If it wasn't for Borderlands 2 coming out next month, I'd call Darksiders 2 my favorite game of the year.
Yeah, I finished it and it was pretty damn good. RPG elements aren't groud-breaking, but add enough customization and strategy that it feels more detailled than yet another GOW clone, and the itemization is surprisingly decent. Some unique weapons have some interesting quirks, such ass les damage but massively increased critical damage and lifesteal on crit, or boosting gold, or stealing Wrath (mana), or my favourite, a big fuck-off mace that looks wicked and encases foes in a block of ice. I also liked the Possesed weapons; basically, you can sacrifice gear to empower them, and the affixes depend on what you sacrifice. Give it + crit chance items to get crit chance, + fire damage for fire damage, and so on. Makes for a good, customizable weapon that can last a long while.
The puzzles start off simple, but get more complicated, above and beyond any Zelda puzzle I remember, without ever being as frustrating as, say, the Water Temple from Ocarina. Of course, given that there's a lot of dungeons, there is some repetiton, but not too much. The game is very well paced. Also it lacks level scaling, which is nice. Being owned by an optional boss, only to return to kick its ass is always a good feeling. Speaking of optional dungeons, there's quite a few of them, but only in the first two Acts of the game; the last two are much, much more linear. It's not a Skyrim-style open world, but it's big enough not to feel like you are mindlessly walking from one location to the next.
Combat is very rapid, and gets a bit confusing with all that's on display at the same time, but a skilled player can take almost no hits, and well executed combos deal massive damage. It's very gratifying.
The plot is a bit ho-hum, the sheer of number of fetch quests that the NPCs pile up on Death (get three of this, good now three of that, oh but before that other NPC wants three of
those...) make me wonder why he doesn't just slice their arms off and gets the answers he needs out of their very last breath. Still, the writing is acceptable and the voice acting is fine, Death's actor delivers the snark very well.
All in all, a great game, much better than the first. The port is a bit bare-bones, but nothing as disastrous as Dark Soul's. I could play very well with m&kb with just a few key swaps. I strongly recommend it.
