Saturday, September 22, 2012

Darksiders 2 on GeForce 210

It's the same day but I wanted to create a separate post for this. I'm playing Darksiders 2 on PC & Dark Sector on PS3. DS is a pretty cool game. At least it was till the first 6 chapters. There are just too many zombies now & very little humans. It's still fun. I won't say it's underrated because I'd give it 7.5/10 too like Gamespot but this friend of mine hadn't cared about it much. I'm not the only one who thinks it's a decent game. It's a really cool game if not awesome.
Anyway this post is more about Darksiders 2. I loved the original Darksiders. It was more like God of War. This one is more like Prince of Persia. The platforming like wall run, side wall run, jumping beams & even combat music remind me of POP series. I wonder if the developer is different. That doesn't mean I hate it. I love pop series especially the 'Sands of Time' Trilogy.  Darksiders 2 is a cool game. I like Death more than War too. War was so expressionless. You could hardly see his face. They put more emphasis on his armor. Although Death has a mask on & it's a cool one, he seems to have some personality. However, I like the gameplay of original Darksiders more. I also don't like enemies lurking everywhere you go. I love platforming, puzzles & the music though. The characters seem nice. The skill system & the outfits are a nice idea too. I also like that we have this bird as our guide. The horse for now is usually for the huge fields but I don't miss him that much. I also like it that we get to use the gun early one & the one with the unlimited ammo at that. It doesn't do much damage but hey, you do need a ranged weapon ASAP in games like these.

About how it plays on my card:
While I played the original on my PS3, I'm playing this one on PC. I still have GeForce 210 512MB SDDR3. Games like Saints Row the Third & The Witcher 2 ran slowly on on this card. But Darksiders 2 seems to run smoothly. It also takes small space as compared to the other two games I've mentioned. It's taking 5.45 GB on my hard disk. At first I thought this might be a demo or a short version but it's not. OK, I've had a few problems. First of all it's the frame rate. I don't know what's going on. Either it's too fast for a human eye or not so smooth. The camera/aim is faster. I can slow it down but it seems the game play is kinda faster too. Not too fast but a little. Or maybe it's trying not to stop in the middle & jumps off after some brief pause I don't notice. But it's not that bad that you can't play. Some people might not even notice it. It's obviously not on high settings. It's toned down. Somewhere b/w medium & low settings. The other problems are related to the PC & not the card itself. I don't know if it's same on consoles but there seems to be some kinda collision detection problem or Death doesn't 'recognize' some surfaces or even enemies. In combats, 90 percent of the time, he attacks at every direction BUT the enemies'.  It's a bit hard to make him focus on enemies. He keeps attacking away from them & because of this keeps hacking & moving away & I have to bring him back closer to the enemy. Secondly he doesn't 'know' whether to wall run up or run the side of the wall. Half of the time he keeps doing the opposite. I mean when I want him to wall run up to grab the 'grabbable' structure above, he'd run sideways on the wall & vice versa. The hints/tutorials seem attached to the area. I was side jumping a wall when the game told me to hit A (Yes, I'm using a shitbox controller) to jump off to run on the adjacent wall. When once I failed to touch a wall & instead was in the air, the game still told me to jump off the wall :P  So over all it's a good experience. Maybe not as great as the original game but it's very close to that experience. I'd recommend this to everyone who enjoyed original Darksiders & those who enjoy POP games.

No comments: