DARK SOULS II

A step forward and a step back.

PC version .

Dark Souls II is a RPG published by Bandai Namco and developed by FromSoftware for the Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.

GAMEPLAY
Smoother gameplay, more weapons and items to change the way you approach the game

The lack of a interconnected world like the original was a shame. Being able to see locations from others was cool and even cooler when you could find how some of them actually linked together. Instead some of Dark Souls II's levels almost stick together awkwardly, such as taking an elevator up  from a poison filled windmill to a lava filled castle with a sea of molten rock surrounding it as far as the eye could see was pretty jarring.

Being able to get invaded while hollow was a bad idea. I understand you could just play offline if you didn't want to get invaded but then you can miss out on some online features like messages. Restricting invasions to when you were human was a better way to do it.

More punishing than the previous game but more so in an unfair way. Your health pool being depleted further and further the more you die was a bad change because it feels like its just trying to make things more difficult rather than challenging. One of the main points of the original was being able to die over and over with the real punishment being potentially not learning from your mistakes, rather than death being a bad thing.

The problem of manufactured difficulty shows up in a few areas of this game and by that I really do mean the areas you explore. Two particular sections in the Iron Keep and Shrine of Amana just felt like they were punishing the player for simply being there. Loads of enemies with annoying moves with the potential to take you down easily made them frustrating, pair this with the degrading health pool and the fact that for whatever reason the invulnerability players got when interacting with levers, doors or fog walls was removed led to some easy frustration to cheap and annoying deaths.

So not only is it more annoying to get to bosses but some of the bosses certainly felt worse than the previous game. There are more bosses in this game than the original and perhaps it does feel a bit like quantity over quality with some of them hardly even feeling like bosses, failing to evoke that thrill or sense of awe that some of the original did. Perhaps my least favourite boss in the game, the Ancient Dragon, was a fight that hardly relied on skill but instead on the luck of which moves he would decide to use. You would go in hoping that he would try and breath fire at you or stamp on you rather than him flying up and spraying the ground with flames, which could even be a one shot move. So I knew what to do, I just had to hope he would use his other moves more often than the fire move. For a series that's supposed to be so renowned for learning to beat bosses through skill this fight felt more like a lottery draw.

STORY


GRAPHICS

SOUND


VALUE FOR MONEY

OVERALL

CROWN OF THE SUNKEN KING EXPANSION
Slumbering Dragon was a great fight but the other two felt pretty average or even frustrating, especially the trio one.

CROWN OF THE OLD IRON KING EXPANSION
Pretty unique location that was fun to explore, one of three bosses was almost just a reskin but Sir Alonne and the Fume Knight were both good bosses, with the Fume Knight being one of, if not the hardest in the series. Although the potential run back if you were defeated by Sir Alonne or the Blue Smelter Demon were really horrible,

The level design of Brume Tower was probably the most well designed throughout the whole game. It was fun descending through the tower and finding all the rooms but the biggest thing I liked about it was how there were some really nicely done traps that could punish both you and the enemy. I have perticular praise for one room in perticular that was filled with enemies and a shrine to buff them, all in the way of a doorway to progress. Fighting against the enemies in the room is very difficult and running to the lever to open the door was also very risky. However if you were thinking outside the box there were some non-aggressive NPCs wandering around with explosive barrels, easily going off if they came into contact with fire. Now seemingly there were trap doors for you to fall into this pit and face despair against the enemies but if you were clever about it you could guide the explosive barrel NPCs into the trap instead, falling into the room and eliminating all the enemies without you even having to step foot down there. It was great to see that work and felt so rewarding for thinking outside the box.

CROWN OF THE IVORY KING EXPANSION
Two interesting boss fights with the other one basically being the same as one of the others but with two enemies instead of one