Dark Souls II – Review

‘You have died’ a phrase that instantly reminds me of my game sessions with Dark Souls II. This long awaited sequel is a game that will do its best to show us that hard games are not a thing of the past.

Story

The story in Dark Souls II is fairly minimalistic, seeing all you need to know is that you’re cursed and are slowly distancing yourself from the world as you know it. Your humanity is slipping away right between your fingers and all you can do is try to fight the curse that haunts your very being.

To do so, you are attracted to a kingdom of a forgotten age and there you must find the soul of the king to regain your humanity and what you do outside of that is of no concern.

All of this makes for a fairly thin plot but in a game like this, this is all you need, seeing it would take away the feeling of being dropped in the middle of nowhere where you will have to find out your own way of regaining your lost humanity.

Graphics

Overall graphically the game is not exquisite but it’s clear it was one of the last batch of releases for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The animations are fairly fluent and even seem oddly realistic when it comes to combat and overall movement. The environments also possess a fair amount of details and are not too empty. Sometimes they miss that something extra, but for a game that goes for a fairly minimalistic setting it suits it just fine.

Sound

Dark Souls II offers a fairly quiet and surprisingly soothing soundtrack. This does not take away that the calmness makes sure there is also an eerie feeling throughout the game.

The voices of the NPC’s in the game are all spoken and give you the feeling of quality voice acting. Whilst not much is spoken in the forgotten land, the voices of the other damned feel more than welcome.

Gameplay

Dark Souls II is an action RPG that is filled with loads of survival elements. Truth be told, the game might actually be more survival than most survival games. Dark Souls II pretty much dumps you inside the game and offers you the chance to create one of the eight available classes. After that it’s pretty much a situation of ‘bye bye, have fun, you’ll die a lot’.

The game does not offer you an elaborate explanation on how everything works (except for a basic tutorial after the start of the game) and it does so for a reason. Dark Souls II revolves around your faith as a cursed hollow who has to regain his humanity and that is all the amount of information you’ll need. The offset is simple and thus you’ll just need to explore the hostile lands and fight all its dark beings in order for you to find your path.

The world in Dark Souls II is an almost open one. This does not mean you can reach all the locations on the map without acquiring certain items to unlock the way. Nonetheless you can pretty much do as you like.

Combat in Dark Souls II is the portion of the game that lives up to the reputation of being hard as hell. You’ll experience a fairly realistic combat setting in which you can’t just storm in and kill a handful of enemies with a few random blows. You’ll have to be careful to dodge incoming attacks, because they will hamper your movement and may result in your death. (Then again, you’ll die sooner or later in your playthrough.) You’ll have to learn attack patterns from all the foes you come across in order for you to dispose them more quickly and thus readying yourself for the other enemies that will come running towards you.

Throughout the world of Dark Souls II you’ll find a decent amount of so called bosses which will wipe you away with only a few strikes or even one heavy blow. These can be avoided if necessary but presumably you’ll want to take them out sooner or later, to get yourself some new goodies.

Gear is also an important factor in the game but overall the game is more about skill. This does not take away that it’s exciting to find new items to try out and be able to upgrade your favorite set up. These upgrades are fairly subtle ones and will never increase your stats that much that you will notice a lot of improvement(s) at once.

All of the things you wish to purchase inside of the game, including leveling up has to be paid with the souls you collect. These souls are collected by slaying enemies or using specific items that contribute to your collection of souls. Sometimes it’s better to spend the souls you’ve accumulated, seeing if you die your souls will reset to zero. Of course the game offers you a chance to fetch the souls you have lost, but you’ll only get one chance to do so.

Sadly a few issues hamper the gameplay, which already has a big difficulty threshold to overcome. The game suffers from horrible camera angles at time and a poor lock-on system. Half the time you’ll encounter weird camera twists when trying to lock-on to your enemies. When multiple targets are closeby, the game sometimes chooses an enemy that’s a lot further away than the foes close to you. Another issue with the game is the incredible amount of invisible walls the game throws at you. The game aims for a realistic feel when it comes to combat and fluent gameplay but sadly your character can not walk over obstacle the height of your big toe. This often causes frustration when you’re stuck behind such an obstacle in the middle of combat.

Conclusion

Dark Souls II is a game that truly lives up to its reputation of being one of the hardest games around. The game nearly reaches its full potential but sadly a few mishaps keep it away from that perfect score. In short: A great game where small progress feels like an enormous victory. What would be an easy task in other games will surely become a big challenge in Dark Souls II. Nonetheless Dark Souls II is a game for those who wish to go back to the golden times where games were a lot more difficult than the batch of games we get nowadays. Beware, the path of the cursed is a perilous one.

ThaMofo

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