I dove head first and blind into Dark Souls 2. I thought this would be the best way to approach it. I haven’t played the other games in the series, and have read very little about it; a review here and an “arty critique” there, but nothing really to make me think I knew about the series.

What very little I did know about Demon Souls and Dark Souls was this: they were hard, and a lot of my gamer friends really enjoyed those games. And after diving headfirst into the game, I’ve come to know Dark Souls a little better, and come to two conclusions: Yes, it is hard. In fact, it’s very hard. The other conclusion is I have changed in my gaming preferences and habits.

One of the things people rave on and on about this series is lack of handholding. I agree, handholding can feel highly insulting and demeaning to players. In cinema, there is an adage – show, don’t tell. Movies where this is put into practice always top critics and filmmakers “best of” lists. This adage applies even more so in games. Let the player explore the mechanics themselves. I’ve nearly come to blows with a producer with a business background (opposed to a gaming background) who wanted to put a tutorial in our game because they couldn’t figure out how to play it. I screamed “you learn how to play it by playing it”! Developers spend months and months refining these mechanics, and to then put the player at the start of the game, halt the action and tell them exactly what to do is insulting to the people who designed the mechanics, the people who designed the levels, and the people who are playing the game.

So I was overjoyed when I was dumped into Dark Souls 2 and had no idea what to do. I ran around pressing every button and ran into everything just to see what would happen. And I was honestly surprised when I peeled back the first fog layer and found a stone telling me how to swing my sword in a traditional “this is a tutorial and this is how you play the game” fashion. Although I do admit it was very useful, and I got a few precious souls that would help me level up later. And I laughed when I had my first death and received the achievement “This is Dark Souls” after missing a jump, which was totally my fault for not reading the instructions properly. And I laughed again when I approached a huge hippo creature and whacked him with my sword, and he turned around, grabbed me and bit my head off. I thought “this is cool”.

That feeling quickly dissipated however, when I first got to Majula, the newbie main hub area. I was just exploring, took the wrong corner, and was attacked by three little rat things. I swung my sword and tried to block their attacks, and it didn’t work. I was just thrashing about madly and in return they hit me with such force that I died almost instantly. I thought to myself ok, maybe I need a different tactic, and tried to kill them again. My different tactic was to focus on the enemy by pressing the right joystick. This focused on them, but again, I couldn’t hit them and I died really quickly. So I just avoided them from that point on.

However, little did I realise that my health bar was now at 50%. So off I went, exploring the world of Drangleic, and when I got to the Forrest of the Fallen Giants, I got my ass handed to me. Time and time again. By the same “lowly” zombie creatures you first meet way back in the training level. After two hours of being killed right near the campfire, I gave up. It was just too hard and too annoying to get killed by the same mobs in the same places over and over again.

The next night, I rolled a cleric, thinking healing would help me. Nope. Same thing happened, I got stuck in the earliest part of the Forrest of Fallen Giants, again. This time, apart from not being able to hit anything, my spells would never cast. In desperation, I jumped online to learn how the fuck you are supposed to play this game.

Now, this brings me to my first issue with Dark Souls 2. As it is, I don’t have a lot of time to play games. Sad, but true. Everyone at XboxWorld donates their time to do these reviews, and get nothing but your love and the game in return. Moreover, I’m one of those people who plays 3 or 4 different games at one time, sometimes on the Xbox or PS3, sometimes on the PC, and yes, even on the iPhone. You could call me a gaming slut. So having to spend 40 minutes on watching a LEARN TO PLAY video, along with reading countless forum posts and walkthroughs isn’t what I call a positive use of my time.

It’s not that I want to be handheld, as I made clear above, but at the same time I don’t want to spend my time learning about the game outside of the game. I want to be shown in game how to defeat the game. I found this disconnect to be disconcerting. And I HATED it.

In this way though, Dark Souls is reminiscent of an MMO. Quite a few of the MMOs I’ve played have difficult parts where it’s not clear what to do or how to do it, so you jump online looking for hints, or ask in chat (and generally get a chorus of “google it!”). And like a MMO, DS2 is not a game where you can really give just one review, because your feelings towards the game changes over time, as does the game experience itself. The hints people leave in the world, the fact you can invite players or be invaded on any given play session, and the constant updates to the game when you load guarantee an evolving experience.

And of course there is the grinding, a staple of the less fun MMOs, where you have to kill the same things over and over and over and over again just to level up. The Dark Souls series is based around this mechanic. Which is fine, if you have the time to grind, which I don’t feel I do have, and why I’ve stopped playing most MMOs which feature it. I do like the fact that if you are killed you go back to where it was and collect your souls so the time is not totally wasted, but of course that means you’re covering the same ground over and over any way.

Yet as I played more and more, getting better and better, I started to enjoy the game more, and I learned how to play. I still feel the game is not supportive of my game style, which is exploration, as I found myself simply stuck at times, even with the aid of a walkthrough. Even now I’ve played the game much more and feel comfortable with the stamina mechanism and developing a rhythm to my attacks and dodges. I know when to consume the precious life giving pickups, know to restore your health with the rare effigies (but not at a campfire!), found areas where it’s relatively easy to farm souls, know how to get back to the campfires with the bones you find around the place, and definitely know not to hit any barrels, because you don’t know which ones will explode and which ones won’t.

Although I am playing better, I still feel the controls are wildly inaccurate. The lock on will switch focus mid battle, even if your foe is not dead. Swings which look like they are going to connect miss by miles. And in a game which is as unforgiving as DS2, this is unconscionable. There are times where I die and it’s definitely my fault, because I’m not managing my stamina, or I’ve run into an area with too many creatures, and I can handle that. What I can’t handle is fighting against the controls, struggling to do what I know I need to do an being unable to do it. It’s worse in the boss fights, or should I say fight, because I’ve only managed to do one successfully.

My final comment on the game is the graphics are terrible. They’re muddy, pixelated, clip through one another, don’t appear on the surface they’re meant to but float above it, and just not up to standard for a game released in 2014 on any platform. It’s really disappointing to see such an underwhelming looking game come out this late in the Xbox360’s lifecycle. Sure, some of the set pieces look great, for example when you emerge out of the early cave system and experience Majula for the first time, and admittedly it’s the last thing you’re thinking about when playing the game as you’re looking at your stamina and health bars and making sure you’re connecting with the enemy, but really there is no excuse for it.

Conclusion:
I hated Dark Souls 2 at first. HATED IT. I thought it was too hard, too unforgiving, and too involved to have anyone but the most hardcore to enjoy it. And in some sense I still think this, but now it’s with a sense of grudging respect. After reading about the game, learning how to play, and becoming involved in the Dark Souls community, I understand where it’s coming from and it’s place in the gaming strata. It’s not a strata I find myself in very often any more, which makes me somewhat sad to be honest, but at the same time everything changes, and although this game isn’t aimed at me any longer, I can’t begrudge those who it is aimed at.

Pros
Tough game which ultimately becomes rewarding
Plenty of replayability
Helps develop a community of people who are willing to help

Cons
looks very ugly
most of the replayability is forced on you.
Controls are not as precise as a game this demanding warrants.
is very, very demanding in difficulty and of your time

Score 80/100