This arena throws 100 waves of enemies at you, with rewards offered after every five waves. If you’re completely disinterested in everything but the combat, there’s a special place for you in Darksiders 2: The Crucible. Instead, they wasted their time wondering what kind of boulder puzzles we’d like to see. I would’ve loved to have seen another skill tree, more types of non-boss enemies, and so forth. I really wish Vigil was able to single-mindedly improve the combat. He shouldn’t be pacing back and forth looking for a pressure plate like he’s trapped in Tomb Raider 2. Death should be killing shit, that’s his thing. It’s the “promise of the premise,” to borrow a phrase from a screenwriting book. It’s why people pick up a game with a muscular grim reaper on the cover: they want to slash fools with scythes. It’s a shame that the latter is so much more common than the former.Ĭombat is what really works in Darksiders 2. Discovering how to hurt an armored colossus with its own weapon seems a lot more appropriate to the game than rolling magic boulders into magic slots. If you don’t figure out how to expose their weakpoints, you won’t even scratch them. If you can’t avoid their attacks, you’ll be wiped out quickly. Each boss fight is on some level a puzzle, with a series of mechanics to master. The puzzles are far more palatable when they’re part of combat. It feels like there aren’t enough unique puzzle pieces to fill the entire game. While this relaxed pace makes it easy to learn the ropes, it’s too slow to keep the puzzles engaging. Once you get comfortable with switches, they give you throwable bombs that can flip switches from a distance. Like the platforming, the puzzles slowly add new elements over time. It far outweighs the amount of combat in each dungeon, too. It's not a forgotten tomb anymore it's a wall run sequence followed by a climbable web next to a vertical pole. The dungeons tend to be a lot less visually appealing than the overworld so quickly the environment melts away and all you see are a series of interactive wall objects. You swivel the camera around the room looking for handholds on the wall and then slowly pick your way across the room with trial-and-error jumping. However, outside of rare crafted events like this, platforming is a very bland process that slows the game's pace to a crawl. For example, there's a thrilling sequence where Death climbs to the top of an airship. Such things just don't suit Death very well. This is where the other two main gameplay elements kick in: platforming and puzzles. Whatever energy I felt while rampaging through the overworld immediately evaporated once I stepped inside one of the game's dungeons, though. By the end of the campaign, you’ll be decked out in incredibly bad-ass armor and have a deep selection of attacks to choose from. Gold can also be used to unlock new combo moves. Furthermore, any gold that Death earns can be spent in a hub town’s shop on equipment. Enemies drop armor and weapons with randomized stats, which you can trade with friends via an in-game mail system. Death levels up by killing enemies and can use these points to pursue two different skill trees. And victory also grants you access to the next area in an already predetermined order.There’s an impressive RPG framework behind the combat, by the way, so you can really feel Death growing stronger. Overcoming them awards Fury with a new weapon to replace the current one for that particular Hollow. At most, each boss will take you one or two attempts to defeat. After a short monologue from Fury, the battle begins and ends in a matter of a couple of minutes. A bigger golem! One imbued with the elemental power of the area it resides in.īattles take place within a walled-off room and golems themselves are slow and don’t require much of an effort to defeat. Each area culminates in a spectacular boss battle against… a golem. Certain enemies are faster or more powerful, but generally, they’re the same boring golem throughout all areas. Keepers of the Void follows a simple structure of solving a puzzle, doing battle, and then solving another puzzle. Later areas involve up to all four Hollows in order to solve any given puzzle. By striking the orb with the Flame Hollow, for instance, certain blocks move, while striking it with the Force Hollow allows you to traverse the side of the affected blocks. This often limits your options and leads to a quick solution to the puzzle. Each of these orbs has runes around it, indicating which Hollows can interact with it. More often than not, this involves interacting with a nearby orb with one of the Hollows at your disposal. Most puzzles revolve around manipulating black blocks in order to reach the next room.
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