Before we get into this let me just put it out there... both these games are fucking dreadful. I got no intention of burying the lead on this. They suck... ultimate balls, and that's partly why I've compounded the two reviews into one. Another reason is that I didn't play either game for very long, although one could suggest that was more of a sub-reason, since I stopped playing because they sucked so much balls.

Darksiders is first chronologically, and I rented this pile of hot rubbish on the say of a guy called Chris Welsh [Twitter him @ChrisDWelsh if you've played Darksiders, because he bloody loved it and he needs to learn!], who went on about the myriad awesomenesses of the game. You play War, the head of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who is called upon when angels and demons wage war in our world. He slays a handful of both until his bosses, three stone heads with fire in them [think pumpkin, but more permanent], give him shit for showing up before he received the call. "But... I DID receive the call" whines War, looking for all the world like a man who started adding body armour around 4 thousand years ago and just never stopped. "No mate," say Hell's Easter Island statues, "none of that happened!" and so on, for some time. The gist is that the horsemen are called up to pitch battle with both Good and Evil should they get out of hand, but only if the Seventh Seal is broken. War gets the call to arms, but the Seal is intact and none of the other three lads show up. He's out on a ledge and the heads accuse him of turning up uninvited. He maintains that he WAS invited and so on and so on until they strip him of his mighty powers and send him BACK to Earth to find out what the bloody hell is going on. Which makes no sense... at all. If you're a talking stone head and you think this silly bastard has gone rogue, sending him back to Earth to carry on going rogue is stupid. However, telling him to put a stop to the thing you don't believe is happening and stripping him of his powers is also stupid. If you don't think the war is happening then what are you sending him to investigate it for? If you DO believe the war is happening then why are you punishing him? Plus if you wanted this whole mess sorting out, surely leaving him his awesome powers and letting him get on with it is a much quicker way.

This is about 10 minutes into the game.

Beyond the nonsensical story, the gameplay itself is God awful. War controls like a nervous frog. Hanging on to the wall and want to drop down? TOUGH SHIT! You will continue to hang there, pressing the button that you KNOW is right, until he spogs out and leaps 8 feet away from the wall and probably down a pit. The entire thing is just running around, killing different strengths of enemy, revealing a door, running in, killing different strengths of enemy and etcetera. At one point you meet a merchant who offers you a thing to open a door. But he won't fork it over till you've collected 500 souls, which for you means running around the immediate area [you can't leave] and killing a procession of zombie people until you reach 500, after which every enemy simply disappears. You have no choice but to move on, and he gives you this daft horn that you blow at a door, which turns out to be a big rock monster, who says some things and walks off. Then you run through a door, kill different strengths of enemy and blah blah BLAH BLAH BAAHAHA!! BORING!

The last straw for me was when I had to defeat several ancient and powerful beings before being allowed to continue. They were holed up behind portals, all of which were on the same street as me. So I run to the nearest one, hop in and get the Hopping In cut scene. Followed by the Arrival cut scene. I walk 3 feet, at which time I am treated to the Middle of the Room cut scene, then the Magical Door cut scene, then a spilt second of gameplay before the CHALLENGE screen pops up and tells me what I have to do. ‘Defeat 50 enemies in 3 minutes’. Oh... OK. And THEN the ancient being right? No. You defeat 50 enemies in 3 minutes, get a health power up and move on. Next portal, cut scene, cut scene, walk, cut scene, challenge screen... defeat 25 enemies with the Pop Up attack. Erm.. OK. THEN the powerful beings yes? No.

Five portals, each of them essentially the same. No ancient and powerful beings to speak of, and then it's over. At this point I've been playing this turd for well over an hour and it's STILL giving me tutorials disguised as missions. I know how to do the jump attack. There are only three attacks and I've been playing for AN HOUR!! Urgh, it's horrible. Not as horrible, mind you, as Quantum Theory.

In it you play Syd, the rough and tumble lone freedom fighter who lives in the future and hunts vampires, henceforth known as Nosferatu because not one of them looks like a vampire. They're your typical space monster [of different strengths] and you blast them with your Revenant, which is what he's called his gun. In my day people gave their guns lady names, like Gladys or Betsy, but I guess I'm an old romantic. Maybe the Revenant was the name of his first girlfriend, who's to say? So Syd looks like a man spliced with the outside shell of a conker, rendered in claymation by a madman. He's all angles and spikes and shades of clay. He is the least plausible human being ever created by anyone. As soon as I hit the run button I knew I wasn't gonna like this game; because when Syd runs, the camera drops to its knees and looks up at him from behind, making it impossible to see where he’s going. It’s like Gears of War – I don't like Gears of War – and this game is a shitter version. Syd is grizzled and world weary, like Marcus Phoenix, slays monsters in a dystopian future with the help of some human soldiers he meets, like Marcus Phoenix, and he carries a rick-diculous gun around as if his overly muscled physique and gruff demeanour weren't enough to make up for the fact that they never rendered him a penis.

I played Quantum Theory for all of 20 minutes. When you run out of ammo there's no more to be had, anywhere. Enemies don't drop their guns, but what they do do, is keep coming in wave after wave. If you DO happen upon a box of ammo [coloured grey to make sure you can see them on the grey background in the grey corner they've hidden them, behind a grey car there's little chance you'd ever think to go behind], that will run out before the targets do. I had two guns. One that could explode scenery with one shot but took four or five to kill a standard enemy, and a shotgun with about as much range as Fisher Price walkie-talkie.

Both games look horrible and play even worse. The main characters are so stock you could make gravy out of them, and the stories so implausibly thin they could take up modelling. Don't bother with either, no matter what @ChrisDWelsh might say.