Darksiders: Genesis review - delightful demon-thwacking from a new perspective

Sockets and gems! I love sockets and gems. So imagine my delight when, a few minutes into Darksiders: Genesis, a fresh perspective on the Hellish Zelda-alike series about monsters and demons, I clicked on a stray tab to find a whole page of sockets just waiting for gems.

Let me try to explain this. Enemies in Genesis sometimes drop special gems known as cores. The core for each enemy type is unique and bestows a unique perk. The more you have of each core, the more they level up and the perks get better. (This can get rather grindy, incidentally.)

Now, to access these perks you have to put them in sockets on the socket tree. And here's where it gets fun. Behold the socket tree! Sockets come in three flavours, and while you can put any old core in any old socket, if you match socket flavour to core flavour you get extra synergy. Throw in special cores that really big baddies and bosses drop and you have a recipe for fun. I have spent many hours in Genesis switching in and out sockets and watching what happens to the overall power levels of my two characters as I do so. It's nice to see the numbers go up. That's Genesis, isn't it? In the beginning, developers created the sockets and the gems. The numbers went up and it was good.

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