Sockets and gems! I love sockets and gems. So imagine my delight when, a few minutes into Darksiders: Genesis, a fresh perspective on the Hellish Zelda-alike series about monsters and demons, I clicked on a stray tab to find a whole page of sockets just waiting for gems.
Darksiders: Genesis reviewDeveloper: Airship SyndicatePublisher: THQ NordicPlatform: Reviewed on PCAvailability: Out now on PC and Stadia, arriving on Switch, PS4 and Xbox One in February 2020
Let me try to explain this. Enemies in Genesis sometimes drop special gems known as cores. The core for each enemy type is unique and bestows a unique perk. The more you have of each core, the more they level up and the perks get better. (This can get rather grindy, incidentally.)
Now, to access these perks you have to put them in sockets on the socket tree. And here’s where it gets fun. Behold the socket tree! Sockets come in three flavours, and while you can put any old core in any old socket, if you match socket flavour to core flavour you get extra synergy. Throw in special cores that really big baddies and bosses drop and you have a recipe for fun. I have spent many hours in Genesis switching in and out sockets and watching what happens to the overall power levels of my two characters as I do so. It’s nice to see the numbers go up. That’s Genesis, isn’t it? In the beginning, developers created the sockets and the gems. The numbers went up and it was good.
In between fiddling with gems and sockets, Darksiders: Genesis is a pretty entertaining game in its own right. The temptation is to look at the distant top-down-ish camera and the hordes of baddies and think, oh, this is Darksiders trading Zelda for Diablo. That’s not quite it. There’s plenty of crunching through enemies to be done, and Genesis has flair for a skeleton cracking under the blow from a sword that would make Blizzard proud, but the skills never encourage the Diablo Glissando, and the Darksiders developers remain attached to combos and puzzles – puzzles involving switches, portals, traversal, lava and all that jazz. There’s nothing that’s going to confuse you too badly, but it adds more to the texture of each level, the shape of each mission, than you’d expect from a Diablo-like.
Darksiders Genesis – Abilities and Creature Cores Trailer Watch on YouTube
There are two characters to play (if you’re playing solo, you can switch between them), and they’re both horsemen of the apocalypse. War is serious and has a sword. Strife is cheerful and favours a gun which can fire different ammo types. That’s the starting point, anyway, but they both develop a nice suite of abilities throughout the adventure. To put it in Diablo language – I’ve just said it’s not that much like Diablo but – War is sort of Barbarianish and Strife’s a bit of a Demon Hunter – but has his Wizardy moments as things progress. The characters each have special tools they pick up along the way – Strife can chuck portals around, for example, while War has the Vorpal boomerang thing and gets to thump the ground really hard – so some puzzles require one of them to step forward for certain tricks. Switching between them is instantaneous, though, and being Horsemen of the Apocalypse, they can each summon and dismiss their horses when gadding about the open-air parts of each level before you get to the dungeons.