Recent reviews by evil_spuds

If you liked the first Dark Souls or Demon Souls, you won't like this. Controls are unresponsive, hitboxes float around, enemies and the world are cheap rather than challenging, and the game just looks ugly.

So the controls of this game. I'll explain why they feel bad to me. When you move, your guy keeps going for a while after starting. You cannot pivot without moving from your starting position, which causes your player to do a silly orbit if you try to grab an item that is directly next to you. Next problem with the controls is the attacks. In DeS and DaS1, when you attacked, you could turn the attack mid swing, provided you are not locked onto a target. This is how I played most of those games, and removing the ability to turn during attacks feels clumsy and makes you almost always have to be locked onto enemies to ensure a hit on them.

The hitboxes of yourself and enemies feel like they're loosely attached to the viewmodel compared to the previous games. Not much else to say about it, that's just how the game felt after playing it for an hour.

Enemies in this game are largely based around having high health and attack in a group. The first enemy you come across is a golpher-looking thing hopping through grass. After fighting the stubborn controls and finally landing a hit on the golpher, I was promptly jumped by about five other golphers. I got away, but that might've had more to do with the lousy AI than anything else. Later, there are large stone knights. They swing swords and clubs surprisingly quickly, and have shields that they never use. When they attack, they go on a several attack combo. But here's where the lazy AI comes in: these guys can't track the player at all. They start swinging and then they just walk in a completely straight line. Meanwhile you can easily get five hits across their back without them being any the wiser. After killing a couple, I decided to just run past the rest. They didn't have anything to say about that, just walked off the cliffs and into the oceans when their swings didn't connect with me.

The game looking ugly is mostly just my opinion. First off, the player's walking gait looks like he's got something up his ass. Next, the look of a hollowed character is just your basic Hollywood zombie look.

The port to PC was actually pretty good though to be honest, didn't need to do anything special to have the game run well at a high resolution.

Overall, I don't reccomend playing this game, replay the first Dark Souls if you ever think you want more. The last thing I want to say is thank Gaben for refunds.

I played this on PS3 before getting it on PC, so I'll describe the game itself, and how the PC port fares compared to its original console version.

The game itself is very good. Think of an old RPG that you really liked, but update it with a more open world, fluid mechanics, beatiful, current graphics, and multiplayer interaction seamlessly integrated into standard gameplay. It also has a unique story filled with interesting characters that you can befriend, trade with, or even kill.

As for the port, it is nearly unplayable without some tweaks. The most important is DSFix, then you will probably need to use a driver to use a handheld controller. Playing with mouse and keyboard is painful and not intended.
The in-game visual settings are not good; use DSFix to make the game render cleanly. You may also choose to tamper with the framerate, although this will interfere with some of the physics in the game.
Multiplayer works well on PC with steamworks, but it seems less populated than PS3. Probably easier to play with a friend though, just make sure you both have the same download region on steam.