Game Play -
Darksiders is fun to play from a hack and slash standpoint. If you are in for wild abandon and carnage in the pursuit of your goals then this is certainly the game for you. The game does make some unusual assumptions though. It assumes that you have played the original Darksiders and that you know the commands. There were a few instances of this early on in the game where it would flash an icon indicating that I needed to press this repeatedly to win a battle. As I did not play the first game and this was a Steam download I have to stop and figure out what that icon meant. The same thing happened with the interaction icon. Instead of simply saying “Press E” it was an icon that looked like an upside-down return symbol.

Speaking of combat there are a few default key bindings that make no sense. Having the dodge option set as the left –Alt key is a tad awkward as it is located below and out of easy reach of the movement keys.  The same thing can be said with the special moves that you can gain and buy. There is almost nothing to tell you what key they are bound to, you can check by hitting “O” and then seeing where they are, but that does not give you quick and intuitive access to those advanced combat moves.

Still we do like the combat style even if it gets confusing in the middle of any intense or multiple enemy fights. Overall things progress pretty smoothly with one tiny little annoying detail. When moving through the game you will find a few places where you can see something important, but you simply cannot reach it. Do not worry about this though it is an indication that you will need to come back to this point later in the game. The bad part about this is that it means you will be traveling back and forth across the game world. Now some may see this as a good thing, but it can make the game seem ponderous and slow moving. You get the impression that you are no moving forward to achieve your goals or that you are somehow just not getting what you are supposed to do. We found this more than once during our 30-minutes with the game.

Performance -
As we mentioned before Darksiders II was meant for the console which means there are very few items that are going to drag your GPU down. Even at the maximum resolution we saw minimum frame rates around 60FPS with a GTX 570. This should give you more than adequate performance even with GPUs in the $100 range. You also should have no problems running Darksiders II on any of AMD’s APUs. There simply is not enough to bog it down graphically. Likewise the audio is not a burden on the system nor is the AI which seems to be very limited in scope.