”
As befits the smaller studio, the premise of Darksiders III has been stripped of the bluster of the first two titles in the series. Running parallel to the events of those games, you’re now playing as Fury, sister to Horsemen War and Death, on a mission to kill the Seven Deadly Sins.
The compact development team means everyone can chip in with ideas, and it also suggests why things are different this third time around. The large-ish open world hubs and soft RPG elements of Darksiders II are gone, as is the division between puzzle rooms and gated combat arenas – all ideas we also saw resurface in the recently rebooted God Of War.
Instead Darksiders III is a Metroidvania. It’s one continuous world map that rolls back in on itself, with treasure rooms teased in the distance – and even boss fights to come are foreshadowed if you explore the horizon. Turning one corner we spy Sloth sitting on his throne of crabs in the distance across a chasm. “You’ll get to fight that guy later in the map,” interjects Adams as we ponder how to reach the Sin.
“THE OPEN WORLDS ARE GONE, AS IS THE DIVISION BETWEEN PUZZLE ROOMS AND COMBAT ARENAS.”
WALK THE LINE
Gunfire isn’t remotely afraid to take the series in a new direction. As Adams explains, the devs have done it before: “When Darksiders II came
out people were like, ‘What’s all this RPG crap doing in my Darksiders game?’ You’ve got to take some risks or else the games become stale. But you’ve got to walk the line between risk and not completely betraying what makes the franchise what it is.”
Our extended hands-on suggests Gunfire is strolling that line with confidence. Certainly, Darksiders never looked this good before. Now running on Unreal instead of Vigil’s old Watchman engine, Darksiders III offers a beautifully lit, nuanced world.
As we play through an early stage set in an long-abandoned underground tunnel, the colours are surprisingly bright and crisp. Whereas Darksiders II would drift into muddy browns occasionally, here we’re treated to blue and purple hues – it’s an apocalypse, for sure, but one that’s been let loose with a Dulux colour chart.
“It’s Earth, but it’s way cooler,” chips in Adams. “On our Earth there’s not these catacombs filled with the undead and glowing swords. It’s the same thing as The Goonies – in the real world there’s not actually buried pirate ships and organs with cool puzzles on them, but it’s the world, only cooler. We kind of follow that logic, in addition to putting in the angel and demon stuff, the human stuff is super-fantastical.”
PUZZLE FIGHTER
That ‘Earth but cooler’ mantra is put to the test as we push further into our hands-on. The rubble-strewn underground tunnels we’ve grown accustomed to give way to rocky caverns filled with lava rivers and waterfalls. But it’s in these deeper dungeons that Gunfire’s Goonies love bubbles to the surface.
We unlock a gate that opens into a vast hall. A towering stone statue lies at the centre, and three smaller statues sit in front of it on a plinth. Two are missing their swords. Our Darksiders muscle memory kicks in: to move the
statue and progress we need to find and replace these missing swords. It’s easier said than done, as unlike in Darksiders II there are no gated enemies, no split between puzzling and fighting, it’s all happening at once.
“This one is way more organic [than DarkSiders II]. You’re fighting guys and solving a puzzle at the same time. We try to interweave it – some areas are equivalent to Darksiders and Darksiders II in the puzzle density, but some areas are more combat-centric,” says Adams, adding: “It’s about situational characters, not waves. Learning the maps and enemy placements, these are continuous levels, not gated enemy encounters.”
It offers a curious contradiction: it’s not as open as Darksiders II, but in many ways playing Darksiders III feels freer. On a first run you’re unsure where enemies will come from, there’s no gate slamming on an arena to let you know ‘this is the fighty bit’, and boss encounters can come at any moment. The higher-level enemies have intro cinematics to let you know you’re in for a real scrap.
It’s a setup that can even be usurped. One tricky moment, to reach the statue room, means defeating a mini-boss guarding a gate on a ledge above a lava pool. One good hit and we’re sent tumbling to our toasty doom. After being burnt by this brute one too many times we get cheeky, and run past him and jump at the gate’s lock, smashing it open. You’ll need brains and brawn to see all of Darksiders III’s secrets.
If you want to kill this guard, you can return at any time once you’ve levelled up and are feeling confident. It’s a play on risk and reward that stretches to the game’s core goal of defeating each Sin, as you can tackle them in any order.
“Take them at your pace,” says John Pearl, design director. “Every time you kill a Sin it levels the world up; your power curve begins to grow away from the world, then you kill a Sin and it resets to match you.”
GRACE AND DANGER
With the focus now placed on combat, it’s good to discover some of the shortfalls of Darksiders II have been wiped away. The camera, even when you’re not actively targeting an enemy, is rather more intelligent than in Darksiders II and rarely leaves us flailing at unseen creatures lurking somewhere off-screen.
There’s a familiarity to the setup, too. Locking onto a target is again done using p and dodge on u – Fury satisfyingly cartwheels away from danger, but with more weight than Death’s lithe flips; get the timing right and you can access a swift but deadly counter-attack.
The animation is fantastic too, leaving us feeling like a goddess of war after just a few jabs of r. Fury’s
prime weapon, her magical whip, has just the right amount of sweep and timing to make every connection with a demonic foe feel powerful – there’s a wonderful half-second pause as she swings the whip over her head, which offers a tangible momentum to the weapon’s crack.
“The animation is one of the of the first things we worked on and one of the last things we check in,” says Pearl, highlighting the care being taken to ensure Fury feels ‘just right’ in combat.
Fury is a far cry from the tank-like brawling of Darksiders’ War, and a refinement of Death’s acrobatic necromancing. She’s somewhere in between her two brothers; solid but agile and able to deliver some intense area affect attacks.
As you progress through the game Fury’s skills will develop, unlocking new whip combos as well as secondary weapon types, which come in the shape of Hollows – magical upgrades that elementally transform the third Horseman. We unlock the fiery Hollow, which turns Fury into a literal flame-haired warrior. This form offers access to nunchuks to deliver faster attacks, and like Death you can combine weapons on the fly with r and w to create combinations of broad sweeps and fast, focused attacks.
Continuing with the idea of blending conundrums and combat together, Hollows can be hot-swapped on the go and used to solve puzzles or access previously treacherous areas of the world. Those lava pools we feared earlier in our play? We can now wade into them to reach hidden locations.
If you do want some traditional Darksiders dungeon puzzling, it’s all still here. The exploding balls return from Death’s adventure. In one room, they’re combined with flammable webs that act like fuses, timed with a pressure pad and revolving door at the far end of the chamber, to create an explosive domino effect to unlock the next room.
And scale hasn’t eluded Fury’s adventure. Returning to the large stone statue with the final sword, and placing it into the smaller statue’s hands, the giant comes to life. It twists and turns and spirals into the ceiling to reveal an escape route from this dungeon – 50 feet above our head. As the dust settles we ask ourselves, ‘How do we get up there?’
“FURY’S PRIME WEAPON, HER MAGICAL WHIP, HAS JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF SWEEP AND TIMING.”