Recent reviews by BattleFly

Alright, about 42 hours of gameplay, having completed the game once on deathinitive difficulty, here's what i think so far.
This game starts off great
- It has some nice puzzles, that would occasionally stop me in my tracks and and consider looking up a walkthrough, but was definitely beatable without one.
- Combat feels nice, it is definitely an improvement from the last game. they have removed the blocking all together, and opted for dodging, which i can fully understand, as it was never obious as to what could be blocked and what couldn't. At times the game felt like it was just throwing more and more enemies at you to try and make it harder, but mastering dodging and fighting system it ended up feeling like it wasn't just being unfair but that i simply just weren't familiar enough with it at the time.
- The game is very visually appealing and runs fairly well. getting about 70 to 90 fps, with maxed shadow quality and no antialiasing, on a 970 running a 1440p screen, which is reasonable compared to other games.
- The only issue i have is that tabbing out can do one of three things, 1. Nothing. 2. Break sounds making only some sounds play and the rest of the time leave you in silence. 3. Crash the game. i'd recommend either playing the game in windowed, or downloading the "Windowed borderless gaming" app, since the game does not support borderless windowed on its own.
- The game has a random loot drop system which i don't feel the game needs at all. It scaled weirdly and doesn't give you much freedom. For the most part it's just: sell your old junk at the vendor and then buy the item with the highest damage or highest defense. You get given special items sometimes when finding secrets or defeating bosses, but because of the nature of the leveling and scaling of the items, they almost immediately become useless or are already useless when you get them. There's a bit of health steal, and critical hit values you can take into account near the end, but it just feel like the game would have been better without the random loot and leveling.
- Since the game has a leveling system it also has skill points. Which i don't understand, at all. It starts you off with 2 choices, giving you almost no points to do what you want, but when you get further into the game it you suddenly have too many skill points to use on skill you don't want, and can't really use anyways because of the energy system. I would much rather have seen some kind of cooldown, but even then it would feel like they are stepping away from what works to try to appeal to a broader audience.
- As far as i can tell, all the secret achievements are just: "complete this, beat this, do this" and you should get them all from just playing the game, they're just hidden to not spoil the game i assume.

But sadly, despite my love of the game at the start it drops off near the end, even feeling like a chore at times.
-Almost all puzzles are thrown out of the window, it has 2 puzzle areas in the last 2(and a half) worlds, where as the first 2 probably had about 10-20 each.
-One of the puzzle mechanics it adds is really just super disorienting, but could still easily just be beaten with trial and error, it didn't feel great at all, it wasn't even obvious that i was progressing, i was just running back and forth being confused, only to suddenly be done.
-It straight up has a third person shooter area. The world doesn't have any puzzles at all, it's just your running around with a gun shooting large hoardes of monsters with a really mechanicly broken gun. The area can be beaten with melee combat but it doesn't feel like that was taken into consideration or tested for at all. And even if you do use the gun, the enemies actively try to get behind you, making you have to take your eyes off of about 20 enemies to deal with one enemy punching you in the back, only to leave you surrounded. The controls for the aiming on controller are also terrible might i add, it's either moving wasy too slow or way too fast, there is no midpoint. It would probablt be a lot better with mouse and keyboard, but the entirety of the the rest of the game plays a lot better with controller, and there is no easy way to change from keyboard to controller without restarting the game.
-Through the last 2,5 worlds with about 10 puzzles it has 5 bosses, where as one of them is repeated 3 times in the shooting segment. Neither of them really felt good to play. It didn't feel like i was learing attack patterns, and finding out when to attack, it felt like i was throwing my head against the wall again and again untill i won.
- Random enemies would be boss level hard for no reason, with one of the summoning a massive rapidfire stunning firestorm which it could summon again as soon as the first one ended, leaving you running away from it, with no chance to attack it. This would happen in small areas with no real room for dodging, and it would even throw more than one of this enemy at you at a time.

I wish i could give the game a "maybe" but i guess i'll let the 20-30 first hours speak and say that i recommend it.

If you really like these kinds of games or really loved the first one, then get this one, but i can do nothing but recommend you lower the difficulty near the end to make it less of a hassle.
If you haven't already played the first darksiders game, get that one instead and then consider getting this one.

This is how Diablo III should have been.