Darksiders: The Art of Plagiarism

Darksiders wasn’t a game that we had looked forward to playing, somehow it missed our radar and then landed in our lap after all the good things and bad things we have heard about it, two contradicting views that got us intrigued. Our verdict is that it isn’t a bad game, and depending on what kind of gamer you are, it might even be worth your time or money. I’ll get right to the point and say it, Darksiders lacks a soul, just like the name Darksiders lack inspiration — not to say that the name of the game is the sole reason for its soullessness, it is just a terribly bad decision for a supposedly blockbuster title . Darksiders plays decent and well enough, which is why we are not going to drill down to dissecting those tiny details right now, and what makes Darksiders devoid of a soul, is where it draws inspiration from and how it utilizes those inspiration — and inspiration is perhaps too conceptualized and vague  a word,   plagiarism is more appropriate.

Frankly it isn’t a crime to copy other people’s ideas and built upon it into something glorious, like the building block of human civilization. The problem with Darksiders’ copying is that each pieces of the game is copied from somewhere else, and the developer Vigil Games does not even bother trying to be subtle about it, like a bank robber blatantly waving his gun at the bank teller not even bothering to put  a mask on — Darksiders add no personality of its own and does not bring any new gameplay to the table of the gaming world. The core structure of the gamplay is lifted right off Legend of Zelda, so calling this a Zelda-clone wouldn’t be too far off the mark. There are a lot of Zelda clones out there, many of them great games, especially on the Gamecube/PS2 generation, but none of them strike as close to being a clone as Darksiders — because of it shamelessly lifting the boomerang and multi-Z-targeting right from Ocarina of Time, not to mention the hook-shot, and the puzzle solving involve them, especially bomb puzzles that involves targeting a flame first and then igniting the bomb with your boomerang — oh it isn’t called the boomerang in the game, but the real name escaped me, it just was neither original nor interesting. Oh there’s more, since you play the Horseman War, you ride a horse that’s not called Epona, sure your fiery hellish black mount is meaner and tougher than most other horses, and there were 1 or 2 boss fights that will cleverly involve the way you use your mount which will remind you of Shadow of the Colossus boss fight sequences involving the horse — this is exactly the problem, you will never remember Darksiders years from now, you will remember the sources it drew its inspiration from, like oldies that make you remember other oldies that remind you of your fond memories of your first date with your spouse.

You will probably hear that it plays kind of like God of War, well it does, maybe because the main character is actually called War, and when you kill enemies, soul orbs balloons out in a colorful explosion — you might have first seen that in Onimusha, and then God of War borrowed it with just one tiny modification — it didn’t make you press a button to  to suck them in, the elimination of the more-than-a-gimmick chore was godsend. Darksiders feels exactly like God of War in that aspect, and it lacked the improvement God of War made over Onimusha, it just felt like an inferior clone. God of War took a lot of from the Rygar PS2 remake, from setting to weapon to perspective — but you wouldn’t call God of War a Rygar clone with Onimusha-like gameplay, then why is playing Darksiders feel like purchasing pirating software in a Chinese computer super-mall? Part of the reason is that the characters are bland and I can’t seem to find myself to care about them. The voice acting is decent enough, with a very professional cast, but their talent is wasted on simply bad character design — even the writing is excellent, just how do you screw up good writing and voice works? You need stars to align badly, and the hammer of god, of war, to make that happen — the design choice was simply questionable. War looked like a glob of muscle covered in mismatched armor — almost Gears of War’s main character like, except in Gears, you didn’t need to care about Marcus and the gang, you just shot the damn aliens, but in Darksiders at least I tried desperately to feel for War, but I just couldn’t.  Not to mention the combo system is just too simple — mostly everything can be done with 1 button, and while you can use another button for sub-weapons, there isn’t any special combination to link them up, which would have made the game infinitely more fun. At the end of the day, I used my dash attack move a lot and kept spamming the same combo over and over again and I didn’t even have to block much.

The rest of the game feels a bit like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, where Darksiders’ uninteresting story draws inspiration from, with mention of angels and conspiracies and apocalyptic endgame scenarios. Not to mention, War’s double jump and gliding mechanics is lifted right off Soul Reaver’s Raziel and his broken wing — there is even a sequence where War plugs the wing off  Azrael’s (not Raziel) back which will much remind you much of Kain and Raziel — not to say that Darksides’ developers copied even that, it is just they have conjured up this mess of a block of  myriad jigsaw puzzle made of all other games you might or might not have played before — with the lack of its own personality, it is hard to remember the identity of the game you are playing, or even the bland characters who are central actors in this drama of a ever unfolding struggle of heaven and hell.

Did I mention, towards the end of the game, you obtain a portal gun, which you can’t use everywhere but only on specific portals, combine that with Soul Reaver-like beam and mirror puzzles with Zelda boomerang and bomb puzzles, hell, throw in Sands of Time slowing mechanics, there, you can probably imagine how the game plays out instead of playing the actual game.

At the end, weather you will enjoy Darksiders, greatly depends on whether you will take offense on how unoriginal it is, and whether you can see past that and think of it as an exercise, a prelude, to living the memories of the good old gaming days.

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