This game is frustrating on purpose. I love a good challenge and I will sit and play something over and over for hours just to beat it, but Demon's Souls is a whole other matter. I tried it for several hours, playing through section after section of the first level only to die multiple times because I love to explore. I read notes left by players, avoided sections meant for higher ups, and killed enemy after enemy on my journey to the boss. It never got fun. I waited and tried really hard to like this games as it was recommended to me by multiple friends, but its appeal just never shone through. I don't understand how this game got such a good review. Many elements of the game feel broken (targeting system is crap, difficulty increases with death, etc) and it tries to be difficult just to be difficult. How is that supposed to be fun? I don't play games to sit through such frustration, I want to have an enjoyable experience. I'm just so disappointed with this game overall, it had incredible potential, and I don't understand how so many others thought it was nearly flawless(10/10) . It's acceptable at best.… Expand

I honestly cannot figure out the appeal. I took a chance and bought it and I hate it. If you take away the excrutiating and frankly cheap difficulty it has nothing going for it save maybe the bosses. I just got it yesterday and I'm already sick of it.

The Gamervision review is dead on in its criticism, and their score may be too generous. And in truth, I'm stunned so many people are willing to forgive poor game design by touting it as "difficulty." In 2009, forcing a player to grind through the same level for hours at end, with an autosave and experience loss system that actually punishes exploration is poor game design, not a smart return to hardcore difficulty. A bad camera and a shoddy lock-on system that doesn't work with large bosses and multiple targets in a room is poor game design, not a smart return to hardcore difficulty. Forcing players to grind for several hours, with little to no progress, simply because their armor breaks, is poor game design, not a smart return to hardcore difficulty. A nearly incomprehensible inventory system that forces players to slog through multiple stat screens just to figure out if their armor or sword is going to break is poor game design, not a smart return to hardcore difficulty. After spending 13 hours with this game, I can safely say I wasted $60 dollars. More people should be willing to admit the same.… Expand

Suffering is the word that comes to mind when I think of Demon's Souls. You will play for a few minutes, die, watch a lengthy load screen, start from the beginning of the level, die again, lose all your souls and be left beaten and broke... and of course staring at yet another lengthy load screen. Your reward, if you do succeed on one level, is more suffering as you move on to the next, more difficult level. The further you get in the game, the more times you will die, more load screens watch, more repetitive combat to slog through, more frustration as you lose all your souls over and over again. And no matter how many levels you gain, no matter how many stats you increase, you always feel underpowered. So you never really feel that you're improving as a player, never any suitable reward for all the crap you must endure to make progress. These brutally difficult games were popular 20 years ago when games were 2D and had shorter, more action-packed levels and no load screens. But today, with 3D graphics, the levels are longer, the action slower, so now unforgiving games like DS are tedious and tortuous. Don't buy into the hype. Avoid at all costs.… Expand

Demon's Soul lacks any kind of story telling. It's simply dungeon after dungeon collecting souls... and that could be ok if the game in itself was good, but it isn't.

The graphics are ok, nothing spectacular though. But that's the only good part.

The interface is clumsy and illogical, as if nobody had spent a second thinking how the user would navigate the menus (which are ugly). It is really plagued with bad ideas... for example when you're playing and recover your blood an annoying text appears on top of the screen but the game still goes on and you can't see what's happening (and yeah you can get killed or fall into some hole and die).

The gameplay is basically repeating the dungeons again and again without being able to save at any point, and loosing almost all your progress every time you die, which makes it boring and frustrating. And you die a lot of times...

The combat system is also clumsy. Your character will start a combo, you will loose control of it, it will make make a few steps, and fall into a hole and die again.

Also the game doesn't inform you of anything. You have to go to the internet to learn

Oblivion, which is from 2006 is still a better RPG.

This game is terribly bad, it's by far the worst game I've played on the PS3. I bought it because it had a high score on MC and I still can't understand why it has such a high score.… Expand

Targeting is broken. Game punishes death by robbing only way to gain level. However, with broken targeting system, game difficulty is through the roof. Don't believe the hype. Its like playing pac man with a broken controller. Sure, its harder, that doesn't make it fun.

Visual, the game is grainy, with dark, dull colors. techincal but not artistic graphics. The voice over is average. Combat system is simple, but it works. Diffulty? EXTRA EXTRA HARD. Which makes me think, why did this game recieve such a HIGH average from the critics? The production value, is of that a LOW bugdet. The game may attract HARDCORE RPG gamers, but thats about it. Overall a disappointment in my book.… Expand

This game is fun for the first level.
Then it very quickly approaches EPIC FAIL status.
The depth is lacking, enemies spawn in the same locations EVERY SINGLE TIME you play the same level... which is required to do to even get any sort of decent soul level.
This game could have been the best game ever made.

Big waste of time. Graphics are mediocore at best. The lag is HORRIBLE at times. The gameplay is boring and repetitive. Takes ages to level up and when you do and die. You lose plaything and start all over again. Good thing my store has a 7 day return policy.

Do you want some meaningless "hardcore cred"? Pretend to like this game and give it a 10. This is more and less than a game, this is a soul destroying experience. I am not embarrassed to say that I find this game far far FAR too hard. But the problem is that most people seem to think that there is some sort of shame in that. Old school megaman was hard. But even in those games every single enemy you came across was not a boss unto themselves. To the wanna-be masochists who think that if you don't like this game you need to learn what a challenge is. Something like fencing is a challenge when fighting a skilled fencer. Fencing against someone with a sniper rifle isn't a challenge, it is madness.… Expand

I've come here to WARN anyone considering this horribly made game. The difficulty of this game lies in the not-so polished game designs and has nothing to do with being genius or brilliant or bringing any sort of "old-school" nostalgia." First off the controls are terrible, not the button layout just the way that if you accidently push one extra attack swipe, you not only waste stamina but leave your guard open for an arrow/attack to get through. If you accidently swapped your secondary weapons, you leave yourself open for attack. You can't ever pause properly and the menus are not simple enough where easy swaps of items or equipment can be made on the fly. Enemies have no problem attacking and running through each other to mob you to death, as one breaks your shield another is landing a hit, but in instances where you have an allied NPC like the knight in the first level, you can't dare attack near him or it will cause friendly fire, huge double standard. Especially when volleys of arrows are going THROUGH the melee enemies you're trying to fight in some instances like the dragon bridge areas in the first level. (The only way enemies kill themselves is if they fall off a cliff or blow themselves up with fire). Targetting the correct opponent becomes near impossible when theres a mob of enemies. The only easy method early on is to just engage 1 or 2 enemies at a time by drawing their attention in the cheapest manner and running back as faster as you can in the most cowardly fashion, rinse and repeat and thats 99% of the gameplay. Using a bow is strictly prohibited unless you can make the kills from a VERY safe distance, since even swapping back to your shielf and sword will take a deadly amount of time. Even with a one handed cross bow (shield in other) your hero will think it is wise to ALWAYS immediately reload after the shot rather than shield and move into a safe corner first. The platforming is random or not implemented properly. Accidently falling off of cliffs will occur especially in the many tight stairwells when targetting and fighting enemies. Trying to climb knee-high platforms is needlessly glitched, where you find yourself tumbling forward into the small wall. The story is mediocre at best and when you are randomly dying every couple minutes you simply forget what is the point. The npc characters are boring to talk to and have very few lines and whenever finished shopping or speaking with them you are forced to listen through the same old goodbye message. Using souls as your only means of gaining levels and purchasing is ridiculous and makes no sense. Gaining levels one stat at a time is a very slow and painfully grinding process, especially if you're forced to kill the same basic enemies thousand times over just to feel confident enough to proceed to the next imbalanced and going-to-instant-kill-you foe. Once you've died the world tendency becomes darker, thus harder than before to the point where you can't even get to where you last died before since you've already run out of healing greens that rarely drop, but you have plenty of mana and poison replenishment potions that you don't need if you didn't become a mage early on or are encountering poison enemies. The game just becomes repetitive and the same boring level over and over, and they are mostly linear with the exception of some rooms but most of the side paths will just loop back to the main one. Do not waste your money and time and frustration.… Expand

Archaic, dull, and frustrating. Those are the three adjectives that best sum up Demon's Souls, a game that seems to scoff at nearly every advancement made in gaming over the last decade. Instead of conforming to modern standards, Demon's Souls decides to drag players back to the days where many games were an excercise in frustration and patience rather than fun or satisfaction. I rarely do this, but I will preface this review with the statement that I never finished the game. In fact, I never made it past the first main level. If that turns you off to what I have to say, feel free to bail out now. If you would like to find out why a player who compulsively finishes nearly every game he plays couldn't be bothered to waste his time with this hunk of garbage, please read on. Technically, the game is average. The graphics are acceptable, although that's all I can say about them. The character models look decent for the most part, the lighting is passable but certainly not striking, and the texture work is on par with most RPGs. The animations are also relatively good; in fact I'd go as far as to say that some are genuinely interesting. Everything else, though, is par for the course and maybe even slightly below today's standards. The sound is also passable. The game sports a relatively enjoyable old-school style soundtrack that at times reminded me of the Diablo games at other times sounded pretty unique. Sound effects are also passable, though again you won't be finding anything to write home about here even with 5.1 headphones. Unfortunately for Demon's Souls, it needed a whole lot more than middle-of-the-road technical features to pull it out of the bog of awfulness. A long, long time ago in the far away lands of our childhoods, games were hard. Really hard. There were no saves, no checkpoints, and there was certainly no mercy. You had your reflexes, your knowledge of the level you were playing, and maybe a 1 up here and there. Those days died long ago, and they died for good reason. It's no secret that part of the problem games always had with becoming a mainstream, accepted form of entertainment was that they were just too damn inaccessible and frustrating for anyone other than the dedicated to succeed at. While this did help foster a sense of accomplishment among those who did invest the time and energy to succeed, it also had the effect of seriously hampering the fun factor, which, if we're honest, is really the whole reason most of us play games. Demon's Souls commits the same sins, but they are amplified by the fact that it has been released in an age of user-friendly games that can be challenging but not frustrating. Essentially Demon's Souls is a stage-based old-school RPG. You select your character and you are then dropped into the world. You get some weak semblance of a story opener that is basically just your standard RPG fare (evil threatens world, your character has to stop it, you know the drill). Your very first experience with the game involves you bein killed by a monster that is ludicrously above your level. Yes, that's right. Your experience with the game is prefaced with your death. Get used to it; you will be dying a lot. You then proceed to a hub area where you are able to chat with other spirits/NPCs and fill in the less-than-interesting parts of your story. Very boring, poorly written NPC conversations didn't do much to light my fire for the game, but I went ahead and hopped into the first area anyway. It sees your character running up a long flight of steps towards a castle, which you then proceed to scale with bad guys opposing you. Standard fare, but here's the trick: the castle is massive (45 min massive if you were to run the whole thing with a low level character), and it is packed with enemies you have no hope of defeating. If you die, and you WILL die, you will lose all of your experience, gold, and items and be reset to the very beginning of the level. It doesn't matter if you were five minutes in or thirty-five minutes in, you will be completely reset. Since you are now in spirit form again due to dying, your health bar will be made smaller and since all your experience and money are laying in a blood puddle where you died earlier (you can pick all of it up again IF you can make it back to the puddle), you will have no real way to upgrade your character or prepare for the challenges ahead. This was my resulting experience: fight through castle, die 20 min in. Respawn, fight through castle, die 20 min in, etc., etc, etc. After 3 hours of this I ripped the disc out and sent it back. Any game that frustrates me with a stupidly difficult set-up and then proceeds to punish me for falling victim to it does not deserve my time and certainly not my money. Those talking about the "accomplishment" and "hardcore" aspects of the game are elitists trying to justify poor game design as old-school. If you like fun, AVOID.… Expand

I cant really explain this. I love Dark Souls, it has become my favourite game of all time, but still i hate, hate and hate Demon's Souls. Its easier then Dark Souls, but its maddeningly frustrating and cheap. Demon's Souls is one of the most over-rated games of all time. Skip this one and buy the sequel.

I was pretty shocked when I looked at the reviews for this game, so many of them so high. First and foremost this game is utter garbage. The controls are terrible, the graphics for a 2009 PS3 game look horrendous, there are many PS2 games that look stunning in comparison, even attempting to compare it visually to any modern game and you will find yourself looking like a fool. I was fortunate enough to get this game for free from PS+ membership, if i had actually spent money on this I would be nearly as pissed as I was when I purchased BRINK, which is hands down the worst video game ever created.… Expand

Bought it at release day, traded in at next day. The problem for me is cannot pause the game no matter which button you press, even the Playstation Buttion not pause the game.

Awsome graphics, ok controls, and a story you probably won't see because you broke your controller from the frustration this game causes. The difficulty level is that of playing D&D with a Dm whose dog you'v run over, spilt drink onto his pristine D&D books, and generally have pissed off, before a session. You will die alot, you will restart from the beginning of the level, alot. You will tire of it very quickly. you also restart the levels with half health when you die and don't get it back till AFTER the boss fight., unless you have somewhat hard to find item. which you'll worry about wasting cause you know that next death is right around the corner. Rent this first, you'll be happy you did.… Expand

Nice looking game, good fighting. Bad inventory management and no pause. Punishing the player for every little mistake or twitch of the controller. There are challenging games, then there are sadistic games. and a few other minor issues.

Demon's Souls is sooooooooooooooo overrated. The gameplay consists entirely of repetitive button-mashing. Block, dodge, attack...dodge, attack block...attack, block, attack...attack, dodge, block...that is all there is to Demon's Souls...terrible, repetitive hack-and-slash. The gameplay includes no strategy and no depth. If you're going to make a game in which the gameplay only offers terrible, repetitive fighting, then at least make it in an open world or something where you can do something else that is fun. This gameplay offers nothing but sword fighting, and even that aspect of the game is repetitive, clunky, and not interesting or challenging in any way. This is the perfect example of a game only taking off because of a mob mentality. A couple of dumb people said it was good, then a bunch of even dumber people just went along with it and piled onto the bandwagon...People can't think for themselves, so an entire group of people were tricked into thinking this game was good. Just because a game is difficult, that does not make it good...I don't care how hard a game is, if the gameplay is shallow, repetitive, and boring, then what you have is a bad game. All these tards keep talking about the difficulty, like it's a badge of honor to play this game. But the game requires little skill or intelligence...all you do is repetitively blocking enemy attacks, and then slash at them mindlessly. Being proud of beating a game that requires no skill or strategy is just dumb. The popularity of this game smells very manufactured to me. People talk about how rewarding it is to "learn" the game...but there's nothing to learn....all you do is block and attack...block and attack...block and attack...whoop-tee-doo....congratulations, you can press the same buttons over and over for hours...NOT A GOOD GAME. It's ridiculous that this game should score even close to other top-rated games which offer so much more depth and variety to their gameplay. Now I love difficult games, but I want my difficult games to actually require skill, strategy, and thinking, and variety.… Expand

In my opinion the game was to complicated..... every time you die you lose your souls and have to run around killing everything trying to level up....... maybe i missed a trick to getting through the game but i gave up and moved on after a fews hours of dying over and over and having to try to collect my lost souls again

This game could easily have a subtitle of "The Punishment". I don't really have anything to add above what others have already written. The graphics are OK, the inventory system is average. I really like the combat system, though, especially because it has that tactical feel to it with stamina, one on one fights and other nice things. Unfortunately the checkpoints and foe respawn are a major flaw of this game. It is not a difficult game despite of what some people would claim, I'd say it's on par with other titles out there. Basically you're going to die multiple times and will have to retry, but where another game would let you to load a save game or restart from some not too distant checkpoint, Demon's Souls will require you to repeat the whole level (or a great portion of it), including all the fights (well, you can try to run, but it's not always feasible) and it will also make it harder than the first time by taking away half of your HP. This one single design decision made me abandon the game, despite that I found it interesting otherwise and really liked the combat, player notes & warnings, etc. But I'm not going to play the same level and fight the same enemies over and over again just to die somewhere further down the road and be warped to the very beginning. This not my idea of fun. I am OK to repeat the same thing 20 times if I have to and eventually I will pass, but starting over with additional hindrances is not fair. This game has a potential and it could have been a great title. Could have, but is not...… Expand

Dull, aimless dungeon hack and slash with an uncompromising and cheap difficulty, in fact it's almost as if the game doesn't want to be played. Repetitive, frustrating, ugly and not fun in any sense of the word.