The Darksiders II remaster doesn’t look all that different

Reminder: This thing is $40

Were we expecting the remaster of Darksiders II for current systems to look significantly better than the 2012 original (RIP THQ)? I was not. Crisper and smoother, sure, but that’s about it. Here are some comparison screenshots that, at least to these less-than-stellar eyes, took some studying.

Besides 1080p and higher-resolution textures, Gunfire Games, the studio behind the remaster, “decided to rewrite the renderer to be physically based like a lot of other current generation game engines. What this means visually is metal, leather, stone and skin look and respond to light as you would expect them to in the real world. This new rendering method meant we revisited every texture and surface in the game, reworking and re-authoring them for the new renderer. To take full advantage of these texture changes, we’ve also gone back and relit the entire game.”

All of the DLC is in here, too, and there’s been general rebalancing and tweaks to loot distribution.

Darksiders II and I didn’t get along. I made it around four hours in before realizing there was a substantial amount of game left to get through and it wasn’t going to hold my attention. Had to bail.