Pre-order Darksiders Genesis

Darksiders Genesis is an interesting twist on the franchise. Far from a Diablo clone, the game is closer to a twin-stick shooter with some significant meat to it. In this prequel to all the other games, you play as either War or Strife and use their gameplay to fight through the levels. If you'd like, the game can also be played cooperatively with each player in control of their own Horseman.

The two Horsemen have different and complementary combat styles. War is great against crowds of enemies and has been sped up from his style in the original Darksiders. He dives into melee and starts swinging, carving a path through any enemies who are foolish enough to stand in his way. Meanwhile, Strife uses his firearms and plays very much like a twin-stick shooter, blasting enemies from a distance with great single-target damage potential. When playing alone, you can switch between the two at any point — including in the middle of a combo — to best utilize each of their strengths.

To grow more powerful, you find enhancements (think: loot) throughout the levels and can collect creature cores, which contribute to a skill tree. Playing through levels again on higher difficulty levels gives you increased chances for getting creature cores, so it is a means to grow more powerful if later levels give you some difficulty. Each Horseman also has wrath powers, such as War's Chaos form or Strife's Havoc form, which can be triggered to grow significantly more powerful for a short duration.

It all came together in the E3 2019 demo when the presenter was tasked with taking down a boss at the end of the level. This monster was a big enough threat on its own, let alone with all the additional enemies that it began to summon. The presenter deftly switched between Horsemen and used War to mop up all the adds before switching to Strife to really lay damage into the boss itself. When playing alone, whichever Horseman is "on the bench" slowly regains health while you play as the other, so there's plenty of strategy in switching between the two.

The game was described as "meaty yet arcade," and it wasn't hard to see why. Darksiders Genesis seems to have a lot of content to it, but more importantly, its overall gameplay looks to be a lot of fun. It isn't terribly hard to understand, but with the game's three difficulty levels and a new game+ mode, it should allow for skilled players to pull off some crazy fights. Darksiders Genesis is coming out close to the end of this year.