Recent reviews by ERECTIMUS PRIME

I see a lot of reviews saying "I haven't even left the first area, but I can already tell this is game of the year." But the thing is, it's once you leave the first area you realise this game becomes less and less fun.

A lot of bosses are reused, which is fine for such a large world, but why did they think that putting 2 of the same boss at once would be fun. Almost every double boss fight consists of running around the arena waiting for 2 desynced bosses to stop attacking, just so you can get your single hit in before they go and do it again. and if you get hit, these bosses will almost always deal over half your health in 1 attack at 40 vigor, and usually stun you into the next bosses attack, which then kills you. I guess this is supposed to be fun? and don't even get me started on godskin duo... go ahead and look it up, if you want to know just how great that fight is..

Once you leave the first area, every enemy seems to deal absurd amounts of damage, with little to no reward for defeating them, after the first time of going through an area, i'll always just run through everything, as it's so much easier than fighting groups of enemies that deal over half you health in one hit, yet again stunning you into the next hit of another enemy, because poise isn't real.

Of course this game isn't all bad, there are a lot of weapons and armors to use which all look cool or goofy. The dual wielding return was really cool too. For the majority of the game i was rocking a double halberd for fun, and also had some faith and mind to throw some lightning at people when i'm out-ranged, though the lighting spear spells have abysmal range compared to other spells, so I kinda regretted that.

The graphics for this game are awesome. So many pretty and unique areas (minus the catacomb areas, which almost always look the same). My favorite area was that underground place that looked like it was in space or something. The "sky" in there was gorgeous, and I would have spent a lot more time admiring everything if I wasn't constantly being shot by great arrows from a mile away.

Not gonna say much about the performance of PC, as there are already many reviews that complain solely about that, but I will say it's really bad in areas with lots of particles, like snowy areas. Also this game has a chance to just crash when I alt + tab, though I haven't seen anyone talk about that.

Though there are a lot of cool new spells and stuff, another disappointing thing about the game is how some spells seem like they would be upgrades to other lower costing variants but deal almost identical damage for costing near twice as much fp, and having higher stat requirements. This is most noticeable with the greatbow spell, and the mutishot greatbow spell, as well the normal lighting spear and the other version I don't even remember.

Though that was disappointing, nothing was as stupid as the mimic tear, the sword of night and flame, and comet azur. These 3 things were by far the most stupidly broken things in the game.

Though the mimic tear summon isn't that great later on since it usually can't roll properly and gets bodied within a minute, it still makes any other summon obsolete, as it just copies you and all your gear and has more health and insane defence compared to both you and other summons. After finding the mimic tear, it kills the fun in finding any other summon, since it just doesn't matter anymore, as nothing comes close to the mimic tear.

Got a bit of a funny story with The sword of night and flame(gonna call it SNF). The SNF's weapon art, or whatever it's called in this game, either shoots a giant laser beam or a flame arc thing. I got this weapon very early on, but never used it, since, for one, I didn't know what the skill did, and two, I already decided I would do a strength/faith build. Later on i decided to use it as a secondary to quickly swap to and clear mobs with the flame arc for rune farming. Since I had this thing equipped pretty much the whole game, but never used it, you can probably picture how stupid my face looked when I used the laser beam attack by accident during the last boss fight seeing it do 2000 damage at once without even requiring me to get close to the boss. I was dumbfounded, as my double halberd jump attack did around 1300 and required me to get close and risk getting hit. At this point, I had died to the last boss so many times I was ready to give up. Won't spoil what the fight is, but it required running a marathon to get to the boss through many obstacles (that can basically one shot), only to get 1 hit in before going back to the marathon. Once i used the laser beam skill by accident, I decided "to hell with melee," and kept using it, then I proceeded to kill the last boss on the very same try. When I do my second playthrough, I don't think I will use anything other than that weapon. The suffering I could have simply skipped had I just used that weapon from the start, is unreal.

Now, Azur comet, won't say much about it, as it's literally just the laser beam skill from the sword as a spell, except it lasts until you run out of FP. This sounds fine, until you realise there is a flask of physick upgrade that makes you unable to use FP for a limited time (maybe 15 seconds, i'm not sure). so the laser beam weapon art that did 2000 damage in one second, can now last 15 seconds instead. You do the math.

Once you have any 3 of these things, everything else just becomes obsolete due to how ridiculously powerful these items are.

Anyways, my rant finally out of my system, I feel better now. This definitely Isn't a bad game by any means. It brought a lot of new things to the table, and although possibly broken, a lot of the new things were fun outside of later game boss fights. I just didn't like how it felt like a lot of the boss fights felt artificially difficult, relying on both learning attack patterns AND heavily relying on RNG during double fights or fights with bosses that have huge AOE spam, as opposed to the ds3 bosses that were hard, but never felt unfair, and were actually fun once you learn how they work. Although I liked all these new mechanics, weapons and armors, I can't help but feel like I had more fun with ds3 overall. My friend picked up this game saying he never played a souls game before, and I genuinely felt bad, as this game is miles harder than ds3 and super punishing if you don't know what you are doing. I watched him play, as he roll spammed away from the reskinned ds3 thrall, only to get oneshotted by it's multihit attack. I fear many people are in the same boat as him when it comes to this game, and might end up dropping it once it gets too hard for them, which is a shame considering how much this game has in it.

I'm still gonna play this game, to see what I missed, or try different builds, but I still don't think this game is a direct improvement from the last, hence my negative review.

Oh yeah, I also didn't like that I needed 40 vigor to reach the softcap for health instead of 27 like ds3, I could have had 13 points to put somewhere I actually wanted.

Also, gonna leave comments open to see just how many people say "git gud" or "mad cuz bad" or whatever the hell else they say lol

I really want to like this, but the memory issue thing is so ridiculous, my games crashes with that memory exception just by navigating the menus.

If i had to say, this might just be one of the games I've ever played.

This Game gave me depression