Installation -
The installation from Steam took about an hour and a half to get everything down and ready to play. This was not too bad as we have seen slower downloads from Steam and even worse from a few other online distribution sites. Once the game was down and installed we ran into one unusual problem. As we recently reinstalled our game testing box we found that just installing the x64 version of Visual C++ for 2005, 2008 and 2010 was not enough. We had to install both the x86 and x64 versions or we ended up getting an error during the launch. We did not receive any errors during the installation which was unusual. Normally games that we get from Steam include everything that is needed to play, but it looks like the game skipped over this install because we had already installed the x64 version.

After that one hiccup we had no problems running the game. One item that bothered us was a statement saying that THQ would be collecting information about us and our use of the game. This was expressed in the installation and use of the game and while we understand collecting some telemetry data we do not see why a game company needs to collect anything about users at all and why they need to share this with anyone. It is a sad commentary on game publishing companies that they are moving in this direction. It is no longer enough to get the money from the game and some DLC, now they want to trade personal data as well.
Configuration -
There are not many options for to tweak in the game which supports the console port claims. It was written for much simpler hardware found on a console, but pushed to the PC. This is a little sad as there is so much you can do with a PC that is not available on the console. The up side of this is that the system requirements are pretty light as you can see below. Darksiders II is not a game that will only be for people with the fastest CPUs and GPUs. Even the recommended hardware is still very light which makes us guess that you could run this game maxed out on most systems with excellent frame rates.