In Darksiders 3, we’re in control of a new horse…person of the apocalypse. In the first game we had control of War, with his huge sword. In the second we had Death, an assassin-like character with daggers. Now, Darksiders 3 features Fury, and she’s as smart as her chain-link whip.
You’re tasked with taking down the Seven Deadly Sins, and you can see the first one in the above gameplay video. You can get an idea of what the combos are like, with quick attacks leading into slower swings with a bit more range. Devil May Cry-esque air combos seem like an option against weaker enemies, and perhaps there’ll be more safety against melee enemies when airborne.
There’s a lot of lush greens for an apocalypse. It looks beautiful, but the fiery hellscape of the end times is no where to be seen, as skyscrapers succumb to overgrowth.Fury also uses the chain whip to traverse this environment, grappling onto poles and swinging from platform to precarious platform.
We got the chance to take on Envy in our play session, a boss fight that progresses across the terrain as she taunts and evades Fury. Envy is a beak-faced hag with a staff that acts like an axe, and lots of AoE magic at her disposal. We didn’t have too much trouble darting close in between her attacks, but it made us think that there are situations when the range of our whip chain will absolutely be necessary.
Capturing Envy inside her own amulet allows us to use the item to find the now-Six Deadly Sins. It’s a setup for the rest of the game, and we’re warned that Envy was by far the weakest of our enemies.
We expect Darksiders 3 will branch out into maybe more environment types and even gameplay styles in the levels that follow. Darksiders 2 was hugely ambitious in scope, with elements of everything from Zelda, to Diablo, to even Shadow of the Colossus. There were a lot of games in that game.
We can’t say if Darksiders 3 is aiming for the same epic scale or if it has something more tight and coherent planned. Our bet is on the former though — it’s the same folks at Gunfire Games making this one, many of whom were with the franchise from the beginning at Vigil.
As we see more of the game we’ll be able to tell if it truly has the scope of its predecessor. But it has also recently declared its intent on the extremely crowded release window of late November — for the time-poor masses of late 2018, an exceedingly long game might actually be a harder sell.
