Darksiders II: Death Lives Preview

Developer: Vigil Games / Publisher: THQ / Release date: Summer 2012 / Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii U

AND HELL FOLLOWED WITH HIM

In the original Darksiders we saw War personified and wronged by the so-named ‘Charred Council’ for allegedly conspiring to jump the gun on the start of the Apocalypse. Turns out that, among the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War’s closest sibling and staunchest supporter is none other than Death himself—pretty much by definition the last guy in the universe you want scrawling your name on his Shit List.

Last week, we attended the preview gala for Darksiders II in the gorgeous upper theater/ballroom at the Regency Center in San Francisco (an event prefaced by a mini-lecture on the depictions of Death, as a figure, in art, spanning various eras and cultures throughout history). In Darksiders II you take the role of Death as he kills his way through various realms on a quest to right the massive wrong perpetrated against War.

While still firmly grounded in third-person hack-and-slash, the action-adventure proceedings this time around also take on all kinds of new elements—some subtle, some less so. For starters, Darksiders II boasts a ‘Make Your Own Death’ feature that allows you to customize your own Horsemen Death. Slayer, Necromancer and Wanderer armor-sets are roughly analogous to the expected high-fantasy character-class tropes (tank, magic-user, rogue), and you can further customize the experience by choosing between the Harbinger and Necromancer skill-trees. That’s right, “skill trees”—Darksiders II introduces a welcome smattering of new RPG-lite elements to add depth and replayability; these include, among other things, copious ‘loot’ from fallen foes, traversal challenges in the vein of Prince of Persia‘s wall-running, NPC interaction, and even detailed, presumably-worth-finding side-quests.

Death, himself, plays something of a new game here; he is considerably more agile than his heavily armored, martial-minded brother War; as such, he lacks War’s ability to block, but gains all kinds of unprecedented mobility. For starters, he can evade attacks by dodging in any direction, or close a smallish gap between himself and an enemy in melee combat; he can also jump about in combat, fling his dual-wielded scythes as ranged weapons (only to have them boomerang neatly back to him), and instantly combine the scythes into a single longer, polearm-style weapon. In addition to his traditional scythes, Death can equip and employ secondary weapons (we saw him take down a large number flying things with some manner of gun—not particularly powerful, but a high rate of fire and some distance between you and the enemy can make up for a lot).

Further, Death can also engage in mounted combat while riding his trusty steed Despair (although he does obviously lose his Evade ability while so engaged). We also saw him ‘pilot’ a surreal, floating arrangement of armor pieces and detached limb-like extremities magically/gyroscopically balanced on what looked like some kind of glowing-lava trackball (for all purposes, the game’s answer to powered armor). When even that isn’t enough, if you opt for the magic-slinging Necromancer skill-tree you can go especially nuts with the game’s variety of spells (because nothing throws a meat wrench in your enemy’s plans quite like suddenly calling up a horde of highly explosive zombies to swarm his ass).

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, Death gains mad parkour skills in Darksiders II. Whole sizable chunks of the game are so-called traversal areas, generating wall-run dashes across narrow beams, bouncing off walls, climbing pillars, and employing Death’s special Ghost Hand, which serves as a kind of supernatural grappling-hook for latching on to distant protrusions and Peter-Parkering across large gaps.

The developers at Vigil are saying Darksiders II will provide in excess of 20 hours of gameplay, which apparently does not include those large side-quests (set, as I mentioned, in areas so impressively large that at first we thought we were looking at main open-world areas of the game). Darksiders II also gleefully hops on the big bosses bandwagon—nothing quite so extreme as the walking-continent baddies of God of War—at least from what we saw last week—but the producer dropped more than a few hints to the effect that, to paraphrase, we hadn’t seen nuthin yet. So, like, yeah. Darksiders II: Death Lives is slated to bring you a second viewing of the Apocalypse sometime in 2012—so at least the Mayan calendar and Revelation can agree on that. Check back with the Book of Machinima for more updates on the coming Apocalypse.

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