Darksiders III (PC) – Gameplay

Darksiders III was released on November 27th, and being the first game of the franchise that I've personally played, I was definitely interested to see this newcomer in action. It's a hack-and-slash action-adventure game which relies on spamming mouse button attack combos and lots of dodging. Darksiders III can be picked up from retailers or from Steam for around £44.99 and is available for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

In the previous Darksiders games, you were able to play as War and Death, the two previous protagonists who make up two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. However, in this newest released Darksiders game, you play as the female horseman known as Fury – and let me tell you, she is pretty awesome!

I was a little bit nervous when starting up the game because I hadn't played the previous games, so I was really hoping this wouldn't be a factor when it came to understanding the plot. Without loads of spoilers, the purpose of the game is to destroy the powerful enemies known as the ‘Seven Deadly Sins'.

During my play through, I managed to encounter the bosses Envy and Wrath, while I got a little glimpse of Sloth but didn't make it far enough to fight him. I do definitely love this idea of the main bad guys of the game being the ‘seven deadly sins' and you have to go against them. It's mentioned in the game that the last time went Fury up against them, she needed all the Horsemen. However, Fury is the only one that's able to go after them now, but the game doesn't go into too much detail as to where the other Horsemen are, but maybe that is something that the previous games do explain.

In terms of the overall visual quality, the graphics definitely look rather good. It's not the hands-down best looking game ever, but generally it looks very good considering its art style – it's not a game that is supposed to look hyper-realistic, but it still looks overall slick enough to impress.

Going through the initial starting area took me a while to get my bearings together with moving around and dodging the mobs. It's definitely good if you dodge lots, but I just couldn't really get the hang of knowing exactly when to press shift at the right time to do a successful dodge. Clearly something that I'm not very good at… The game is also very heavy on the mouse clicking and has a whole range of different ‘combo' attacks that you are able to do. However, it was again complicated knowing exactly what move I was doing and how to do it.. So I just happily clicked away and pressed the buttons that I deemed relevant at the time.

You are introduced to your first boss fight rather quickly, and it wasn't just about hitting them continuously. There seemed to be a breaks in the fight where you could manoeuvre yourself and get closer to strike the enemy – so a bit of thinking was required. This was a nice change to a lot of the games out there that just require you to smash weapons into the bosses over and over again to eventually defeat them. However, later on when I fought Wrath, the fight just consisted of me hitting him til he died, so it seems there is some variety when it comes to the boss fights and they're not all the same.

The game has a currency system of Souls, which is very similar to one of my favourite franchises, Dark Souls. If you do die.. you start right back at the beginning of the level and then have to go collect your Souls again, and if you die before retrieving them you lose them. This adds to the difficulty of the game and makes you want to be a tad more careful when progressing through.

You can use these Souls to either buy new healing equipment or other helpful shards that make it easier for you when it comes to fighting. Be warned though, each time you buy an item the price of that bought item increases exponentially, so you really have to be stingy if you haven't got a lot of souls.

Another use of these Souls – and to be perfectly honest, I can't pin point whether I'm a fan of the system or not – is levelling up. The merchant you come across offers to take your Souls for ‘attribute points' which you can use to either level up Heath, Strength or Arcane.

The game had a few issues within some of the cut scenes, which were rather noticeable. Characters seemed to pop in and out of the scene when the camera panned over to them, and there were also little black outs during cut scenes as well. I also found it hard to know sometimes how to get past an obstacle or barrier – there was a part of the play through where I wandered backwards and forwards for ages not knowing how to get past what clearly was the correct path to follow.

I don't expect arrows to guide me where to go, but here I had to use an exploding bug, which hadn't been explained to the user. If I hadn't gone into the key bindings and looked for a hopeful possibility of being able to use it, the play through parts that I got stuck at could've take a whole lot longer.

KitGuru says: Have any of you guys been playing the new Darksiders? This was my first game in the franchise, so is it worth going back and checking out the others as well?

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