Finally Finished Darksiders 3: Cons

This is one of the better Playstation Plus games of the past year and honestly, just this one title makes the 3 month subscription price (that I had at the time) almost worth the price on its own. I originally put it down because I thought it was too difficult, but then I played Nioh for a while and then nothing seemed difficult at all.

Upon rejoining the fray I ended up completing the game just 3 days later and it was a wonderful experience. However, this game is not without its flaws and I will point those out now.

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CONS

• The loading times are massive

This is something that gets under my skin in any game and I feel it is the ONE THING that developers really need to focus on the most and eliminate as much as possible.

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You like that logo? Pretty cool huh? Well I hope you think so because you are going to be looking at it A LOT! The load times after you die from any means including accidentally jumping off a cliff (there are lots of those) pops this bad boy up on your screen and regardless of where you died - the complicated nature of the graphics in whatever area seem to be meaningless, you are looking at nearly a full minute of loading time just to get to have another go.

This also happens any time you "warp" to another portion of the map and this simply discouraged me from ever using this. I know that 1 minute is not a long time, but dude! You die a LOT in games like this and I think I probably spent at least 20% of my overall game time "loading."

These loads aren't just happening during respawns either, sometimes you'll be running along and even be in the midst of battle and the screen freezes so it can load again (although for not as long.)

This makes the game feel "incomplete"

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• The game fully crashed dozens of times

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_{I know it says "Apex Legends" but you get the point}

This screen is everyone's favorite screen on a PS4 and I find it appropriate that they used the BSOD format for it.

Sometimes the crash would happen after you hadn't saved the game in a long time (this isn't up to you when you get to do it, for the most part) and of course this is where the crash happened to me multiple times. You then have to reopen the game, which has to load a bunch of stuff, and then click continue (another load time), then work your way back to where you were (which will incur several other loads) and possibly have the game crash again in the process.

A couple times the game crashed so hard that the PS4 couldn't recover from it and I had to hard restart the system, which as I am sure you could imagine, incurs an even LONGER load time.

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• There is no map

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_{Something like this would have been great, but unfortunately this is NOT from Darksiders III}
The "world" you explore is relatively massive and since there are aspects of Metroidvania in this game (which I like) this is meant to encourage you to travel back to previous areas in order to get to areas that were previously unreachable. But the lack of a map makes choosing an area to warp back to pretty much a "shot in the dark" and if you choose incorrectly, of course you are going to have to wait a really long time for each of these areas to load. They could have implemented this quite easily but there is no map, of any sort anywhere in your personal inventory, or in the "warp" areas. boooooo!

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• You get lots of alternate weapons, too bad they are all useless

As you progress in the game you will receive a bunch of new weapons along the way. They have names like "Barbs of Scorn" but basically they are knives, a sword, a spear, a hammer, and a boomerang thing. They all have different animation sequences to their attacks which are cool but all of them do substantially less damage than your main weapons, and also have much shorter range. Therefore you are not going to use them, other than the burning effect on the Chains of Scorn, which you will only ever use after a dodge.

I suppose the boomerang is useful in some situations but even when it is fully powered up it does about 1/5 the damage that your main attack does and it also makes you momentarily vulnerable while you are throwing it and can not move

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This brief moment where you are about to unleash your "boomerang" that leaves you completely unable to dodge might seem trivial, but the ability to dodge boss attacks are sometimes measured in partial seconds and it is infuriating that you cannot move as you see them lumbering towards you.

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• Targeting system broken in some instances

The lock-on targeting system works pretty well for the most part, but sometimes, such as the final boss fight with "Envy" you obviously want to be focusing your attack on the actual boss but since she summons on the previous bosses to assist in attempting to kill you, the focus gets changed to that "summon" instead of on the actual boss.

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_{The focus was changed to the summoned "Sloth" while "Envy" (the actual boss) may have warped behind me and is getting ready to strike out of view}

This will occur even though it is not possible to harm the summoned creatures and at many points they aren't even on the screen yet / any more yet the focus is still on some area in the void. This is dumb and shouldn't have made it to the final product.

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• After the endgame the impression is given that you can carry on for more content... but it isn't real content

This had me excited at first because it said something on the screen about carrying on to the next chapter.... wooo hooo! There must have been some DLC that I was unaware of!

The game simply starts back from the original beginning and goes through exactly the same game that you just finished defeating except the enemies are more numerous and far more difficult. You also have all of your abilities stripped and all the "waypoints" you had acquired are now also gone.

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So there you have it. If you only read this and not the "Pros" section I recently wrote it probably sounds as though I think this game sucks but that is not the case. It is a fantastic game that if they had only waited a bit longer to address these problems might have ended up being damn near perfect.

I still heartily recommend this game, but only if you get it for the price of free up to about $10. Otherwise, leave it alone.