Here we are again playing as one of the Four Horsemen. This time we're not following War's journey but Death's. He is on a quest to save his brother War by bringing back mankind. As far as the story goes it's nothing special and I got kinda bored by it - the first Darksiders game definitely had a better developed story. Death is a cocky character and has an attitude of "stop fucking with me and do as I say". All in all, I feel that War was a more likable character.

The gameplay has gotten an upgrade. Death can wall-run a la Prince of Persia and can hang on to ledges. It pulls it off well and it's satisfying to watch Death wallrun and make jumps in the longer parkour segments.

One of the major differences with the previous Darksiders is that you can equip new armor and weapons. During the game you will find many chests containing items and while they can be potions or money you could also get a piece of armor or a weapon. Items are also dropped by bosses and sold by the few merchants in the game. The most powerful items are the ones with the "Possessed" prefix. You can sacrifice other weapons to level these powerful items and assign new attributes to them (like more crit %, strength, life and so on). It's a cool mechanic and Possessed weapons are definitely the best in the game.

During the game Death will acquire new abilities like extending his reach using a ghost hand (think Nero from DMC4) or opening portals in specific plates (just like War could in the first Darksiders). It's a mix of new and old and the pace at which you get new abilities is pretty good.

The combat is a complete button mash. You do acquire new combos, but they are not many and there isn't a big variety to make the combat interesting. In the end I equipped a pair of Possessed Armblades with a 20% crit chance among other stats and proceeded to mash the Y button (I play with an Xbox360 gamepad on the PC). I played on the highest difficulty so I had to watch out not to get hit, so the combat wasn't THAT boring. Death has the ability to dodge attacks and if you press the dodge button at the right time Death's reaper form makes a counter attack. It's the same mechanic as War's block.

The graphics are the same as on the consoles. They aren't breath taking but the art style is cool and it's easy on the eyes. You can only change resolution, gamma, Vertical Sync and toggle fullscreen on/off. The absence of Anisotropic Filtering is obvious so expect some blurry textures when looking at them at an angle. You can't change Anti-Aliasing, but jaggies didn't catch my attention(not that I was looking very carefully).

Overall, I didn't enjoy Darksiders II as much as I did the first one. After seeing the ending cinematic of the previous game I was in big anticipation of the next game and to continue the story, but I was disappointed. If I were to rate the game, I'd give it a 7/10. Still, the game is worth playing and I recommend picking it up when it's on sale.

TL;DR: The first Darksiders is better, still Darksiders II is worth picking up when on sale.