At the End of All things
The earth itself shudders in fear. Armies of demons and angels descend from the skies. Millions die in deaths fittingly painful to their sins. War rides among the streets, filling them with the bodies of the damned. The Last Days have come.

There's just one problem. It wasn't supposed to happen. At least, not yet. This is the world of Vigil's first game, Darksiders.

In Media Res
You enter this world as War, the Horseman of the Apocalypse. You arrive in an unnamed metropolis and wage unholy war upon all mankind. After eradicating dozens of humans, demons, and angels, it comes to light that the invasion was never ordered. The seven seals, in biblical mythology the holy guards that herald the end times, have in fact not been broken. No other Horsemen have ridden. The Third Kingdom of Man has been destroyed for no reason. Brought to justice and stripped of your powers, you must discover why Earth was destroyed when no call was made.

Getting a Grip
Darksiders plays like a fairly typical third-person platformer/shooter work, with independent movement and camera controls on each respective stick. In combat, things are a little simple, with a generic attack on the X button and finishing moves mapped to the B button. Combat is remiscent of Game: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Game: God of War, with moves cleanly blending together to allow the player to effectively fight crowds of enemies at once. However, while War is capable of sweeping swings that hit half a dozen targets at once, finishers are limited to being administered one at a time--apparently, even a Horseman's capability to mete out death and punishment has limits.

This turns the game into a single-button affair 90% of the time, but Vigil decided to mix it up with a Fable-style inventory system, accessed by using the right shoulder button and then the appropriate button for said item. Unfortunately, this system that worked so well in Game: Fable doesn't work so well here due to subtle differences in the control scheme. Having to hold down the left trigger to lock-on to your target can make other actions awkward; this would have worked better as a toggle. Other odd design decisions, such as the use of the left bumper and right trigger (combined) to activate "chaos form" (I prefer to call it balrog form), add to the confusing complexity of what would otherwise be a button-mashing brawler. With a bit of tweaking, things could have been smoothed out immensely, but as it stands, this isn't quite a game-breaker.

The Beauty of Chaos
The world you start your adventure in is one of bedlam--apocalypse is coming, skycrapers falling, roads crumbling under the weight of demons waging unholy war on mankind. Later in the game, you explore a now-destroyed world: cathedrals built to celebrate the fall of the Third Kingdom, in sufficiently ultra-gothic styling.

The Unreal Engine 3 shines once again in this title, and the various textures and creatures encountered in said engine evoke memories of Game: Gears of War. Sometimes the similarity is a little too close, such as stages which are filled with pits of immulsion--I mean, magma. In another homage to Fable, War's armor tends to glow blindingly bright in these circumstances, though this doesn't seem to apply to other surfaces in the game. Other than this, however, the game glows with the dull reflections of the grimy, abused surfaces seen throughout.

Stopping for Directions
Navigating the game itself is an exercise in Zelda recurrences. In a trope common with modern dungeon crawlers, the player is forced to rely on a single outcast information- and item-broker who just happens to have all the keys to all the doors...for a price, of course, the spirits of those the player kills. He has a particular penchant for the souls of young children. Thus begins a long series of missions both pertinent and and not, administered in the vein of Zelda quests.

Many puzzles introduce strong elements of platforming to the game, vis a vis Prince of Persia. Unfortunately, Vigil is still new to the table, and a large number of their puzzles are easy to miss--one puzzle occupied a full thirty minutes of mindless running back and forth before it was deduced that a single unremarkable statue, among a wall of identical statues, had to be triggered. Other puzzles require copious amounts of backtracking, either to extend playtime or simply as a side effect of bad planning.

Many instances are interrupted by somewhat awkward cutscenes, themselves addled by half-second lag times. The cinematic direction, on the other hand, is superb and features elegant shots that would fall right in with a bigger-budget film production.

The Final Verse
While it's easy to say this game is definitely enjoyable, it only just manages to stand out from the pack. While most of the homages tend to work well for gameplay, they approach imparting a contrived feel, but thankfull the game stays in fun territory. Needless to say, Vigil could certainly streamline the process, but for a first effort, Darksiders is more than admirable.