Here we have the new dark souls three, I sat for around ten minutes listening to the music, trying to amp myself up to tackle this beast, I finally pressed A and let the journey begin.
First thing that pops up is a normal user agreement, but hidden in those small letters are the words behind the normal ones are (RIP CONTROLLER). I knew right from the word go, that this game was going to be a monumental challenge. It will test my love for xbox and how much I can control myself.
Dark souls Is a game about wondering up and down from walls to deep dungeons, killing all sorts of beasts and escaping from places where normal people just shouldn’t go, with very little help on where to go and what to do.
The intro movie and scenery is amazing and takes place in a medieval like setting with dark colours and demonic creatures of all shapes ranging from Deserted Corpse’s to starved hounds. Dark orchestral music plays in the background, and it’s the type of music that would be played at my controller’s funeral if I couldn’t contain my rage, but it really does add to the atmosphere of the game. It’s a game purely based on the element destruction and killing the already dead.
The first thing you do is customise your character, with various classes such as knight, mercenary, warrior, herald, thief, assassin, sorcerer, pyromancer, cleric and finally the deprived, for people who are really looking for a challenge. The classes give the game a really diverse playability function with each class offering unique attributes like single shield and long sword, dual welding axes or ranged weapon and even magic. The characters offer different challenges, for example the knight has strong armour and lots of health with a single weapon and shield and which will be used for close hand combat, then you get the sorcerer who will use magic and spells that are more powerful but he won’t have as much health or protection. As a new comer to this game genre, I felt that it would be best to play through the game as a knight, as it offers the most armour and protection. Furthermore you can customise your chosen character with a different name, age, build and appearance. There was one option that made me chuckle however and that was burial gift. That’s just pure indication on how difficult this game is. The burial gifts are items that help you increase health or ammo when you die, to hopefully make it a little easier to win. The pre-set character builds for the mature age look as if a man in his late 70s tried to hit the gym. During all the selections you’ll definitely notice the smoothness of the menus and selection. But after all this I decided that I shall make my character look as strong as possible, which would hopefully give him the strength to carry on.
Once all the customising has finished and you’re happy with how your person will look when they lying on the floor suffering, you click accept and let the games begin.
One thing that’s very nice to note about this game is that the loading times are quick; there is a very short waiting period. So after you have died it’s a short waiting period to die again.
You start off in the cemetery of ash where the tutorials given are short and very cleverly done, which is a subtle feature where they are written on the ground and you hover over to view them and you can rate how helpful it was but however it’s surprisingly entertaining.
The graphics that are surprisingly good considering the amount of content in this game, and so far I haven’t experienced any frame drops or anything of that nature. The attention to detail is incredible however something that is lacking is that in all that additional detail is the number of items found, goods and weapons are really hard to come across. Breaking all the boxes and tables and other things that look like they would have goods in don’t, it’s a small waste of time. They really have added attention to detail and content, so it’s a big plus in my book!
7 minutes in and already at the first death.
This game has me locked in.
When you come across your first boss Iudex Gundyr, the boss of the cemetery of ash, it will be nothing but a stab fest; I did so much running away I could have finished the Boston marathon and the comrade’s marathon. The destruction of the boss battle arenas is awesome; the items such as barrels that you roll into when avoiding being struck by the boss’s great sword offer a great atmosphere and bring that extra little detail into the game. When you are almost done killing this man he goes like super sayian something out of Dragon Ball Z where all you do is mash your controller buttons till you have blisters, and the only thing to keep you mashing those buttons easily is the sweat dripping off your face and fingers, lubing up your controller. All caused by the fear and being trying to avoid dying, over and over and over and over and over, like I did. You just know that it’s going to be harder than hard its dark souls after all. I struggled for over an hour grinding out and when you defeat a boss or other creatures you collect their souls and use it as currency, allowing you to upgrade and buy things and this is just one of many bosses. They have been very clever with the achievements of the game where they have a few normal achievements such as collect all the items, and then the other ones are all secrets, so that the players won’t know what type of bosses they will come up against. After stumbling around for a while you discover the Firelink Shrine hub, where you will keep coming back to, to upgrade your weapons.
Something I find extremely infuriating is that there is no pause, even in the offline mode. Sometimes you need to pause when someone calls you or you want to clear your tears and wipe your controller down you can’t, because it doesn’t allow you. Also when you die in a boss fight you have to go all the way back to the previous check points and fight your way through and make it to the boss fight again.
The story line is amazing and the cut scenes are captivating and the music is immense, creating an intensely challenging beautiful piece of art work, a piece so good it will keep you coming back to look at it over and over again but eventually want to put in the shredder because of what it has done to you, but your soo hooked that you won’t, and you can’t, because it has your soul, your hours of blood, sweat and tears in it. You worked so hard and cried so much that it wouldn’t be worth losing it.
The best thing about this game is the sense of accomplishment, for example when you finally unlock the secret achievements which are 90% of the achievements or when you finally take down one of the first boss’s I and you still have a controller that’s intact, it puts a big grin on your face. It’s sooo pleasing. The developers of dark souls really wanted that emotion to come through. This game is a mixture between happiness, sadness, passion, and anger control however we cannot forget the most important thing, which is not dying. Timing is key. It will mean live or die.
They have added a new feature, which is multiplayer but this multiplayer is different, it allows for random people who are on average 10 levels above or below you to join your game if you want them to with a smooth connection into the game, it sometimes takes some of the fun away from trying but also stops you from dying over and over. However my favourite feature about the multiplayer is the fact that you can leave messages on the ground for other players to read and laugh at. It also shows you all the blood stains of where other players have died, so if the area is covered in red, you better get be prepared! There’s lot of bonus to the multiplayer to work up tactics and devise plans to defeat the beasts, but with a small downside however, sometimes the multiplayer will take action away from your gameplay experience, because some random person/or your friend will join the game and help you take down boss’s, its great help but it slightly kills the feeling of doing it yourself. Sometimes you want to do it yourself but someone kills the boss for you.
I didn’t come across any frame drops throughout the game they have made sure that that is ironed out, but I did come across a very strange bug in the game, if you don’t know how to quit the game correctly or your rage quit, there’s a bug that stops you from connecting back online when you start the game up again, you can still play the game on offline mode but it’s really hard to reconnect to the online in the game, everything else works fine, it’s just the servers don’t want to connect. There is a small fix where you start the download for an Xbox 360 game and then it seems to work but it is a strange bug with a strange fix.
To give you an example on how hard this game is for new comers, I spent close to 7 hours playing the first 3 chapters, it’s a challenge but I kept going, even though I had died from falling off cliffs or being squashed by Vordt of the Boreal Valley more than the amount of words I’ve written in this review.
If dragon slaying like killing the ancient Wyvern in Archdragon Peak or ghost slaughtering in the cemetery of Ash or using spells to defeat Longfinger Kirk in the cathedral of the deep sounds appetising to you then this is game will feed you for weeks!
Even though this style game isn’t my main focus style, I thoroughly enjoyed trying to fight the monsters and demons that I came across throughout this. It may be challenging and filled with a message saying “you died” yet so many more times after trying that over and over I came to the realization that this game isn’t for me!