The top-down map design isn't that legible it's hard to know what walls are climbable and even where to go in some cases. I won't lie: I found my playtime with Darksiders: Genesis often tedious. "We would love to do it, but for now it's the first dipping our toe into the pool having these two horsemen be playable simultaneously, and it's been a challenge you know making it fun for two players." If they would double our budget and schedule, that would be awesome," he says with a chuckle. I mention this, and note that I assumed it would be the sort of game where eventually all four horsemen would be playable, much like the original vision the first Darksiders had. I missed the spiel from Madureira and company.
Playing the demo, I wasn't informed that Darksiders: Genesis was supposed to be played co-op, as a representative from THQ Nordic simply activated the demo on the PC I had finished another game's demo on. Meanwhile, co-op spawns in unique puzzles that require War and Strife to work together. In single-player, that second lever doesn't exist it's just one.
In one example Madureira explains, if someone is playing co-op they'll have to each pull a separate lever and keep them down to, say, open a door. Multiplayer will also urge players to work together to solve puzzles. And you can't both be Strife, it's either you pick one or the other." Madureira assures me that despite the obvious leg up in playing co-op, overcoming bosses and playing the whole game single-player is possible too. "And then in multiplayer, you don't have to worry about that because you're both there. "So in single-player there is sort of a strategy of when to switch to each horseman to use them to the best of their ability in that situation," says Madureira. "But obviously we don't have the level of loot drops of Diablo games," Madureira adds. In co-op, this dual effort is allegedly helpful in large-scale battles especially boss fights-as I learned the hard way with many deaths and zero victories in a boss-specific demo where I wrestled an intimidating foe on a bed of gold treasure.ĭarksiders: Genesis leans closer to RPGs than its predecessors, with skill trees and ability upgrades.
War, meanwhile, feels more familiar if you're nostalgic for the first Darksiders, with a heavy sword and a knack for crowd control. Abilities run on a cooldown, which makes switching between characters handy in single-player. Strife is a character who is at his best in one-on-one battles, and has pistols and other weapons that hone in on single targets. It's also meant to be played co-op, but in my extended demo I played solo, switching between War and Strife on the fly with a button press. That changed over time, as the combat shifted more to a Diablo hack-and-slash style, only with a more Darksiders-esque, arcade-like simplicity. "The very, very initial one sentence pitch for it was like Tomb Raider: Guardians of Light with Darksiders," Madureira says.
Instead, it takes on a top-down perspective, and has a lighter hack-and-slash feel. | Airship Syndicate/THQ Nordicĭarksiders: Genesis is a very different sort of game from the 3D action-adventure game players may be anticipating. Darksiders: Genesis has a new perspective. While Darksiders slipped away from his creative control, it's returned with Darksiders: Genesis, to be published by THQ Nordic. He's known largely for his work in comics, from Uncanny X-Men to the ill-fated Battle Chasers, the latter of which he helped adapt into a video game at his studio Airship Syndicate in 2017.
While Madureira had no part of Darksiders 3, he helped found the series as creative director of Darksiders at Vigil Games. He introduces a little humor into the series." Strife is sort of this loud mouth, he's the funny one. Then we brought back War, who was from the first Darksiders, so hopefully there'll be a lot of nostalgia there. "And so we introduce Strife, who has not been playable before. "From the very, very beginning in DS1, we thought, like, 'We're going to make a game where the four horsemen are playable.' And that has still not been realized to this day by anyone, but at least in our game you get to play as two of the four," Joe Madureira, the studio creative director at Airship Syndicate, tells me of the new game. It stars War, the familiar protagonist of the first Darksiders from 2010, and Strife, the fourth horseman who is playable for the first time. It's Darksiders: Genesis, a co-op prequel to the Darksiders series set immediately after the council has initiated the horsemen. It's not Darksiders 4 though, even if it does finally let us play as the fourth horseman. THQ Nordic has an estimated 80 games in development, and one of them-surprise-is a new Darksiders game.