The characters are all designed by Joe Madureira - if you've followed his work, his style has always been like this since his days as the artist on Uncanny x-men in the 90s. I would say he's one of my favourite x-men artists. If anything the blizzard artists have probably been influenced by his style.

Seriously, in the action adventure genre, it's average at best.

I played bayonetta first before playing this, and after the deeply rewarding combo system in that game, i found it very hard to motivate myself to complete darksiders.

bayonetta's combo system is quite simple, you can get good results simply by mashing but seriously, it's not that difficult to chain because the combo systems make sense due to the branching nature of a lot of the combo trees. bayonetta is pure cheesy fun and activating witch time reliably is one of the most fun things about the combat system.

I see you have ninja gaiden 2 in your gamer card - that one is pure hard core gameplay, you will tear your hair out trying to complete the game on mentor and master ninja difficulties.