Perception is a very odd thing, especially when it comes to the gaming industry. What your boxart contains often ends up being the make-or-break behind the sales figures, which is probably why any good game with a white box usually end up being ignored just because of the grey letters with two Is and a W. Similarly the sight of Kasumi’s hanging udders barely restrained by the tiniest of ninja swimsuits is enough to make any gamer shell out sixty bucks, whereas fantastic games like Devil May Cry 3 are passed up because Dante looks like an emo glam-rocker with the Buster Sword.

I bring this up because the completely unhelpfully named Darksiders is a game I very nearly gave up on just due to the frustrating presentation that seems to lead you in to multiple different styles that the game is imitating. The boxart looks kickass – the sight of a burly, armored horseman slaughtering dudes seems like a cheap God of War ripoff at absolute best, except without all the shamelessness and buttock fixation. (No I’m not bitter about Bayonetta, just thinking about X-Blades, I swear!)

You play as War, the Horseman of the Apocalypse, hitting the ground ready to bring the end of times. Only it appears that he got a bit too excited and came too early. The Seventh Seal, apparently the final item that can bring about the end of days, is still intact, and War, while still staggering from his premature apocalyption is blamed…for some reason. And since the Seventh Seal isn’t broken the Horsemen can’t bring about the End of Days, even though it killed everyone on Earth, it still technically doesn’t count. Which is pretty fucking weaksauce, one would think that the Apocalypse that kills off all human life would be the Apocalypse rather than ‘Doesn’t Countalypse,’ especially since the rest of the story involves angels and demons butting heads. Anyway a trio of burning faces declare him guilty of starting it for no reason, kick him back to earth with some lovechild of Mark Hamil and Gengar attached to his wrist, and tell him to figure it all out.

Okay so the plot’s a bit silly, and it gets even worse when they start mixing in even more ideas from Revelations in for no reason, yet the entire time keep redubbing the blatantly obvious God, Satan, and even Adam and Eve names like “Creator” and “Destroyer” and “The First Ones.” All you need to know is there’s Heaven, Hell, and Earth, and since War fired off a bit early the demons get to have a grand time playing about on Earth, and after a brief interlude with the Burning Council he’s sent back to earth after a hundred years passed. There’s plot-important Demons and Angels and whatnot but it all plays out like someone thought that Constantine needed more angst and less likable protagonists.

The story could have worked, however, had any of the characters expressed even the most basic elements of, well, being a ‘character’. Most all of them are grunty warriors, even more awfully characterized than anybody from Warhammer 40k, growling and brooding, trying to sound badass but end up just looking silly as you wonder what happens when they sit at the dinner table and ask their wife how work was. And the skirting about of calling anyone an Angel or a Demon seems especially pointless when compared to Bayonetta, who had an unequivocally evil character standing in piles of dead angel bodies with a nonchalant pornographic pose.

War is probably my favorite – he looks like Frozen Throne era Arthas wearing a red cape that constantly shades over his white-glowing eyes, even while he’s riding a flaming Nightmare horse in the desert. His voice sounds like he’s trying to gargle gravel and even when he stops to have somewhat friendly conversation to his only amiable relation – an Irish Hephaestus – his voice makes him out to be an even more hostile and suspicious Bale-era Batman. He’s got all the characteristic weight and depth as a post train-track penny, and the ridiculous amount of midevil cars he’s wearing probably doesn’t help.

Really it’s just a setpiece of post-apocalypse, and though the story is half-baked the world behind it is quite pretty, with extremely detailed and stylistic graphics conceived by comic book artist Joe Madureira. I could get behind the idea of Angels and Demons fighting a war on a completely fucked Earth with the Horsemen caught in the middle of it, but the execution plays like the fantasy of a black-metal fanatic forced to attend a Christian highschool, not that that would ever be me. To be fair, there aren’t many games where you play as a World of Warcraft character bludgeoning a bateezu to death with a car in a ruined metro tunnel. War seems like the character he spent the most time on, which is to say ‘too much,’ as many of the other characters have extremely distinct armor and weapons but don’t have the clustered mismatched bronze-silver-iron armor pieces. As a comic book, it could have worked, but in a video game it looks downright absurd.

The intro lands War like a meteor into the center of New York, and gives you the ability to play about, serving as the tutorial before War is stripped of his powers (more specifically his health bar) and kicked to the first level. The first impressions of the game give mind to a very simplistic God of War game with one button, but fortunately after visiting The Shopkeeper of Duneharrow, Vulgrim, you get a war scythe used with the secondary attack, making it more like Dynasty Warriors, with the scythe acting as the combo finisher. You can use a grab button to snatch enemies too, although you have to actually beat them up before cutting them in twain, so it’s not quite as good as Kratos ripping someone in half with his bare hands. I’m not a big fan of the block being the same button as the dodge, too, it presents this annoying scenario where you’d meant to block and dodge or vice versa. Most action games don’t do this, Vigil, pay attention.

I’m not going to lie – the first hour of the game is absolutely terrible. Vulgrim’s not around to get you equipment or techniques and you’re sent to wander glowy-eyed about the world with a goal set before you. You know how God of War had the kind of atmosphere due to fantastic music composition and cinematic direction? Well, Darksiders doesn’t have that, and the awful one-button combat makes it painfully boring, especially when compared to the at least functionally good Bayonetta, released the same week. There’s tons of enemies, and they take quite a while to kill, especially since your options are, in order, Mash X, Air Combo, and Mash X Some More.

So after slaughtering enough dudes you are sent on a quest by a Balor named Samael. The details are sketchy but he basically wants you to fetch four demon hearts. While it sounds like it’s setting you up for Borderlands style World of Darksiders Onlinecraft, it’s the four dungeons that make up the meat of the game, filled with all sorts of puzzles and exploration to do. These felt very reminiscent of Zelda on first impression, but it was kind of in the distance, in the background.

However after finding a new boomerang-like weapon from a chest, using it to solve puzzles involving lighting torches, fighting a big super-boss who was exceptionally vulnerable to my new boomerang, collected a heart container, and went into a blue column of light that teleported me to the entrance I began to think the Zelda influences were slightly more than secondary.

For the most part it’s like they took a handful of games and managed to merge them together. You have the dungeons and puzzles from Zelda, the gameplay and platforming from God of War, there’s even sprinkles of Prince of Persia, you can air combo enemies and keep them afloat with your rapid-fire handgun like Devil May Cry, and towards the end you even get a Aperture Science Handheld Abyssal Portal Device!

Remember when I said in my Spirit Tracks review that I felt like the Zelda series was getting staler than unused bread ends? This right here is everything I want with Zelda. The combat and the puzzles are evenly spread among one another, and both can be equally challenging – kinda – without being mind-fuckingly difficult. Most of it’s scaled down, but it fits in this instance. It’s also hundred times faster than Twilight Princess’ four-million hour tutorial and exposition dialog, awful first hour notwithstanding.

For example, combat. Your big Anti-Sonofabitch Stick sword, ever so groaningly named the Chaoseater (You’re the Horseman of War, man, why are you eating chaos?), is used for just about every attack worth owning. The secondary weapon, the fifteen foot long scythe, is more of a street-sweeper than real primary weapon, but since its in your secondary slot and can be used with the twelve-foot long greatsword and becomes a game of using both in combat, like a twinked overcompensating DND character.

But what’s really cool is the upgrades system, giving you lots of perks and options. The merchant from before sells you Wrath abilities and upgrades (which is pretty much Rage from Wolverine Origins; lots of cool attacks and buffs), Wrath/Health pieces, sells and upgrades techniques, health/Wrath potions, and pretty much is the dispensing merchant you trade souls for. All the perks allow you to customize your build, and many of them are secret and hidden all over the admittedly cool world. And if you ever get sick of them, you can always manifest yourself into your Chaos Form and wreck shit like Godzilla.

The puzzles and platforming are pretty simple at first, blatantly pointing you in the direction of a wall you need to climb or a torch you need to light. The boomerang you get is more like a giant saw with only three blades, which after a few upgrades turns into a kickass fire-and-forget blender. But as soon as the dungeons stop making you light torches with the Windmill Shiruken over and over, they keep changing, giving you cooler and cooler new puzzles to mess about with, even giving you a hookshot and a mask of shadows. At the final dungeon, the Black Tower, you get the aforementioned Portal gun, which sets you up to a whole bunch of challenging scenarios including a rather interesting and really tough weights puzzle.

I know it’s going to sound like I’m a huge hypocrite here, but the funny thing is all the puzzles really do play independent of their source materials. Pushing blocks doesn’t feel that trite because it rarely ever shows up at the forefront of puzzle-solving. Lighting torches with the boomerang isn’t new but they manage to space it out just as soon as it’s about to get boring. The hookshot is only used to grapple onto specific, clearly labeled spots and used in combat if you feel like imitating Scorpion. The portal gun can’t be used except on specific spots, and your momentum always stays the same unless you charge the gun up. The upgrading is action game standard but having the weapons have slots of their own makes some fun customization.

The only tool I don’t like is the Mask, the one that allows you to see into the shadow realm. It’s mostly pointless except in two puzzles and an especially asinine but mercifully short mission where you travel around searching for the Plot Important McGuffin Sword fragments.

I do like the combat, but things have gotten much more refined in gaming as of late and I think it wasn’t utilized as it could have been. Mixing in the other attack buttons together could lead to some nifty combos but instead they just went for Dynasty Warriors like the lazy bastards they are. The worst is the Fuck You Punch gauntlet, because it trades comboing enemies for knocking them away only to chase them down again like a game of fucking fetch with demon dogs.

Yet after all that bitching I just can’t hate the fights. God of War had one weapon throughout half of the game, a handful of magic spells, and a few combos. The second one dumped more combat options onto you, sure, but this is their first big game, so I’m inclined to be nice to them, especially since the combat makes up barely a fraction of the game compared to puzzles and dungeon exploration. It also takes a bit of skill, towards the end throwing guys with shields and hammers that deal two entire lifebars of damage. The bosses aren’t as nearly so tough but again are more puzzle than fighting.

I also don’t quite get the point of the upgrade shop being so expensive when there’s no New Game Plus option, and while riding from atop your horse, cutting fuckers in two or firing round after round from your gun is pretty awesome it rarely ever gets used, often booting you off at random spots merely because you exited a Horse Safe zone. The desert, for example, is the biggest and best place to ride in, and at the end of the game during said fetch-quest there’s no enemies. The most frustrating realization is that in Hard mode the currency of souls is pathetically low, resorting you to just monotonously mashing X like a roadworker with a jackhammer.

Camera’s a bit odd – lockon zooms the camera in, annoyingly close to War, and all the dodge moves use the camera as the basis of direction instead of him. This means that when I intend to dodge to the left I instinctually hold the angle to the left of War, meaning I dash towards them. This can lead to problems especially when the enemies towards the end of the game have attacks that can crush three entire life bars with one hit. This trades skill for uncooperative controls, leading to some cheap deaths.

Now call me crazy about this one; there are five different components from other, fantastic games. I mean, I’ve heard people like Zelda anyway. But the point is this game is blatantly taking steps from other games to make its own, the most prominent one being Zelda. Then again, like my X-Men Origins: Wolverine review, I can’t help but find this game strangely compelling. I admit fully well everything in the game isn’t something I haven’t already seen before, yet I keep playing anyway.

When you get right down to it, there isn’t anything really to like except the basic function of a Zelda game that’s got more advanced combat than poking incessantly till your foe dies. It certainly isn’t new in gameplay or innovation, but it somehow finds a nice spot in all of this frenetic mess to find its own seat, somehow forming a really good game. It may be about six weapons short of either God of War or Zelda, but somehow being between them spaces out both of their diminished standout features all the more. The only thing I really regret is that I know the game will be tragically forgotten by the time the Game of the Year ceremonies run around next year.

It’s the Lufia II thing again, putting both decent puzzles and decent combat together, spaced out carefully, to make something altogether great. Story deficiencies keep it from being truly great but I’m really looking forward to the inevitable sequel, even despite all its flaws. Make no mistake if you can stomach the monotonous first hour or two and get to the first dungeon it’s a complete blast, but it certainly won’t win any awards, except maybe Least Original.

Three ChaosEaters Out of Five