Daksiders 2: Deathinitive Edition remastered

I absolutely LOVE the Darksiders franchise so when a chance came up for me to get a remastered version of one of my favorite games of all time popped up for under $10, I jumped at it. It has been long enough since I last played this game that I don't remember really any of the stuff that is going on so that much is good. The bad news is that this game that was originally released in 2012 for the PS3, even with the remastering, is looking and feeling quite dated compared to modern-day games and despite my love for the game in general, I think it is pretty unlikely that I am going to continue playing it for much longer.

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I love the idea of playing as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the powers and brutality that you have as Death in this game were pretty impressive a decade ago. Unfortunately now, the graphics, despite being pepped up for newer systems, seem pretty grainy and lame compared to what we have grown accustomed to these days.

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The gameplay is still fine and maybe I am being a bit fussy here, but expectations change a LOT over the course of nearly 10 years and even with whatever improvements they made, this game still just seem kind of lame in a graphical sense.

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Here's an example: Can you guess which one is the original and which one is the "remastered" version? Because I can't tell. It doesn't appear as though they changed all that much and maybe that is why I was able to get it for so cheap. It was originally re-released for around $30 and for those that never played the original, I think it was probably a good experience. However, it get's worse.

The game frequently experiences framerate issues as well as excessive loading screens that sometimes happen just in the middle of wandering around. Seeing as how the game hasn't really changed all that much from a graphical perspective and the fact that it is now on a vastly superior machine (PS3 vs PS4) I find this to be inexcusable.

Now, let's get into problems that the game has that was evident in the first released that were not corrected in the re-release.

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This game is trying to be "open world" but it really isn't. The areas that you are meant to travel to next are only accessible once you have (insert whatever item here) so wandering towards later areas is simply an exercise in futility: You reach a wall or something or other that you can't break through without that item and wandering over there was simply a waste of time. Also, there is a whole lot of this in your future if you play this game.

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The various temples and dungeons that you have to complete are unnecessarily far apart from one another and therefore you spend a great deal of time just jumping on your horse and running to that place with very little happening in between. There might be a chest you can open for some normally irrelevant goodies or some enemies that you can try to run past or fight them for xp if you want but herein lies another problem: No matter how powerful you become, even if you can one-hit-kill them later in the game, these enemies are still capable of knocking you off your horse with a single hit. At this point in the game, it is just an irritating battle because you can not get back on your horse until you have killed all of them and sometimes they are tedious flying creatures that are just a pain to focus on and kill, once again, with a single shot.

Also, upon completion of a dungeon or area you are almost always required to return to "town" in order to talk to someone who is going to tell you where you have to proceed to next. It isn't always evident which of them you are meant to talk to either so you may just end up wandering the city for what seems like ages when in all honesty they really should have included an option to just teleport to that person. It's not like there is anything that would otherwise kill you before you can get to them since most of the city is filled with nothing at all, let alone enemies. This starts to feel like you are doing "fetch quests" after the 17th time you have to do it and this is one thing I find unacceptable in any game.

If there is nothing that is going to thwart you between where you are and where you are going it is just irritating when a game makes you do a bunch of walking.

The voice acting is pretty fantastic in this game, I will give them that. But then again, it was in the original already so nothing has really changed here.

tl;dr

Even though I was able to acquire this game for something really low like $7 or so, I feel as though it isn't worth it. They claim that this is a remastered version of the game but the graphics look basically identical to the original. The fact that there is any rogue-loading at all in this game, given the fact that the PS4 is much more powerful than the PS3, is completely unacceptable and it kind of just makes me feel as though THQ was simply going for a cash grab when they pushed this out there. Also, if you want to make an open-world game, make one of those! But don't pretend to be open world when there are things getting in your way that make only one destination possible at any particular point in the game. There is some reason for backtracking once you upgrade your arsenal but mostly this is just for chests or collectibles that isn't going to appeal to most gamers that I know.

If you have never played Darksiders 2 this might be ok for you because the story and the characters are pretty great but I think it is a real stretch, if not an outright lie, to claim that this game has been remastered.