A certain degree of grim seriousness is called for when you’re the Horseman of War. Organizations have an image to maintain. You can’t show up to the apocalypse in bright fluffy pajamas singing Broadway show tunes. It ruins morale.

But Darksiders is among those games that take it a bit too far. Its protagonist War is a muscle-bound brute clad in spiked bits from three separate suits of armor, carrying a sword the size of some small tree trunks and inlaid with skulls all the way to the tip. (Incidentally, he looks eerily similar to Arthas Menethil, but whether this makes him sillier or cooler is up to you.) He tromps through the burnt-out wreckage of long-dead human civilization, never speaking above a growl, massacring anything that challenges him- and quite a lot seems to think it can beat the embodiment of War in a fight, from the warlike angels of not!Heaven to the victorious demons of not!Hell now infesting the dead Earth.

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