Similarly, the puzzle and plot designers knew how to set the right pace for an enjoyable game. Complex emotions flow from Death effortlessly and it really shows me that the writers and designers on this team knew a lot about their audience. However, for me at least, this game’s most compelling feature was not the exquisite game mechanics or the brilliant puzzle designs, but the development of a truly relatable super-human character. The portal gun from the first game is new and improved as well because it now does time travel! By making two parallel levels, one destroyed in the future, and one whole in the past, you can effectively travel through time and challenge yourself to complete puzzles in both worlds to get to the end. One of your forms is an enormous stone statue of Death as a Reaper and it can be moved by one of the other two ethereal forms of Death to activate weight sensitive pressure plates. In this game they actually give you the ability to split into three forms all of which can be controlled individually. The puzzles themselves aren’t too brain wracking, and just challenging enough especially with their new puzzle solving tools. Each new location has a few brief dialogues between some interesting characters before you’re off slashing the life out of various enemy types usually because some fool of a dungeon lord decided that putting piñatas in your way was a better and more entertaining use of your time. You spend a majority of the game on foot with a few travel moments spent on your horse really just running past pretty scenery. The game itself revolves around environment traversal, button mash hack and slash, and magical-physics puzzle combination. Lucky for you, the animation and game mechanics teams worked together to train Death in becoming a traversal phenomenon. Problem being that it would seem all of creation wants to throw a wall between you and your goal, and, when I say all of creation, I mean heaven, hell, the underworld, and the Makers. From start to finish you, as Death, ride forth in search of a means to resurrect humanity, and you learn how in the first half hour of the game. He voices the gamer’s internal emotions during most dialogue sections which are scattered through the game and only last long enough to further the plot with some good humor. If you’ve had those thoughts then Death may very well be your favorite RPG hero. Have you ever been really enthralled in a good story line and along the way someone bugs you to go retrieve their family heirloom from a house halfway across the map? Sure, we all have, and we’ve all had those thoughts of, “you have to be kidding me…I have to go save the world from total annihilation, invasion, destruction, whatever and you want me to go fetch your dumb diary?”. Are you tired of playing the nice guy in video games? Great, because Death, the main character of the second game of the series, is a hero who really speaks the player’s mind. That’s not all this new title boasts, however. Time travel, split personalities, and minion control are just three of the new tricks in your puzzle solving arsenal. THQ really brought the Darksiders series to new heights with their second installment, Darksiders II, which features several new shiny game mechanics that I’ve never seen before. With only a few minor glitches in the audio and interface departments, THQ pulled off an exquisite game. The character development and personas developed by the writers were superb, the modelers went above and beyond, the puzzle and level designers along with the game mechanic engineers came up with tons of really creative puzzles and breath taking environments. A lot of good people did a lot of fantastic work and clearly did overtime on this ambitious and well-advertised project. I was very impressed with nearly everything in this game.
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