I’m trying to beat the Tiamat boss in Darksiders, and I just have to rant.
This boss is ridiculously hard to beat, but for all the wrong reasons.
- The biggest cause of your death is the poor camera! The camera will automatically center itself so that War is visible, but Tiamat is not. Thus, you cannot see whether and when Tiamat is getting ready to attack you! Often, you can’t see where Tiamat is! You can adjust the camera of course, but throughout this fight you’re fighting both Tiamat and the badly programmed camera.
- The second biggest cause of your death is the fact that the sticky bombs are nearly invisible. They do not have a colour or glow that distinguishes them from the rest of Tiamat’s body. It’s often impossible to tell whether the bomb even stuck to Tiamat! Besides this, Tiamat’s other body parts can obscure bombs that are stuck to Tiamat. Thus, even if you have several bombs on Tiamat, the lock-on control will not see them and will not lock onto them! In any case, Darksiders’s enemy selection mechanism doesn’t work very well — sometimes it selects a nearby bomb rather than a flame even if the reticule is directly on the flame. I’m guessing this is because it draws a line from War to infinity, and the nearby bomb is closer on this line, even though the reticule is centered on the flame. Whatever the reason, the very few shots at Tiamat you get are even harder to take because of the sheer clumsiness of the controls.
- The fireballs that Tiamat throws at you are programmed in an entirely unfair way. I’m not sure what it is, but I seem to take damage even when all I’m doing is watching for them and dashing to avoid them! Either the game is detecting collision in some non-physical way, or the blast radius of the fireballs is much larger than the fireballs themselves, thus visually tricking you. As if that weren’t enough, the audio cue is off too. If you respond to the audio cue, you’ll dash too early and get hit!
- Finally, that video game programmer insanity — making you sit through a cutscene before you can start a fight — is present, though to a smaller extent. It seems you can skip most of the cutscene, but the last bit will invariably play before you’re handed control, increasing the aggravation.
As you can tell, I’m really hating this game right now.
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