Good Demo/Bad Demo for the week of Feb. 22nd
Yay, I got a video capture card! That means these screen caps will look a bit better. Click on the smaller images to get a full view of the thumbnails.
This is a massive week, because there are a couple of big demos available. My first of 3 good demos is Darksiders: Wrath of War.
Read on!
Dante's Inferno got quite a bit of crap for being a blatant God of War clone. If it had done it like Darksiders, maybe it would have been taken more seriously. Darksiders is inspired by action titles like GoW, but it also does more exploration, which also lead to it being compared to The Legend of Zelda.
Darksiders is its own monster, though. First off, main character War looks more like he belongs in Gears of War or Starcraft, and not an action adventure game. You can thank comics artist Joe Maduiera for those designs.
Darksiders is about War, one of the four horsemen, after he has been betrayed. Being, you know, the GOD OF WAR, he has quite a varied selection of weapons available to him. In the demo, I was surprised that I had so many weapons I could use.
Besides the character design, the colors are also what stands out. This is quite a brilliantly colored game. There may be monsters and dreary locales, but that doesn't stop Darksiders from looking pretty.
This demo was really good, if a bit late. Darksiders was available in stores a while before this game came out, but putting out this demo was a good idea. Now I want to at least rent this game!
Speaking of the God of War, here's God of War 3!
The big daddy of third person beat-em ups is back for its third (and most likely, last) iteration. When you first play the demo, you may feel like it's more of the same, but there are both massive graphical improvements and a big dialing up of the gore.
Now that I think of it, maybe the Darksiders demo was deliberately released at the same time as the God of War 3 demo? Pretty sneaky!
OK, back to the gore. This is only a demo, but I think it's safe to say that Kratos is not playing around. If guts spilling out makes you queasy, you can be excused from playing GoW 3.
To catch you up on the GoW 3 story, Kratos is mad. VERY MAD! You start the demo with all the weapons Kratos forcibly ripped from various gods, men and monsters. As the demo continues, it only gets more difficul. The hardest part is when you use your wings to navigate through a deadly maze, which angered and fired me up all at once.
If you avoided God of War for this long, I think you can still pick this up without knowing about the previous plot points. It helps to know why Kratos is so mad that he would rip peoples' heads off, but it's not absolutely necessary. If you don't play this demo, Kratos will probably feed you your own spine. Probably.
Digger HD
I feel like my Good Demo/Bad Demo premise is slipping away from me, because I didn't think Digger HD was bad at all. It hearken's back to the past, but now it's a side-scrolling game with 3d character models.
Digger HD is good for people who want to purchase a title that hits their nostalgia spot. You might also want to show your kids what they missed out on in the "good ol' days." Everyone else should steer clear. This is a simple game where you roam around like Pac Man, collecting riches and avoiding underground monsters.
That's it for this week. Next week is Just Cause 2!
