Reviews

Game Review: Dark Souls

Avatar photo

17 January 2014

By Alex Khalil

Dark Souls, possibly on of the most challenging games I have ever encountered in my life. It’s grim, it’s brutal, and my god is it amazing. So after much deliberation I decided to buy the game that everyone had been playing on YouTube, after countless videos kept popping up on my recommendations. I watched a few and thought, it can’t be that difficult can it? So I marched into Game, and picked up a copy for £15.

On arriving home I was optimistic, and through the tutorial I thought, yeah it’s challenging but nowhere near as hard as I thought it would be. But after about 10 minutes of going the wrong way, and getting man handled by ghosts with scythes for arms, I began to think, huh, maybe this is as hard as it says on the back of the box. Seriously, it literally has ‘Prepare to Die’ written on the back as a title. The game comes from the collaboration between From Software games, and Namco Bandai games. First rule of thumb when playing, everything can kill you. No exceptions.  No cheats. No alternate routes. You will die, (implied by the latest release of the ‘Prepare to Die’ Edition). However difficult the game may be it is very hard to deny it’s, visually, a beautifully made game. The bosses are all unique, and are all really genuinely really cool…although you start to forget that after they’ve killed you 15 times in a row.

The bosses are challenging, and will brutalise you if you aren’t playing right. But that’s not to say the game doesn’t support separate play styles, as it offers the choice of a Warrior, a Knight, a Wanderer, a Thief, and a few more, so there are loads of way to get to a play style that suites you, you just need to be clever with it. So if you know you’re still a low level, don’t go up against the bigger bosses, and try some of the smaller ones. It’s a chance to get better gear, plus raise your stats, to reduce the chances of you being sprayed all over a boss’s weapon in a mixture of brains and lost souls. The currency in the game is souls. Everything revolves around souls, so you can imagine how annoying it is to get really close to the next bonfire to save your game, with 5000+ souls ready to be spent on levelling up your character…and being shoved down a really big hole so far that you pass the earth’s core, and smack your head of a skeletons sword at the bottom. Then rage and turn of your console, followed by crying into cookie dough ice cream.

There is nothing more fulfilling than killing a boss after 30+ times of trying and failing. It’s amazing. I mean… it’s indescribable. The game sets up the challenge so well that you keep coming back like an abused boomerang, ready and waiting to be thrown into the abyss that is Dark Souls once more, to be used as a play thing for a 20ft high gargoyle, and then revived at your last bonfire. Overall it’s an amazing game. Definitely one of my top five RPG’s… even though I’m still trying to reattach my leg to my body while being beaten to death by a knight with a stupid pointy helmet.

 

 

Like this article? Please share!