Third-person slasher Darksiders has some impressive character design, but the gameplay is lacking focus.

DARKSIDERS (Vigil Games; PS3 and Xbox 360; rated mature)

Fans of superheroes with improbable anatomy or ’90s fantasy comics have likely been aware of Joe Madureira since the halcyon days of their oh-so-awkward youth, but earlier in January a new audience took notice of the man behind Battlechasers: gamers. The first product of Vigil Games, the studio Madureira co-founded, Darksiders is a third-person action-adventure starring a man (actually: a Horseman of the Apocalypse) with improbable anatomy hacking, slashing and occasionally puzzling his way through scores of angels, demons and some stuff Madureira probably had scribbled on his math notebooks in high school. Needless to say, his presence as Vigil's creative director resonates throughout the game.

But — and it's a big “but” — is that really a good thing? Darksiders’ character designs are colourful and bold, but shamelessly derivative, and enemies are so overdetailed they become little more than a dull acrylic smear to be wiped away by the player's gigantic sword. The decaying Earth where most of the game is set has a few nice visual flourishes, but it’s often made difficult to navigate by a distinct lack of the usual colour or lighting cues that modern game designers use to lead us through their environments. Freeze the screen at any moment and you might get a nice comic book panel, but as an interface, the visuals fail to impress.

The difficulties in “reading” the screen presented by Madureira's input may have led to the second most derivative aspect of its design: the gameplay. Vigil cherry-picks — to put it charitably — from God of War, The Legend of Zelda and even Portal, though Darksiders predictably lacks the focus of any of those three. The resultant melange is actually surprisingly congruous, and the familiarity helps us to navigate the messy screen, though congruity alone is scarcely enough to elevate the game anywhere near the level of its forebears.

ARMY OF TWO: THE 40TH DAY (Electronic Arts; PS3, PSP and Xbox 360; rated mature)

Army of Two: The 40th Day is the sequel to 2008's Army of Two, an ultimately middling cover-based “pop-’n’-drop” shooter that featured a few fun co-op gimmicks and some unintentionally hilarious bromantic overtones. In it, you controlled Tyson and Salem, two mercenaries who were also bestest friends (and nothing more!), as they trotted around the world squirting hot, hot lead at other hunks of steroidal man meat. While The 40th Day takes the ambiguously gay duo to Shanghai, content-wise it's more of the same — with the notable exception that, this time, it's actually kind of fun.

There's a barrier for entry, however. Though it's been toned down considerably since the last game, Tyson and Salem — the game's twin protagonists — are still kind of unlikable dicks. They'll still fist-bump like frat boys after murdering dozens and dozens of people, they still exchange unfunny quips between firefights and they still wear those ridiculous metal hockey masks. Oh, and at one point during the game's zoo level, Tyson cops to raping a panda bear. I am not making this up.

Fictional context is all just gravy in a game like The 40th Day, though, and its beef ’n’ taters are appetizing, even if they're not quite delicious. The repeatable action of running into an area, hiding behind stuff and spraying bullets at everyone who isn't you is a fun one — so fun, in fact, that it's almost enough to carry the whole game. Unfortunately, none of the ingredients developers EA Montreal added to flavour the repetitive action really work, either because they're rendered unusable by stingy checkpoints (like the weapon upgrade system, which tosses out all of your modifications if you happen to die before you reach the next one), or because they were sort of dumb ideas in the first place (like the tacked-on stealth missions).