If you were to just see Dark Souls on the shelf in a shop, and pick it up without a clue what to expect, the chances are you wouldn't quite be prepared for the challenge that awaits you. Building up a feverish anticipation across the internet, Dark Souls has already gained something of a reputation for itself, purely by virtue of being so. Damn. Hard. A challenge like no other, with a difficulty level that'll push you to the very brink of your skills within a few minutes of starting, it's no wonder Dark Souls' tagline is "Prepare to Die" - as that's exactly what you'll be spending an awful lot of your time doing.
On the surface, Dark Souls is a dark fantasy role playing game. With dragons aplenty, ruined castles, dark, twisting caves, and eerie forests to explore, it certainly ticks all of the fantasy boxes - although, sadly, there's really not all that much of a story here. Although the game does feature an intro, you'll likely leave it with less idea of what's going on than when you started, as the emphasis here has gone firmly into making a game that's as challenging as humanly possible. Your objective is simply to survive from one end of the world to the other, with no princesses that need rescuing, quests, or really all that much of a story to tie it together.
Stay back, tree beast!
Thankfully, the game does at least give you a little bit of a helping hand as you get stuck in. After creating your own character (you can choose everything from your character class, all the way down to the style of your hair), you find yourself waking in a dungeon, where a passing chap opens a grate above your cell and chucks you the key. From here, you proceed through what makes up a basic tutorial, telling you how to attack, block, and eventually, parry and counter your opponent's moves. While the initial enemies you'll face are unarmed, you'll quickly end up against heavily armoured foes with spears, crossbows, and swords, each of which require a different strategy if you're looking to take them down.
Switching between frantic button mashing and slow paced circling, as you wait for a hole in your opponent's defences, the combat, as you may imagine, plays a large part in the game. Early on in the game, you'll earn a shield, which will quickly become your best friend, as you can actually only take around three hits before you die. When you're being attacked from all sides by countless enemies (and often, snipers with crossbows in distant towers), it doesn't take much to be hit those fatal three times - so you'll want to keep your shield handy.
Depending on your class, you may start knowing a magic spell - our Pyromancer, the catchily named Mr. Burns, started with a fireball - but it's not quite as easy to use as you'd imagine. With a limited number of uses (eight), you're forced to pick and choose the enemies you use it on - especially as the only way to replenish it is to rest at a nearby bonfire, which act as checkpoints in the game.
As you may imagine, though, from a game that puts its difficulty first, and everything else last, there are more than a few annoyances to the gameplay, as you're regularly forced to make awkward decisions in parts of the game that seem to have been exclusively designed to make things harder. A case in point are the bonfires, the game's checkpoints, that, although they replenish your health and magic, also cause every single enemy you've killed to respawn. So the situation usually follows something of a similar pattern - you'll be making your way through an area, taking lots of damage, and using up all your spells. While you do have a few health potions on hand, eventually, you'll undoubtedly find yourself running low on health, and completely out of any magic, forcing you to rely exclusively on your melee skills, whilst knowing that a single hit will easily kill you. You have no idea where the next bonfire may be. At this point, you effectively have two options - either carry on towards certain death, or turn back, and retreating to the safety of the nearest bonfire, essentially giving up on all the progress you've made as the enemies you've killed magically come back to life, and you're left at square one.
Bonfires act as checkpoints throughout the game - but they come with a hefty price.
In reality, though, the decision is even harder to make than we've made out above. In addition to regenerating your health, the bonfires are the only place you can level your character up. As you progress through the game, and kill enemies, you'll collect souls, which can then be used to increase your character's skills - your health will be one of the first things you'll want to buff up. Similarly to the health, though, there's something of a catch. Should you die before you next reach a bonfire, you'll lose all of the souls you've collected. Restarting from the previous bonfire, you'll then have to fight your way past all the same hordes again, in the hope of reaching your only recently dead body, where you'll be able to pick up the souls you left behind. Of course, the catch is, should you have a slightly worse run than last time, and not manage to make it to your body, those souls will be lost forever. If you only make it slightly further and then die again, you'll be back to square one, too - restarting from the last bonfire, and forced to fight your way back again.
And then we come to the bosses. Huge, evil, screen filling beasties await you at disturbingly regular intervals, ready to bring your journey through Dark Souls' world to an untimely end. Indeed, the first boss you find in the game, you actually have to run away from - the second can kill you in two hits. And he will. Again, and again, and again. It takes a very special kind of mindset to keep approaching such an insurmountable (and unfair) task - fighting your way through the castle, and up a tower each and every time just to be smited by the same boss in exactly the same way as before.
And perhaps that's what gets us about Dark Souls. It's one of those games that's rather tricky to review, as, if you're not one of the masochists who will happily attempt that same boss fight 300 times, you're likely to get very little out of it. We come under that category. It's not like Dark Souls couldn't have made that slightest bit of effort to make itself that little bit easier to get into - but it chose not to, for doing so would have tarnished its "hardcore" credentials. It could have featured an adjustable difficulty level - let the masochists have their impossible game, and let us have something we can actually do. In fact, there are still some parts of Dark Souls we're not entirely sure what they do, as there's next to nothing to explain them in the game. Completely shutting itself off to anyone but the hardest of the hardcore, Dark Souls is a game most will want to avoid.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
