This is undoubtedly not a game for everyone, as I discovered. I read all the warnings about the difficulty, and the unforgiving gameplay, but figured it still sounded like my sort of game. It just isn't, and I'll tell you why. This is a game where you die a lot, and each time you do you'll redo a lot of the stuff you've just spent 30 minutes doing. And whilst you're redoing it for the second time, you'll probably die again, meaning you'll have to do it all again. And then you'll probably die again. And so it goes on.

None of this would be a problem if I felt I was being rewarded for my time spent playing - but you just don't. In fact each time you die you have less to fight with the second time round. And this ties into my biggest problem of all. I keep reading about "the hardest game ever made", maybe so, but isn't gaming meant to be fun? This game quite isn't. I turn on my PS3 for escapism, whether it's for 10 minutes or 4 hours - all Dark Souls offers is frustration, the 4 or 5 hours I spent playing were some of the most miserable I can remember.

A huge amount of effort has gone into this game, it looks absolutely stunning and generates an incredible atmosphere, but that's not enough for me. My advice? Rent before you buy - I've already traded my copy in.

I know this review will get marked as unhelpful, but I think it would be to someone who isn't already a Demon Souls fan, as I can see so many of the people leaving high-scores on here are.… Expand

Inferior to the original in every way. After the initial "tutorial" area (which is reminiscent of the original and well-executed), I ran into a multitude of problems. Within a span of five minutes, I got stuck in a tombstone, attacked by teleporting skeletons (not INTENTIONALLY teleporting skeletons, which I'd be cool with), had my vision blocked by a giant crow, encountered massive slowdown and fell through a flight of stairs causing the game to lock up (and after restarting the system the game proceeded to berate me for turning it off without saving). I plan on changing this review if/when a patch comes out, but the game is completely unplayable for me at the moment. It's like trying to play Super Meat Boy with a trackball. I've tested 2 copies of the game on 3 separate PS3's, so it's not an isolated issue. Whomever was responsible for QA should be fired.

Also, judging by other people's comments, it seems like user reviews are being pulled from the site...? What kind of crap is that?… Expand

Let's be honest for a second, here. Seriously. Ask yourself: "do I really like this game?" or "am I really enjoying this?". I think Dark Souls is the perfect example of Psychological Marketing. Developers and the media MADE US believe that suffering exhaustively with some sort of "do it again until you get good at it" business is something nice, something we want, the ideal gaming experience. It's not. Dark Souls is, no question about it, a beautiful game, challenging and well crafted. That being said, the difficulty level is just way, way too high - to a point that there's not fun at all to play it. But we do, we play, we suffer, because "they" made us believe this was the best gaming experience ever. I gave up on Dark Souls as soon as I realized that I just don't have time for this. Being a gamer in my 30s, I have pretty much 1 hour per day to play games. And I don't want to spend these precious hours hating myself or hating a game because I cannot have any fun, because of frustration. I'm no masochist, sorry. For me, the ultimate gaming experience is HAVING FUN. And there's [almost] no fun to be had in Dark Souls, sorry.… Expand

There is a great deal of difference between being challenging and being unfair. This game is simply unfair, and, as someone said, this is the kind of game that you play just to say you played it. There is nothing to like here: is just a struggle, like putting yourself on diet, or working your biceps to exaustion at the gym. I could play this game for a wage, not for free. And if I think I even payed for this one, well, I can just blame myself...… Expand

Demon's Souls was/is 1 of the best games I've ever played. the balance between frustration & reward was perfect. every death was your fault. I have never put so many hours into a game.
as spiritual successor, dark souls lacks the same balance & polish the graphics are an improved, however the character animations are a step backwards - my deprived runs like a legless chicken. the levels in DS were tight, the game was about itching forward. in going more 'open world' ds loses the focus that DS had. o
the combat feels sluggish in comparison, & there's a noticeable lag betwixt button press & action. every time, bar 1, I've died in my short time with dark souls, I felt it was the game at fault, not me.
I score half what I give Demon's Souls minus 1 for disappointment.
Return game to shop, back to Demon's Souls, maybe get Skyrim?… Expand

Horrible. That is the best way to sum up this game. Extremely difficult to the point of complete insanity. Make one mistake and you have to repeat an hours worth of play to get back to the same area. No story line what-so-ever. No explanation of what different symbols, stats, etc mean on your character. The game was definitely banking on previous reputation. Controls are very buggy with multiple button combos almost pointless because you can never get them to work.… Expand

I had fun setting up my character, and starting thru the tutorial... That's about it. After I escape the first dungeon, I meet a knight and decide to fight him and take his soul (I'm a thief in the game after all...). He kills me in 3 hits... Fine, try again. Respawn/reload the game, he kills me again! The fighting is so lame... He hits me, and my character has to go thru this delayed reaction/animation, realizing he's getting hit, and by the time I regain control, I'm hit again, then dead... again. Fine, can't fight him, I'll reload the game and run away. Nope, he just follows me no matter where I go, and how far I run. My hits are so weak, they barely register, and of course, he has no slow down from my hits, just continues thru his attack motion as if I'm not hitting him multiple times. 9 Deaths later, and screaming at he TV, i quit. Not fun. Why not at least "reset the scene" if the player is killed? If it was a mistake to fight the first character I meet, why not let me learn that, and leave him be. Do i have to restart the whole game, and go thru the tutorial dungeon all over again? How many similar situations would ruin my evenings if I decided to keep this torture session disguised as a video game? I would have loved to play with a friend to help me, why restrict me from doing so? Muliplayer i random and can't be coordinated. Not fun. I gave it a rest and tried again the next day, still not fun. At all. Trading it in for Batman Arkham City.… Expand

If you think Silver Surfer is the greatest game of all time, and that difficulty means out-of-nowhere deaths that require psychic abilities to avoid, Dark Souls is for you. Everyone else, stay away.

This game just doesn't have quality like I guess I'm used to. The idea that a full screen announcement comes on to tell me that "You Lit The Bonfire" as if it was a significant achievement confuses me, especially since the game hides some much other information that is crucial for understanding how to play the game. The character classes are obscure and magic is pretty much a joke as everyone has to engage in melee combat due to the restrictive amount of spells that exist in the first 6 hours I put in the game. Since there is a heavy reliance upon melee combat and health is so crucial the game becomes even more difficult if you pick a lower vitality, magic strong class. And the game is difficult, but the difficulty comes not from the game itself but from the horrible UI and controls. I died more from fumbling my controls than I ever did from underestimating my enemy and the heavy fog of ignorance the game keeps you in that hides some of the games mechanics is the other side of the difficulty. I don't know why people enjoy a game that makes it hard for you to enjoy its many aspects but this game succeeded. I mean, the starting gift you choose, what could be more obscure and then overly useless than blindly picking an item from that list. I would have rather it not existed at all since the item I picked was never useful for me.

The online aspect of the game is usually most prominent in messages left on the ground, many of them stating this: "I'm tired of this"

How useful. I died to a boss because I rolled off a cliff, unintentionally, I didn't want to roll my hand just happened to mash down R3. I died to a simple skeleton archer because I accidentally unequipped my shield in the midst of battle when trying to quickly switch to the healing potion from some bombs I was using. Bad controls should not be the main contributor to a games "difficulty" level. The targeting system also needs some help...which is another part of, I guess, the difficulty. Fix the controls, sloppy controls are never fun, fix the targeting, and provide more information about items and the overall why for running around in the world so I can enjoy the world you created and I'd rate this game much higher.… Expand

I have never written a review for a game before but I feel that in this case I need to. If nothing else than to lower the user score of this game ever so slightly so that someone else won't have to go through what I did. In short the game is unplayable and I would like to explain why so as both not to get flamed and just banished to the bottom of the pile as another person who says "its too hard waaaaaah". I do not deny that the game is hard and I have no problem with difficult games, I went through battletoads, Ninja Gaiden Series and Devil May Cry on the hardest of difficulty settings. However Dark souls is not a game end of. There is no reason this game has a score as high as it does but I suspect that it is where it is on metacritic because of very clever marketing ie One guy says this game sucks his friend says no its just hard you are being a **** its the same as saying "I can't punch my way through this wall" "well clearly you aren't trying hard enough and are just too weak". Thats what Dark Souls feels like to me. One of the main things is wrong with the game is the controls and the lag from pressing buttons to the character actually doing something. There is simply no reason for this kind of lag not on a console game. I have designed games before and the point is to make the character an extension of the player, the closer you come to that point where the player ceases controlling the character and the character becomes an extension of that player the better. Please take a look at this game and ask yourself why is it difficult is it because it requires me to think more about my actions, requires me to have lightning nay superhuman reflexes, or is it simply because the games bad game mechanics shoe horn you into a play style that goes against every natural instinct.… Expand

This game is so good, everything about it is purely amazing, the visuals, the gameplay especially. It is so addictive and challenging and the feeling you get when you finally beat a boss that has been killing you over and over feels so good that it makes Dark Souls and Demon's Souls easily my favorite games of all time. The online is also very fun, it feels so good to kill that black phantom that breaks into your world. I wish Dark Souls and Demon's Souls were ported to the Vita because I would love to be able to play them on the go and I would be happy to buy them both again.… Expand

Dark Souls start out in a similar manner to Demon Souls, but unlike Demon Souls - Dark Souls is rife with frustrating deaths and cheap mechanics that lock the player to play the game the way the designers intended instead of being open ended like its predecessor. No longer does the play have the choice of which challange to tackle next, instead we have an RPG on rails due to the design scaling enemies by area. Thus if the player is stuck in a specific area he or she can no longer try a different challenge instead the game forces you to try the same long sequence over and over, which can lead to frustration and annoyance. When you have to run the same 15 minute sequence in order to fight that boss that you keep dying with no option of game progression, the game become an exercise in repetition instead of exploration and progression.

Also, a year after release the game is still rife with frame rate drops, graphical tearing, enemy glitches, and bad clipping. It is incredibaly frustrating when fighting a single skeleton and the game locks up or a two ghosts and the game drops down to single digit fps causing you to miss that roll. The worst though is enemies hitting the player through foliage or solid objects that should be impenetrable.… Expand

Simply put they advertised a game with Co-Op and Multiplayer. The game has none of that. Once again peer to peer networking is the bane of gaming,. They say the multiplayer is working as intended. Here's my stats.
72 Hrs of gaming I have summoned someone twice and I have been invaded once. My friends all have the same issue. This is pretty much a single player game. It is no Demon Souls. Ps3 did it right the first time with DEDICATED SERVERS.… Expand

This game is simply not worth playing. it contains a decent amount of flaws, such as, the lack of multiplayer and co-op as the devs have promised that it would be included, you are unable to change your difficulty and the character creation is horrible. there is no beauty in this game so if you want a dead or broken game with horrible voice acting, then this game is for you.

Good game, but the cheap deaths is a very negative aspect to this game, and there's a lot of it. The story is not as good as Dark Souls and the absence of a central "Nexus" also ruins this game for me. I feel that the bosses are also not as memorable as Dark Souls. Another negative thing is that the game is full of people who spam "soul" glitches to reach levels that are far too high (300-700) to even challenge against when you are in certain covenants such as the Darkmoon covenant.… Expand

I played this game and hated it the first time I played it, then the second time, then the third and even fourth time. But when i played a fifth time it got a little better. It isn't so hard to get used to the controls even if they do suck so bad they want to make your face explode. I did yell "What the FREAK!!!" quite a few times when I died from pure lack of good controls, and I did hate the fact that the pretty backgrounds were just that, pretty backgrounds. The internet play sucked the story line sucked, but once you got used to it, it was ok. Definitely not my favorite game though. Ive played worse. What made me the most angry was that you couldn't pause it. It just expects you to play forever. Put the game back in and if it is still too hard to get used to a new game play style then you are a noob.… Expand

I love a good challenge in a video game, but this game is not a challenge. It's an attempt to drive you insane by making you feel like you're nothing. People argue that the extreme difficulty will make you feel satisfied when you beat a hard boss or a hard level, but I didn't feel satisfied once while playing this game. I did maybe for the first thirty seconds after beating a boss, but that didn't last long because you're forced into another hard level afterwards. The game isn't even fun, mainly because of its combat system and level system. When you level up, your stats are hardly even increased, and you need a lot of souls(currency) to level up. Let me add that once you die, all of your souls are gone, but you can get them back by going back to where you died. If you die again without getting your souls back, they're just gone forever and there's no way to get them back. I know that your equipment is more important than your stats, but to play the game and not die every five minutes you'll need some really good equipment, and that's not easy to find. The combat system is seriously among the worst that I've ever seen in any video game, and it gets really repetitive. Block, attack, block again, attack again, repeat. Progressing in this game is a nightmare, it's entirely composed of trial and error, which is a horrible way to make a game. Needless to say, with constant trial and error and constantly dying, the game is no fun at all. The online features are also bad and completely unnecessary, you can either summon someone to join your game, or someone will just join your game automatically and mess everything up for you. Being allowed to let someone else join your game to help you is a nice feature, but just having someone butting into your game without you wanting them is just a terrible decision, and I really can't stress that enough. They'll just try to kill you, and mess everything up. They'll most likely have the best equipment and kill you like nothing, like the game wasn't already terrible enough without that feature. As an attempt to make the game a little easier, the developers put in a feature where you can leave messages to help other people, but most of the time what the messages say isn't helpful at all. Most of the time the messages I saw said "praise the sun!" which isn't the slightest bit helpful. I also saw things like "jump" at an edge of a big drop. I also saw stupid things like "I did it!" in random places, none of those things are helpful at all. The game is also completely absent of a story. So to summarize, the game has an unfair, brutal difficulty, terrible combat, poor level system, bad and unnecessary online features, progression that consists entirely of trial and error, annoying messages, gameplay that just isn't fun, and a nonexistent story. The one online feature that actually works is letting other people into your game to help you, which is the only reason I gave it a 1 and not a 0. Dark Souls is possibly the most overrated game of this console generation.… Expand

This is not a horrible game, that being said it is not a good game either. It has very minimal story and once you get going you realize that its basically a grind fest. The difficulty is overrated, its not hard because your opponents are smarter than you, and you need to figure out tactics to beat them,its difficult because the are stronger than you, the game plays like this. Get killed by a big strong guy 10 levels stronger than you, grind out 11 levels, beat strong guy, go two feet, rinse repeat. It just gets really boring really fast. One thing that is a major nuisance is the lack of a pause feature, for people who get telephone calls or occasionally have someone knock at their door or simply have to take a piss, you have to either find a relatively safe place to stand, die, or use an item to transport to your campsite, i guess the reasoning is that it makes it more difficult where in reality it's just annoying.… Expand