Darksiders sometimes feels like a 9.5, but when you compare it to the best games it reminds you of, it's a bit lacking.
By the time you finish the first dungeon, however, you start to think it's a Zelda game, but not just a Zelda game. It's now a Zelda game with badass graphics, much better combat, and added platforming mechanics (fast-traversal and attack-while-hanging-onto-stuff = way better than Link).
After the second or third dungeon, however, you realize that it's not really a Zelda game. There's basically no NPCs to talk to. No archery contests. No fishing. No horse races. The only thing to do outside of the main quest is to go around the world using your dungeon-found gadgets to collect powerups you couldn't get earlier in the game; the game turns out to be very linear. You can't really keep looking at it as a Zelda game when you find out there's hardly anything to do.
So now we're back to an action game... with puzzles, some customization, and a bit more length and variety than you might expect. Once again, it sounds like a great game, except at this point I can pinpoint numerous problems in the combat.
The generic charge is used against a lot of tough enemies and bosses to evade their attacks. However, it just moves you out of the way. You're still a big target, unlike the Ninja Gaiden roll, and you're stuck with a lot of ending lag so if you do it too soon you often end up getting hit.
The chaos form (makes you invincible and deal a ton of damage for like 15 seconds, with a weapon enhancement available later that buffs its duration and recharge) is overpowered. There's only a handful of fights in the game where you're really meant to use it (and only because they're long multi-wave fights), and using it anywhere else is easy-mode.
The general enemies take too long to kill most of the game (like 3 full combos), don't attack you nearly often enough, and don't have a whole lot of personality (I never get the same satisfaction as killing enemy ninjas in Ninja Gaiden 1 & 2). You can knock these guys down and they take like 5 seconds to get up, which is essentially easy combos, but there's no challenge to it. There's also, disappointingly, no throw moves. You can pull them in with the Abyssal Chain (and yell "Get over here!") but it just knocks them down; nothing cool.
The tougher enemies (this is on Apocalyptic, mind you; Normal would probably be too easy for me) take off like 1/4 of your health in one hit, and in a couple extreme cases 1/2 your health. I'm fine with having to avoid strong enemies' attacks, but the problem is that with the charge you can't fluidly dodge and counter-attack, so you can only safely deal a few hits each time, which means it takes like 10 times of going back and forth to kill each of them.
Later in the game, most of the enemies don't seem much more powerful, but you can take a lot more hits, can have lifesteal on your weapon, and deal like 3x the damage. So offensively the game feels more like it should, but there's only a couple enemies that are a viable threat at this point.
Sword attacks use X, and secondary attacks (you get 2 secondary weapons, with one equipped and swappable via dpad) use Y. This sounds okay, but there's no real reason for it. The sword is reliable, but the limitation to X leaves you with a very short move list, which doubles to around 15 when you buy new techniques. I could probably list them all off the top of my head if I wanted. The first secondary weapon doesn't seem to do anything you can't do with the sword, and the second secondary weapon is only useful as a weapon for its aoe knockdown abilities; there's no cool inter-weapon combos to use.
So if you're all about the Zelda experience, this game is missing a very large part of it. If you're looking for an action game, the combat in this game probably isn't what you're looking for. But if you're willing to compromise some of each genre for a solid hybrid, this game is a lot of fun.