E3 2019 is the home of a ton of demos featuring some of the most anticipated games to be released, including THQ Nordic’s newest entry into the Darksiders series. Called Darksiders: Genesis, the spin-off game is also being developed by Airship Syndicate.
To that end, we can now watch footage from the demo for the upcoming title as provided by the French Xbox Live YouTube channel. There’s about 24 minutes of early gameplay footage in here, detailing what we can expect from the top-down dungeon crawler/looter spinoff starring two Horsemen of the Apocalypse – War, returning from the original Darksiders, and Strife, who is starring in his very first game. Check out the footage below.
For first impressions, the game looks absolutely stunning. I’m quite the avid fan of the series, especially the second Darksiders, and it looks to me that Airship Syndicate has chosen to lean more closely with the level design of Darksiders II rather than the most recent outing from Gunfire Games. While they’re all great in their own way, I think the level and art design from Darksiders II is the best in the series.
The demo takes place in a level called the Inferno Vault, and sees War and Strife traverse its depths to find something called the Ember Spark. The mission starts off with some brotherly banter between War and Strife, and then cuts straight to gameplay. It’s revealed that in single-player mode, you can switch between the two at will – War specializes in killing enemies up close and personal, cleaving through them with his oversized blade Chaoseater. Strife wields two large revolvers, Mercy and Redemption, to whittle down enemies from afar. It’s a good balance in my opinion, instead of just having to choose one character to bring on each mission.
The levels play out exactly like a dungeon looter game, and I got major Torchlight vibes from the video. Strife is pretty agile, able to dodge at will and can access some useful abilities like caltrops and a shadow clone. War is best used to pummel bigger enemies, having access to powerful executions and that skill where he buries Chaoseater into the ground, and protrudes swords from it.
A lot of the iconic traversal methods from Darksiders II also makes a comeback, including the Death Grip, which allows Strife to hook onto air hooks in order to cross large gaps. Both War and Strife can also prolong their stay in the air and glide via a pair of wings, which Death also had access to in Darksiders II. Being a dungeon crawler title, some enemies now drop powerful runes which can grant new skills to both brothers. Bomb growths also make a return, allowing you to destroy certain obstacles in your way. The sleek-looking ledge traversal also makes a return, with Strife seamlessly shimmying across ledges with ease.
At the end of the demo, one of the game’s bosses is shown, a gatling gun-wielding demon named Legion Boltspitter. The boss was a bit boring, though, and could use more moves, as only a couple are seen in the video. The demo also only showed Strife’s fight with it, and it was a bit one-sided due to how easy it was to kite the big lumbering demon around. You can, however, see the instant character-swap shine during the bossfight; once one of the lesser monsters start to crowd Strife, you can easily switch to War in order to fend them off, then switch back to Strife to continue the assault on the boss.
All of that said, Darksiders: Genesis is looking very good right now, and could be even more amazing when played in co-op with a friend. The only issues I have for it right now is that it looks too easy – let’s be honest, the demo-tester wasn’t really the best player, and he kept fumbling some very easy dodges, and he still managed to complete the level fairly easily. Let’s hope that there’s some difficulty scaling, similar to other titles in the series. The boss also lacked some audio files, like his gun and his roars, but I’ll attribute that to the fact that it’s a demo.
Darksiders: Genesis will be released on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia, and PC sometime in 2019.
