‘Darksiders II’ Vs. ‘Sleeping Dogs’: Who Ya Got?

It has been a painfully, painfully quite couple of months on the release schedule for video games. Summer is usually bad, but this has been awful.

We’ve soldiered through with downloadable games like Dyad and Wizorb, and used it to get caught up on franchises that I’ll need to be familiar with for the upcoming fall jammed full of games. But it’s still been baffling. There have been weeks where literally four, count ’em, four games have hit the market.

Even by the industry’s standards, this is pretty bad.

The drought ends with a bang next Tuesday, though, with both Sleeping Dogs and Darksiders II. We’ll be reviewing both, and here’s why you should be excited for them.

Let’s start with Darksiders II. The original Darksiders was an enormous dungeon crawler that, a few annoying boss battles aside, was a fun and well-done game that mixed the levelling-up-via-items Zelda style with a God Of War combat system. What stood out about it the most, though, was the writing. Way, way too often these days, video game protagonists are grimdark dorks.

War, however, wasn’t a mindless killing machine. In fact the game had an ongoing theme that killing wasn’t really his first option and he only got into fights when he had to. It was nice to play a character who wasn’t utterly homicidal. The writing seems to be sticking to that with the sequel telling a parallel story about Death looking to save his brother and, by extension, humanity.

Oh, and it also has a more elaborate loot system with several armor sets and types of weapons, not to mention the map is twice the size of the enormous previous game.

Next there’s Sleeping Dogs. This has had a torturous development history. It started out as True Crime: Hong Kong, got dumped, got picked up and had a title change courtesy Square Enix and is now poised on the brink of being a surprise hit.

The early reviews have been really, really good. I admit I’m concerned about a few things: the game was originally intended to be an open world brawler, but had guns added to it relatively late in development.

Both, however, look like a lot of fun.

So, are you picking up one? Both? Neither? Tell us in the comments.