Dark Souls is the sequel to Demon Souls. Dark Souls is one of the hardest games I have ever played. This game requires a lot of strategy to move through the game. One on one fights are the way to make it through this game and even then you will have died more times then you can count. Once you start fighting multiple enemies at the same time that are around the same difficulty level as your character, you are in serious trouble unless you pull off some impressive moves with some luck.

In Dark Souls you can upgrade just about anything you get if you have the right color and size of titanite. There are several different embers depending on what type of damage you want to do like fire, poison, lighting, and others. You have 3 main levels of upgrading your weapons. 1 to 5, 6 to 10, and 11 to 15. In order to further your upgrades from 5 to 6, 10 to 11, and 15 you need to find embers; give them to curtain blacksmiths and then use items like titanite chunk and slabs; which are harder to come across then titanite shards. Amour appears to only upgrade to level 5, and you can add special upgrades to your amour with different titanite.

The game has 4 blacksmiths and several merchants. Each blacksmith has curtain abilities available to them. Depending on what upgrade you want to use; determines which blacksmith you need to go to in order to get the upgrade completed. I found out the hard way that if you attack a blacksmith or merchant they will attack back and it is a fight to the death and if you win against them they don’t come back in the game to sell or trade you any items. So be warned when thinking about attacking a merchant.

Dark Souls is an action/RPG game that is very addicting and will consume your time playing this game trying to just beat the next boss or to get your character to the next upgrade level.

The game says it has co-op but it fails to explain that it’s not your usual co-op that most people are used to playing. In this case the co-op consists of 2 ways of doing co-op. The first is your character has to be human and then as you go through the level you will find these bright white signs on the ground that allows you to call other people who are +/- 10% of your character’s skill level to your game as a spirit to help you beat the boss in that particular level. The second way is by using the white soap stone and placing your own white sign on the ground and wait for someone to summon you to their game. Dark Souls has several servers so you could be at the same spot in the game as a friend of yours but if your friend’s character skill level is too high or too low compared to your own or if your friend happens to be on a different server then you won’t be able to find his summoning sign to summon him. Dark Souls is mostly meant to be a single player game with the ability to get some assistants from up to 3 other players at one time giving you a party of 4 players.

One major issue I had with the game is when I’m human and trying to get some help by summoning someone I would get invaded by someone instead. To invade someone’s game you need a red eye orb to invade a person who is in human form. The point of invading someone’s game is to kill the other player to gain their souls and possibly a weapon or amour from them. Invading is very popular and tends to happen almost anytime you become human.

There was a problem with people exploiting a few glitches in v1.04 where people get an unlimited amount of souls and humanity; then they would level up their character to the point were the character virtually can’t die and they would go invade other games. Luckily there is an update v1.05 that fixes that glitch and doesn’t allow that to happen.

Dark Souls has by far some of the most astounding scenery. You will find yourself overlooking the sun setting over a vast body of water, or looking down upon an old ancient city. The characters in the game are fully detailed and definitely do the game justice.

The game is extremely difficult and will frustrate you to no end. But very addicting and you will sink an enormous amount of hours into playing Dark souls. I have put in over 80 hours and I’m only about half way through the game.

Overall Dark Souls is definitely worth picking up if you’re an RPG player and want a game that you can’t beat in a day.

Reviewed By: Booker140