Darksiders 3 is a bit of a black sheep in my opinion. It departs from the brawly beat-em-up style of gameplay for a rather punishing dodge-timing style of combat and a souls-like death and weapon upgrade system and to a lesser extent the leveling system. Every time you die instead of a game-over and a reload you respawn at the nearest serpent hole (vulgrim's shop locations) and drop all of your soul-lurches and the many weapons Fury can acquire are upgraded with a limited resource found around the world and to level up you must feed souls to Vulgrim in exchange for levels to increase either health, physical damage or arcane damage. On top of that Vulgrim has taken on his stingiest form yet and every time you purchase a consumable from him the price increases by a fixed amount permanently.

Honestly I don't like this and the only reason I completed the game was because the devs added a "classic" mode to the game that reduces the burstiness of enemy damage. It also removes the animation for using items but that is hardly anything to write home about in my opinion.

Despite this rather glaringly bad combat system exploring the game world is relatively fun. Fury has a number of entertaining ways to traverse the world as she acquires "hollows" that give her elemental powers and new weapons, fire allowing her to launch herself into the air, ice letting her walk on water, lightning letting her glide and 'force' letting her turn into a morph-ball and glue to special walls, its a good bit of fun and there's a fair amount to explore.

Story has never really been a strong suit of the Darksiders games but this one kicks up the weirdness in the dialogue department some somewhat disjointed and strange line reads from time to time but its not the worst and only sometimes distracting.

While the game presents itself initially as an open exploratory game where you can go more or less where you like this is something of a lie, the way enemies are balanced very much forces you down certain paths as going down the wrong way will run you straight into packs of enemies that 3-shot Fury.

On that topic Fury is hilariously fragile, she dies faster than War or Death by a country mile, while even Death is no where near as tanky as War could be he had ways to keep himself alive throughout a battle while Fury is a glass cannon, only able to heal with limited healing items or a boot-leg estus flask. Unfortunately in the default game mode Fury doesn't feel like she has as much kick to her as she should for how fragile she is, again why I recommend switching to "classic".

All in all I think this is by far the most flawed of all the Darksiders games and it really feels like the developers were trend chasing on the coat-tails of the souls-borne craze. A shame because I like the soulsborne series and I like Darksiders, sucks to see one mangle itself trying to be something its not.

Darksiders 3 is a bit of a black sheep in my opinion. It departs from the brawly beat-em-up style of gameplay for a rather punishing dodge-timing style of combat and a souls-like death and weapon upgrade system and to a lesser extent the leveling system. Every time you die instead of a game-over and a reload you respawn at the nearest serpent hole (vulgrim's shop locations) and drop all of your soul-lurches and the many weapons Fury can acquire are upgraded with a limited resource found around the world and to level up you must feed souls to Vulgrim in exchange for levels to increase either health, physical damage or arcane damage. On top of that Vulgrim has taken on his stingiest form yet and every time you purchase a consumable from him the price increases by a fixed amount permanently. Honestly I don't like this and the only reason I completed the game was because the devs added a "classic" mode to the game that reduces the burstiness of enemy damage. It also removes the animation for using items but that is hardly anything to write home about in my opinion. Despite this rather glaringly bad combat system exploring the game world is relatively fun. Fury has a number of entertaining ways to traverse the world as she acquires "hollows" that give her elemental powers and new weapons, fire allowing her to launch herself into the air, ice letting her walk on water, lightning letting her glide and 'force' letting her turn into a morph-ball and glue to special walls, its a good bit of fun and there's a fair amount to explore. Story has never really been a strong suit of the Darksiders games but this one kicks up the weirdness in the dialogue department some somewhat disjointed and strange line reads from time to time but its not the worst and only sometimes distracting. While the game presents itself initially as an open exploratory game where you can go more or less where you like this is something of a lie, the way enemies are balanced very much forces you down certain paths as going down the wrong way will run you straight into packs of enemies that 3-shot Fury. On that topic Fury is hilariously fragile, she dies faster than War or Death by a country mile, while even Death is no where near as tanky as War could be he had ways to keep himself alive throughout a battle while Fury is a glass cannon, only able to heal with limited healing items or a boot-leg estus flask. Unfortunately in the default game mode Fury doesn't feel like she has as much kick to her as she should for how fragile she is, again why I recommend switching to "classic". All in all I think this is by far the most flawed of all the Darksiders games and it really feels like the developers were trend chasing on the coat-tails of the souls-borne craze. A shame because I like the soulsborne series and I like Darksiders, sucks to see one mangle itself trying to be something its not.