I like to imagine myself as a great connoisseur of video games. And while there are many flavors of games available to me, I find that the games that cleanse my palette tend to be those that are more unique in their format than anything else. [Can you tell it's close to lunch time?]
Taking a few days to go over the notes I took while in Santa Monica for E3, I realize that I keep going back over my notes for the same few games over and over again. Not because my notes suck or that my drunken penmanship leaves anything to be desired, but because I get more and more excited each time I read over my notes for those titles. One of those yummy/unique titles happens to be Darksiders: Wrath of War.
Let me get the business out of the way so we can talk about what I find interesting about this title. Darksiders is a single player action title that will out sometime in fall of 08 for the XB360 and PS3 console systems. Made by THQ's in house development studio Vigil Studios penned by Joe "The Man" Madureira. Joe is responsible for some of my more favorite Uncanny X-Men comic books so it should not have been a surprise to me that Darksiders would have been the type of game that grabbed my attention.
Darksiders is set in post-apocalyptic Earth [all action titles must start post-apocalypse, it's the law] but instead of being the requisite lone "badass" human that is out to save what is left of humanity, in this game you are War, one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.
Right off the bat I know that I am going to like this game.
It's not that I don't like being a goody-two-shoes hero, [I do] but I value the fact that I'm going to get to play a character that probably lives in that grey/dark grey/ok, dark-charcoal area between good and evil. I think that creating a story for a game that has the player walking the fine line and gives them the ability to choose how far into the light or dark they venture is a title worth investing in.
As War, you start the game battling Abaddon in a duel that ends with your defeat and loss of many of your Horsemen powers. You spend the rest of the game questing for revenge against Abaddon and recovery of your powers. At E3 I got to spend some time with Vigil's general manager David Adams who walked me through an early level of the game that flowed wonderfully.
It was obvious that the developers were going for the God of War action style while trying to take advantage of what the XB360 and PS3 architectures had to offer. The demo I got was on the XB360 system and the environments looked amazing and were surprisingly interactive. Items that weren't nailed down could be used as weapons in a fight or to solve puzzles. Adams said that there wasn't a lot of puzzle solving that was going to be involved in the final game but that Vigil wanted to make sure that any inclusion of mini games/puzzles added to the storyline without complicating the gameplay. As I stated earlier, the environments are yummy but they aren't trying to be super realistic and I respect that as well. I don't need to be beaten over the head with a bunch of polygons to appreciate a good story or depth of a character.
That being said, I shuddered a little bit when I started hearing more details about the storyline. In this day and age any game title that starts using the bible as material for the storyline makes me nervous. Why? Well, with the wrap that videogames are taking in the media and from the likes of the Jack Thompson's of the world basing a game on the book of revelation may just invite in an even more brutal “moral” advocate group. You know what I'm getting at. Scrutiny from the religious right with Thompson leading the way could make it very difficult for this game to gain the attention that it should in my opinion. After reading an interview done with Adams in a recent issue of GameInformer I think they are well aware of how much headache they may be in for. In the interview Madureira tries to stress how much this game is, “...our own fiction...” and that they [the developers] did, “...not follow the bible or get religious with it.” Which, from what I've seen they are pulling off. Darksiders does not follow any doctrine, nor does it try to create any of it's own.
Labels: Apocalypse, Darksiders, E3, Hands-On-Demo, Ninjasistah, THQ, Videogames
Finish what you start...
