Darksiders III

The pitch: the third horseman, and a genre pivot the series didn't ask for

Darksiders III sends Fury, the third of the apocalypse's four horsemen, hunting the Seven Deadly Sins across a ruined, semi-open version of Earth, developed by Gunfire Games and published by THQ Nordic after the studio picked the franchise back up following original developer Vigil Games' closure. It released worldwide, simultaneously across PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, on 27 November 2018. Roughly 12,500 Steam reviews later it sits at Mostly Positive — about 76% positive — a meaningfully more contested rating than either of its two predecessors, and the reason why is the first thing almost every review, positive or negative, spends its opening paragraph explaining.

The first two Darksiders games were built as Zelda-inspired dungeon crawlers with hack'n'slash combat — puzzle rooms, boss keys, a combat system that rewarded aggression. Darksiders III trades that identity for something closer to Dark Souls: stamina management, a tighter and less forgiving dodge window, and — at launch — no easier "classic" combat option to fall back on. Reviewers who take that swing on its own terms describe a genuinely atmospheric, more serious action-RPG that earns its own identity rather than repeating the first two games. Reviewers who came in expecting Darksiders 1 or 2's feel are, with remarkable consistency across nearly eight years of reviews, the ones walking away disappointed — one widely-upvoted review puts it as bluntly as the corpus gets: "This game is a Darksiders game in only 3 aspects: The name, the art style and the story."

The complaint that isn't about taste: inputs that don't register

Set the genre-identity argument aside, because there's a second, more concrete problem that shows up independently across the entire review timeline regardless of which side of that argument a given reviewer sits on. Multiple, unrelated reviewers describe specific input failures rather than vague "it feels off" complaints: pressing dodge and Fury not dodging, pressing grapple and nothing happening, reaching for a ledge and failing to grab it. One 2026 review lays it out as plainly as possible: "I press dodge -> she doesn't dodge. I press left click to grapple -> she doesn't grapple. I press jump next to a ledge to grab it -> she doesn't grab it." That's not a subjective complaint about difficulty philosophy; it's a responsiveness problem layered on top of a combat system that specifically punishes mistimed dodges, and it recurs often enough across the years to read as a real, persistent technical issue rather than a handful of unlucky players.

The camera draws almost equally consistent criticism — several reviewers across different years independently call it the worst they've encountered in the genre — and the world's navigation adds a third, related frustration: a semi-open, Metroidvania-inspired map with incomplete fast travel and a compass more than one reviewer says stops functioning reliably partway through, leading to extended backtracking through visually similar areas. None of these are fatal on their own, but stacked against a combat system that already demands precision, they compound into the "aggressively mediocre" verdict one reviewer settled on — not a broken game, but one that keeps getting in its own way.

What the developer actually fixed, and what it didn't

To Gunfire Games' credit, the response to launch criticism wasn't silence. A post-release patch added a "classic" combat option, and reviewers who tried it after the update report meaningfully smoother sessions than on the default Souls-like setup — one describes making "more progress in a single session than during past 2 days worth of playtime" after switching. That's a genuine, verifiable improvement, and it complicates the simple "broken at launch, still broken" reading some reviews imply. What the patches evidently didn't resolve for everyone is the underlying input and camera responsiveness, which recent reviews as late as 2026 still describe in the same terms as the 2018 launch-week ones — and a smaller but real thread of 2024 reviews reports ongoing Unreal Engine 4 crashes with no fix available at the time of writing.

Length, price and the DLC on top

At its NZ$64.95 list price, Darksiders III sits well above what most reviewers feel its roughly 12-20 hour campaign justifies, and more than one negative review specifically frames its recommendation as conditional on catching a discount rather than buying at launch pricing. Three paid DLC packs followed release — two boss-arena/challenge add-ons and a cosmetics pack — none of which reviewers describe as adding meaningfully to the core campaign, so they read as genuinely optional rather than content withheld from the base game. Against genre peers releasing the same year, several reviewers note Darksiders III's shorter length is a mixed blessing: less of a time investment if the combat friction wears on you, but also less game for the asking price if it doesn't.

Verdict

Darksiders III is a real, ambitious swing at reinventing its own series' identity, and taken purely as a Souls-inspired action-RPG with strong art direction and a genuinely serious take on Fury's story, a meaningful share of its audience thinks it lands. But the input-responsiveness and camera complaints that recur, independently, from 2018 launch week through reviews written in 2026 are hard to dismiss as taste — they're the same specific, mechanical complaint made by unrelated players years apart. If you loved Darksiders 1 or 2 specifically for how their combat felt, this is a different game wearing a familiar name; if you're coming to it as a Souls-curious newcomer with patience for a rough camera and occasional dropped inputs, there's a legitimately good action-RPG underneath the friction.