Reviews Dark Souls [PS3]

Martel

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Introduction

Ah yes, Demon’s Souls. Infamous for its difficulty amongst, although I would say for the wrong reasons, given how tremendously unbalanced it was, making the game absurdly easy until it decided to screw you over with something so ridiculous that you’d spend another few hours grinding away to beat it, or walk back through the fog barrier and pray you got lucky this time around.

But nonetheless, if ever there was a game that proved that video games have, on the whole, been getting easier as time goes by, it’s Demon’s Souls, a game that is reminiscent of an earlier age, when death in a game was a severe punishment for carelessness or lack of skill, and when you actually had to WORK to accomplish something. Days that people who have been playing games for as long as I have miss dearly when we’ve just finished a game on the hardest difficulty setting in ten hours or less. I could go on, but I won’t.


So, just over two years later, we have Dark Souls, a spiritual sequel to Demon’s Souls, with the same “tough-as-nails” gameplay that the first delivered. I initially wasn’t going to get this, but after watching some gameplay videos and realising that I hadn’t played anything even remotely challenging since Resonance of Fate last year, I figured I’d give it a go…and summarising my experience in a sentence, or even a paragraph, just isn’t going to be possible.

Dark Souls has been one hell of an emotional rollercoaster: contempt, panic, blind rage, back to contempt, stunned disbelief, mild amusement, some more blind rage…with every new challenge and experience came something new, which is in itself an extremely rare thing when video games haven’t really changed at all over the last two generations…or even before then, in all honesty. Yet, in the end, I am left with a feeling of profound disappointment, tinged with frustration. This is not the game it should be, and is certainly not the game it is made out to be. Read on to find out why, much like Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls falls short of its full potential...but is bloody good fun nonetheless.

Storyline: 4.0/10

In the founding of the world, the dragons held sole dominion over the world, as dragons often do. However, then the human race came into existence and, as the human race often do, ruined everything for them, and four entities, consisting of Gwyn, Gravelord Nito, The Witch of Izalith, and the Furtive Pygmy, overthrew the dragons with the Fire of Lords (yes, they overthrew dragons with fire) and established the Age of Fire.

A happy ending for all concerned, then. However, more recently an affliction of unknown origin has started to affect humans, fragile things that they are. A mark known as the Darksign will appear on a person, and they have become an Undead, meaning that every time they die (which they will do plenty of in Dark Souls) they will return to life. But over time, they will lose their sanity and become increasingly more violent, until they snap entirely and become Hollow, with no will of their own.

Obviously not a good thing. In this decaying world, the player takes the role of an Undead who has yet to become Hollow and, after escaping from the Undead Asylum, learns that they are the Chosen Undead of a conveniently written prophecy, which foretells of their exploits and ultimate destiny: to ring the two Bells of Awakening to counter the plague and re-establish order on the world.

This is all explained in the opening cutscene, and that is really all there is to it. After ringing the Bells of Awakening, players are sent on another, slightly more challenging quest with an extremely minimalistic explanation as to why they should be doing this from a Primordial Serpent, and at the end you are presented with a choice as to how you would like your new world order to take shape, giving you two possible endings, neither of which reflect the way in which you played the game, becoming a simple matter of what you choose to do after defeating the final boss. There is very little to say about the story of Dark Souls, because in truth it is very rarely present in the game, and acts more as an instruction and progress tracker than anything else, reminding the player that once they have defeated a certain boss, they need to another location to defeat another boss. What little effort has been put into the story is not particularly original, detailed or ground-breaking, and follows a standard run-of-the-mill fantasy formula that has been around for years.

Dark Souls does not have a story so much as it does a vaguely contrived excuse for players to visit certain areas and battle certain bosses. The time spent addressing the issues raised by the prologue is minimal, and serves more as a distraction from the gameplay than a vital, interesting part of the game. A poor attempt that, whilst it may be considered unnecessary in the grand scheme of things (after all, Demon’s Souls did not have much of a story either) could have been much more interesting, detailed and integrated into the gameplay. Players looking for a detailed, involving plot to go with their gameplay will want to avoid Dark Souls.

Characters: 7.0/10

Despite its miserable excuse for a plot, Dark Souls has quite a satisfying and gritty cast which fits perfectly into its grungy and depressing world and, whilst these characters do not noticeably add to the experience, they do not detract from it either, and the rewards one gets from paying attention to them makes it a worthwhile endeavour.

Whilst the entire game revolves around the player, the various sidequests that the supporting cast undertake makes for some interesting detours, as you will occasionally encounter them in new areas, and makes the world of Dark Souls seem a little livelier than it otherwise would. Your actions also influence the cast to a degree: killing some NPCs will cause others to attack you on sight, rescuing others will grant you access to new spells and equipment, and speaking to them will yield some small information about what is going on in the world around you, and their current state of mind, although conversation options are extremely limited, with characters just repeating a single sentence much of the time, with any dialogue changes coming after certain events in the game. Through a sequence of events, characters can also be turned Hollow, forcing you to kill them, but netting valuable loot. Or, if you choose, you can simply kill them immediately for a paltry amount of souls.

Many of the NPCs relate to one another and, whilst few very of them will interact with one another, certain NPCs will lead to the discovery of others, as they request that you find a particular individual once you have spoken to them after a particular point in the game. Some will go on adventures of their own, and will request your help at certain stages or, in the case of Soltaire, will even go so far as you join you in certain battles. Whilst the development of these NPCs is not as solid as one might find in other RPGs, they nonetheless add to the world and are worthy of note.

Gameplay: 7.5/10

Described as a "dark fantasy RPG", Dark Souls is an open-world adventure game similar to The Legend of Zelda franchise in basic gameplay design, in which the player character runs through the world in real-time, facing off against enemies, navigating various obstacles, improving their survivability through acquisition of better weapons, armour, spells and souls and, of course, through defeating various area bosses, with the overall objective – to ring the bells, and then to collect the souls of four bosses – being an unobtrusive presence in the background, to be undertaken at leisure. Players can start as any one of ten different classes, with each having their own different starting equipment and level (Pyromancers, for example, start at level 1, and have comparable weaker equipment than, say, a Knight, but gain the Pyromancy Glove, which otherwise won’t be acquired until about five hours into the first playthrough of the game) and ultimately serving as a basic framework for future play style. In truth, it makes very little difference in the grand scheme of things what class you choose at the beginning of Dark Souls, as all classes have access to everything. This is perhaps an oversight on the developer’s part, as it makes the character creation process feel somewhat hollow as a result, but it does an adequate job in providing a starting framework for character development, and gives players some idea of how they’d like to play the game.

Player progression in Dark Souls revolves around, unsurprisingly, Souls. Souls act as the player’s very lifeblood, being used for practically everything in the game, including levelling up your stats (each going up to level 99, making your maximum level 792, although naturally, the more you level up, the more it costs) and your equipment, to purchasing various items from the assorted NPCs the game will throw your way. In the likely event of your death, you will be teleported back to the last bonfire rested at (see below) with your souls remaining at the point where you last died (or the closest place to it) represented by a glowing green puddle. Reaching this puddle before you die again will restore your lost souls to you, but should you die before reaching them, they will be lost to you forever. This adds an added level of challenge to the game, and it requires extraordinary self control not to simply go rushing back in to attempt to reclaim your lost souls, for you will almost certainly die in the attempt – upon death, the vast majority of enemies (there are one or two exceptions) will respawn.

Another important part of Dark Souls’ gameplay is Humanity. Humanity, commonly dropped from rats or looted from dead bodies, allows you to revive to human form, which allows you to invade another player’s world, or be invaded yourself, both by other players and by black phantom NPCs. Humanity is mostly important for online play and Covenants, although it also allows you to Kindle bonfires to increase the maximum number of Estus Flasks you can carry (see below for more detail) and it also has the added benefit of increasing your item drop rate. Like souls, humanity is lost upon death, and will be lost permanently if you do not reclaim it before dying a second time.

One of the first items you will acquire in Dark Souls are Estus Flasks, which act as your primary source of restoring lost health. Initially capped at five, Estus Flasks can be boosted in strength by acquisition of Fire Keeper Souls, which are gained either at certain points at the map, or by killing Fire Keepers, which will disable the bonfire that they happen to stand guard over.

Character development is a vital part of Dark Souls and, whilst there is no right or wrong way to play the game, players will need to plan out their character’s development if they wish to get anywhere. Different stats, naturally, have a different effect on character capabilities: putting points into Vitality, for example, will increase your health, and therefore your ability to take hits. But unless you put some points into strength or intelligence as well, you will find that it just takes you longer to die, because the longer a fight goes on, the more likely you are to make costly mistakes. You can equip weapons and armour beyond your skill level, but they will suffer a penalty that will make them worse than useless: equipping heavy armour without sufficient endurance to cope with it will make you extremely slow and easy to hit, and trying to wield a weapon beyond your level of strength will make it unwieldy, and it will suffer a penalty in its prowess.

Dark Souls is very much defined by the types of weapons and armour that you wish to use, and this is something that players will need to decide relatively early on, for the higher your soul level, the harder it is to reach the next soul level. Weapons and armour both can be levelled up, and can then be ascended into entirely new types, once they reach +10 and you are in possession of a particular type of ember, to give them a variety of new effects and resistances. The souls of bosses, naturally, make the strongest weapons and armour. Items required to upgrade weapons – chunks and later slabs of raw materials – can be purchased from blacksmiths, although some can only be obtained from powerful enemies as rare drops, and for the majority of your first run-through the game you will be in short supply of materials that you need. Whilst it takes a long time for weapons to be made obsolete by newer weapons, meaning that there is a certain level of balance to weapon development, armour is quickly surpassed by later sets, so the same cannot be said for that. Indeed, whilst Dark Souls has a very pervasive and well-designed system for developing equipment, there are far too many ways around the drawbacks of enhanced equipment, such as speed penalties to heavy armour (Havel’s Ring, for example, will let you equip almost every armour set in the game and suffer no penalty whatsoever) to make the game particularly challenging.

Dark Souls has an open world, and there is no prescribed order in which you have to do things, although the game does drop some very strong hints as to the correct path: as an example, there are three paths out of Firelink Shrine, to the New Londo Ruins, the Catacombs, and the Undead Burg. Within the ruins are ghosts that you can’t damage at all without either being cursed or a specific weapon dropped from said ghosts, and the path to the catacombs is lined with skeletons that will kill you in one or two hits at that stage, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where you should go first, as the enemies in the Undead Burg are much easier to kill. If you so wish, you can go to either of the other two areas first (there is nothing to stop you running straight past enemies, after all) but you will experience a much tougher time for it. Many areas and the bosses contained within them are optional; for example, you can avoid the Depths and Blighttown entirely if you chose the Master Key as your starting gift. The majority of areas and bosses are mandatory, but in this Dark Souls gives first-time players the chance to increase their soul level and equipment in preparation, and gives those who have already finished the game the opportunity to skip past it all and cut right to the heart of matters.

Dark Souls is absolutely ruthless in dealing with players who slip up. Status effects (particularly Curse, which kills you instantly and then revives you with half your maximum HP, and can stack all the way up to 1/8th of your max HP) are debilitating, enemies will give chase to you for quite a long time, and are also capable of parrying and backstabs, or very high damage output. Each enemy has their own identifiable attack patterns and behaviour, however, so once you become familiar with this, it becomes much easier to avoid their attacks. Yet even once you have upgraded your armour and increased your soul level, a lot of enemies never cease to be threats: you can’t just wade in and cleave a path through things at any stage; although things become substantially easier to kill, they can still inflict heavy damage on you. Whilst enemy strength is relatively proportionate to the order in which you are likely to visit areas, there are usually a few extremely powerful enemies wandering around in some areas (the Hydra in the Darkroot Basin, for example) to stop complacent players in their tracks.

Once in a while, you will be required to face off against a boss, and the only real difference between boss battles and regular enemy battles tends to be the size of your opponent, as well as the life bar that pops up on the bottom of the screen. Boss battles, whilst titanic, are not a huge step up from regular enemies a great deal of the time; normal enemies hit extremely hard, and bosses only slightly more so, which would be quite underwhelming if it weren’t for the fact that bosses are always accompanied by music. They do, however, require more strategy to take out: some bosses have weak spots you can exploit, or will launch an overwhelming offensive if you don’t exploit them. Defeating a boss also nets you a large amount of souls, and usually the soul of the boss in question, which you can either use to gain more souls, or use in the forging of a weapon. Some bosses also drop weapons and armour if you slice off a part of their body (usually the tail) as well, and doing so is no easy task. Completionists after the platinum trophy will likely find that acquiring an item from a boss is more difficult than defeating the boss itself.

Bonfires in Dark Souls act as “safe zones” of sorts, allowing players to rest and recover their health, as well as level up, attune their magic and, once the respective items have been purchased from merchants, repair, enhance and store equipment. Each time you rest at a bonfire, all enemies killed up to that point will re-spawn, so they also provide opportunities for farming souls. Bonfires are relatively well-spaced, although the gaps between them will feel extremely long and thoroughly unfair at times, and the first time you are exploring a level, having to run through the majority of it again because you haven’t found the bonfire there yet is highly aggravating. Kindling bonfires also allows you to carry more Estus Flasks (up to ten, although once you have acquired the Rite of Kindling you can push this up further) at the cost of humanity, further increasing your ability to survive.

Spells make a return in Dark Souls, and are also considerably more balanced: instead of having an MP bar, spells (which consists of miracles, sorcery, and pyromancy) have a set number of uses; the more powerful the spell, the fewer the uses. Using any type of magic requires strategy, for uses can only be regained at a bonfire and, of course, resting at a bonfire restores the enemies of that area to life. Unfortunately, this has the downside of making pure mage builds highly unreliable; you will need at least some physical damage capabilities to succeed; any spells will hit enemies (and bosses) extremely hard, yet many bosses possess more HP than spells can handle, and will be quick to take advantage of the slight delay in casting time to hit you for massive damage.

Another aspect of Dark Souls are Covenants. Occasionally, NPCs (usually major ones) will offer to allow you to enter a Covenant with them, granting you access to items that aren’t obtainable anywhere else. Covenants can be strengthened by offering up certain items to the NPC in question – often Humanity, or rare items that are easiest to acquire through online play – and doing so will often net you valuable rewards, such as high-level spells and unique weapon sets. You can only join one Covenant at a time, and leaving the old Covenant in favour of a new one will reset the strength of your previous one back down to its original value, so if you re-join it you will need to start from scratch. Most of the Covenants can be broken by attacking the NPC in question (or NPCs affiliated with them) and, if you break a Covenant in this fashion, the only way to rejoin it is to absolve your sins, which can be done at a few select merchants, with the cost being proportionate to your soul level. The more rewarding Covenants in the game are usually well-hidden, or have high entry requirements (Warriors of Sunlight, for example, requires 50 Faith by default, with the requirement reduced by 5 Faith each time you help someone online defeat a boss) to match their profitable rewards. Whilst they do not shape the overall gameplay in any way, they do provide a welcome distraction.

So, to address the burning question that will no doubt be the deciding factor for many who are contemplating buying this game: just how hard IS Dark Souls? In truth, Dark Souls is as hard as you make it. Those who rush in to new areas without seeing what lies around the corner will be met with a swift death until they learn to take things slowly. Those who don’t learn from their mistakes and watch boss attack patterns are going to die frequently against those bosses. Dark Souls, like its predecessor, harks back to an earlier style of gameplay that newer gamers aren’t going to be familiar with, and many are going to struggle with it because of this: it requires thought and strategy. Grinding for souls becomes harder and more tedious the more you level up, and in truth it makes very little difference to your overall strength in the long run; enemies will still hit you extremely hard and if you don’t know what to look for, you’ll just die slightly slower than what you would have done otherwise. This is not a game you can just hack, slash and blast your way through, like pretty much every other game of this genre to come out this generation, or the last two generations before it.

Dark Souls punishes carelessness and mistakes with extreme prejudice, and is arguably more unforgiving than Demon’s Souls was; as save points are more frequent in the form of bonfires, if you died you wouldn’t have to re-start the entire level as you did in Demon’s Souls, and enemies hit much harder to compensate for this. Impatient players are going to be punished time and again. Older gamers are likely to be able to adjust to Dark Souls’ gameplay and complete lack of forgiveness or an identifiable learning curve much easier than newer gamers are. In truth, Dark Souls is NOT that hard a game. It forces players to learn from their mistakes and take things slowly, and punishes those who don’t with a swift death. Once you know where enemies are stationed, and what to look for with bosses, Dark Souls becomes a very easy game indeed, as your brain takes over and you start dodging and countering automatically in response and, whilst the challenge ups in New Game Plus, you’ll be able to skip a great deal of the game’s optional areas, and the loss of the element of surprise will make the game much easier for you. That first time you play will be challenging (and, once you overcome the area or boss, immensely satisfying) for anyone who plays the game, yet some will find it harder to adjust to Dark Souls than others, and this will no doubt hinder their enjoyment of the game because, like Demon’s Souls before it, Dark Souls feels extremely cheap at points, and blurs that line between challenge and frustration.

Surprisingly, Dark Souls is actually a fairly long game, with the first playthrough likely to last between 30 and 50 hours, depending upon how much exploration you do, and how many times you die and need to spend time acquiring enough souls so that you can withstand the assault of bosses. Dark Souls is a game that encourages slow and thorough exploration, and whilst it does not require much grinding, there will no doubt be moments when even the most experienced of players will find themselves in need of a strength boost, or some better equipment.

So, now we come to the flaws of Dark Souls. There are three rather damning flaws to this game which, whilst they may be addressed in the future through patches, are present at the time of writing, and will hinder enjoyment of the game considerably when they are encountered. They are a constant source of frustration (and, in the case of the second mentioned, a very real threat) whilst playing through this game, and should be more than enough to deter a lot of people from purchasing this game, at least until the issues are fixed. Even with the most recent patch (November 2nd 2011) which fixes a great many frustrations and imbalances, and makes online play considerably more enjoyable in terms of the risk/reward benefits, the design flaws are still there, and all it has really done is smooth out the interface a little.

Multiplayer functionality – or lack thereof – is what has dragged this score down the most, because it is, in truth, the most badly designed interface of this generation, for it has no viable co-op function for friends to play together. Once you have defeated the Taurus Demon, you acquire the ability to summon players (if you are in human form) or be summoned into another player’s game, through Summon Signs. The client drops a summon sign, which then appears in the host’s game as a lighter version of the hints scattered across the ground, and can then summon a phantom of the player, to play through levels and against bosses. This in itself is not a bad way of doing things. The problem is that the servers in which you are playing on are randomized. So, two people could theoretically spend over an hour dropping summon signs (and, whilst I prefer to take a detached viewpoint in my reviews so as to provide an unbiased opinion, I must mention at this point that I spent nearly two hours trying to play co-operatively with a friend, so here I speak from painful experience) and not encounter one another. Invasion of another player’s world functions in much the same way: the process is entirely random, and when seeking to invade other player’s worlds utilising covenant items for specific item rewards, it becomes extremely difficult to locate another person to play against, thanks in no small part to the fact that a large majority of players have exploited the glitches present in the game and are likely to be several hundred soul levels above you.

Dark Souls’ second major flaw is that it is plagued with freezing issues. These can happen at any time, without warning, and for no real reason. Once this happens, the player is given no choice but to turn the PS3 off and then restart it, with the very real risk that save data will be corrupted as a result of this each time. There are also slowdown issues that tie in with this technical issue: the frame rate at Blighttown in particular is truly abysmal, and when the action begins to heat up the game may become noticeably slower, making it difficult to co-ordinate your movements properly.

The third flaw of Dark Souls lies in its enhancement system; certain weapons, such as the Crystal Ring Shield, are phenomenally overpowered, and extremely easy to acquire very early in the game. Enemy damage will steadily increase as you traverse different locations, yet player damage can jump dramatically in a very short amount of time, and it may be several areas into the game later that enemies start to have the health and attack or manpower to counteract this increase in strength and balance out the game again so that it becomes more than a simple hack and slash. Without enhancing weapons or armour at all, Dark Souls has a moderate learning curve and a balanced level of difficulty. By taking advantage of the enhancement system, players can easily make the game very simple which, whilst not uncommon in other games, still constitutes as a major design flaw. Dark Souls grants the player so many opportunities to exploit it that it negates a great deal of the challenge of the game and, considering it is an open world game designed for exploration and tight-knit, frantic combat, it makes it extremely boring if you’re so powerful you kill everything in one or two hits.

In summary, Dark Souls is a memorable, although perhaps not unforgettable, experience, filled with tricks and surprises that will catch even “veteran” gamers (for lack of a better term) by surprise; this is not a game you can simply blaze through unless you know exactly where everything is and how to counter it, and this can only come about through painful, hard-won experience. Dark Souls is considerably more balanced than Demon’s Souls was and, whilst with balance has come a reduced level of difficulty, it is a much more enjoyable game as a result. However, the host of glitches, truly game-breaking items that make a mockery of the entire game, and the truly dreadful excuse for an online mode, are keeping the gameplay for this game stuck at 7.5 and, until these flaws are rectified through patches, it definitely does not justify a higher score, because if you had plans to play co-operatively with a friend, or stumble across one of these glitches, it will lessen the experience for you considerably.

Controls: 8.0/10

Rather than make life deliberately difficult for the player, Dark Souls has a relatively simple control system that is easy to pick up within the first five minutes of play, yet takes time, experimentation and practise to master, particularly in the case of parrying, or knowing what attack to use when.
However, Dark Souls has an absolutely diabolical jump mechanic, with jump being assigned to the same button as backstep, run and roll. In order to jump, you must first run, and in confined spaces, jumping over holes or gaps becomes extremely difficult, and there will be some occasions during which you plummet to your death after trying to make what looked like a feasible jump and failing abysmally.

For some bizarre reason, Dark Souls does not have a pause function either. The game still goes even after you open up your menu, meaning enemies could pummel you as you swapped out your gear. Whilst this is not a huge factor, and serves to encourage the player to come prepared with all the items they need assigned to their inventory beforehand, it serves no real practical purpose not to have one.

Graphics: 7.0/10

Dark Souls has slightly above-average graphics, and shows that, unlike Demon’s Souls, it is capable of more than just subdued and gritty landscapes. The locations are quite varied, and whilst the vast majority of them are reminiscent of Demon’s Souls miserable landscapes, there are some truly spectacular sights to behold; the sunset over the Undead Burg in particular, as well as the entirety of Anor Londo. Like many console games of this generation, Dark Souls has that same “long-sighted graphics syndrome” in which things are extremely impressive from a distance, but not quite so impressive close-up. Character design is truly atrocious, but as your character will almost certainly be outfitted entirely in armour or robes, this is not a huge issue. Although even up close, larger enemies are graphically impressive, suggesting that more effort has been put into the enemies, bosses and distant visuals, rather than that which you can actually interact with.

However, one area does let this game down noticeably: The Lost Izalith, which is the standard volcano area you’ll find in most RPGs…and, like most volcano areas, it’s practically impossible to see anything, because the intensity of the lava makes it almost impossible to tell where you’re going, and reduces everything to vague shapes: if it’s black, it’s a rock, and if it isn’t, then it’s lava. Such areas have been rendered successfully in the past (Magmoor Caverns in Metroid Prime, to name but one past generation example) and, whilst it is unsurprising that it has been done so disastrously in Dark Souls, it is nonetheless extremely disappointing and highly frustrating.

Sound: 9.0/10

Dark Souls has an extremely memorable soundtrack, for much of the time the game chooses to leave you in total silence, with only the sound of your own footsteps and enemies for company. This creates a fantastic atmosphere, and sound is even incorporated into the gameplay at points: certain enemies will make sounds when they hear you, and the sound of an arrow being fired from a bow will give you a split second warning that you’ve been spotted before you’re hit. With its soundtrack, Dark Souls proves that quality is far better than quantity, and that music used at certain points is far more atmospheric than a full soundtrack for every point in the game.

Music is used in this game sparingly, and it is very effective in creating an even tenser atmosphere than the norm, for it is almost entirely restricted to boss battles. All major bosses are accompanied by their own unique, sweeping orchestral boss theme typical of the game’s composer, Motoi Sakuraba, often with an undertone of ominous vocals to set the mood. With other bosses, the vocals are more pronounced; overshadowing the orchestra entirely, yet for each boss the music supports their form and attack pattern perfectly. Gravelord Nito, for example, is a slow attacker, and his theme focuses more on the quiet-but-ominous vocals. Other, more aggressive enemies like the Taurus Demon and Iron Golem, have loud orchestral tracks with the barest hint of vocals, to accompany their relentless and powerful attacks. The music is blended seamlessly with the gameplay, and sets the boss fights apart from the regular battles you will encounter in the game and, when some enemies can hit just as hard as, if not harder, than the bosses, this makes all the difference.

There are also occasions where music will be utilised to convey a particular mood (before a couple of important covenant NPCs, as well as at Firelink Shrine) although ultimately these moments feel more out of place than they do anything else, considering that the rest of the game is conducted in silence. They do not detract from the experience, but they do not add to it either. Voice acting is varied and of a good standard, although is a little too quiet at times, and many NPCs do not have more than a few lines of dialogue. Nonetheless, overall Dark Souls have a very high quality of sound, made all the more potent by its absence for the majority of the game.

Unique/Extra Features: 6.0/10

Despite being a spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls is not a carbon copy of it. Many of the flaws of Demon’s Souls have been done away with to create a far more balanced and enjoyable experience. Much of what is in Dark Souls has been used elsewhere and in a different format, but on a much grander scale: there are points in time where this game feels very similar to a sandbox game, with open-world exploration atypical of a game of this type, which usually prefers to stick you on a fairly linear path and force you to get on with the story. Perhaps the most unique feature of Dark Souls is the online functions, although this is definitely not a point in its favour.

Replay value: 9.0/10

Dark Souls has an extremely high replay value, with the New Game Plus option booting you right back to the start and carrying over everything earned in the previous game. Whilst you would think that this would make the game significantly easier, you’d be quite wrong: enemies also receive a considerable upgrade, and even the common undead will deal a high level of damage to you, and bosses will have almost triple the durability that they had the first time through, and will hit significantly harder and, whilst you will no doubt be familiar with their attack patterns at that point, there will be absolutely no room for mistakes, which will appeal to “hardcore” players who want a true challenge. Those seek the Platinum trophy will have to reach a third playthrough at the very least, with potentially more depending upon luck, skill and patience. Dark Souls has sufficient length the first go around to make it a worthwhile experience, yet at the same time it allows players who know what they are doing to skip out on quite a few of the areas that they would have visited in their first playthrough, making it easier to endure multiple playthroughs. This aspect of the game, at least, is extremely well-designed, and encouragers players to revisit the game.

Overall Rating: 7.0/10

Fans of Demon’s Souls are going to want to give this a look-in (if they haven’t already) and between the two, Dark Souls is the game that I would recommend for new players unfamiliar with the Souls series. The game’s flaws and frustrations, whilst more intrusive (and potentially more destructive, given the freezing issues that could corrupt save data) than Demon’s Souls, are offset by the overall experience: the game is more balanced and atmospheric, and maintains more or less the same level of difficulty (that said, if you found Demon’s Souls easy, you’ll likely find Dark Souls easy as well) throughout. Dark Souls is an improvement over its predecessor in every department except the online play, which is the primary reason that this game fulls short of its full potential. Dark Souls is an immensely satisfying single player experience, yet the online multiplayer leaves a lot to be desired, and is more of a hindrance than a help; it feels half-finished, poorly designed, and is ultimately not even remotely enjoyable.

That said, there is a lot of fun to be had in Dark Souls. Getting through an area and defeating the boss for the first time is immeasurably satisfying, and unlike Demon’s Souls and so many other games that claim to be hard, it does not blur the line between challenge and frustration very much. Death occurs because you, as a player, messed up, and not because the AI decided to royally screw you over and deliver a cheap shot on you. In short, Dark Souls feels like a challenge, and not like a chore. It creates a wonderfully tense atmosphere, punishes complacency, and allows players the freedom to explore and develop on their own, providing only some very basic hints (usually in the form of powerful enemies smacking you around if you put a toe out of line) about where you’re supposed to be going. It allows players to learn for themselves, and doesn’t spoon feed them everything they need to know. Much of the fun in Dark Souls comes from not knowing what you’re going to encounter next, and each death is a learning experience, rather than an unjustified surprise.

In conclusion, Dark Souls is a moderately impressive and enjoyable game that, whilst perhaps not as challenging as Demon’s Souls was, is definitely a more balanced, rewarding and satisfying experience that first time you play it through. However, it is a game plagued with glitches, erratic frame rates, and sports the worst online multiplayer of this generation, all of which are significant factors that will noticeably detract from the experience. Those who seek an enjoyable, reasonably long challenge would be advised to give this a look-in, and ignore the claims of how hard and impossible this game is: ironically, in preparing to die, you will not die as much as you think you will. There will be death, but ultimately how much of it is entirely up to you. Flawed, frustrating, but ultimately fun.
 
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