Deaths main weapon is his scythe, which actually spends most of its time split into two smaller scythes (but reunites during finishing moves). With Death so much nimbler than War ever was, its a no-brainer that hed have a different approach to fighting monsters. It can also be used to grab certain objects, like bombs, and hurl them at distant targets, which is always fun. Once again, though, we needed to jump at just the right moment to swing across otherwise, wed drop straight back down after reaching the handhold in question.Īs you might expect, Death Grip has other uses in combat, it can yank enemies closer to Death (or yank him over to them, if theyre bigger than he is). Later in the dungeon, we found the Death Grip, a spectral hand-shaped zipline/grapping hook that let us yank Death over to handholds or up to rings in the ceiling.
Fail, and youll take a plunge, which for us usually meant a fall into lava and a quick respawn at whatever patch of ground we were standing on last.
During that second, youll need to hit the jump button at just the right moment, and Death will continue running. A lot of the walls Death runs up or across offer handholds that extend his run, and while Death can cling to some of these indefinitely, others are small enough that he can only hang on for a second. While getting around like that isnt exactly difficult, the timing of it takes some getting used to. And where War mostly kept to the ground, running up walls and swinging from high places are par for Deaths course. In our last preview, we discovered that Death is considerably more agile than Darksiders last protagonist, War. (The pause-screen map helped too, but less subtly.) Prev of 8 Next Prev of 8 Next The dungeon was vast enough that we still managed to get lost and confused a couple of times, but even then, we could rely on Deaths crow which glowed purple and perched on things that were in the direction we were supposed to go to be an unobtrusive stand-in for an onscreen waypoint. For starters, the whole place had been overtaken by Corruption, which caused seemingly unbreakable yellow crystals to grow everywhere, and had infected the dungeons resident constructs (stone robots of varying size), making them violent, and making combat pretty frequent.Ĭlimbing, jumping, switch and hidden-item puzzles cropped up constantly, too, most of which were easy enough to figure out if we were paying attention to our surroundings.
The dungeon sent us on what amounted to a series of fetch quests, as Death traversed long passageways, caverns and underwater lakes in an effort to find three Heartstones (which were needed to reactivate the dungeons Guardian, a gigantic creature made of stone), but there was always plenty of stuff to do. We're not about to assume that that means the overall game will be four times the size of the first one (back in January, THQ told us it would be "at least twice the size"), but if what we played is any indication, then Darksiders II is going to be a seriously lengthy game. That dungeon, we were told, is set at the end of the first of the games four zones, and that first zone will be about the size of the first games entire map. As we mentioned on the first page, our hands-on with Darksiders II took place entirely in a single dungeon, which took about three hours to get through.