As always there may be small spoilers contained, mostly about certain bosses or areas. Nothing game breaking though.

Demon’s Souls, a game heralded as a brutal experience that harkens back to the days of ye olde school gaming toughness. A game that intrigued me in previews but never got enough of my attention to warrant a buy. After numerous great reviews from professional sites like Gamespot and 1up, I decided to take the plunge and purchase it. I thought that as a general fan of action-RPG games, if there were any issues that I could overlook them and the difficulty wasn’t something that bothered me too much as I don’t consider myself to be very casual when I play my games.

So what was Demons Soul’s like?

Utter tomfoolery.

Let’s see where I should begin. I guess the story and related areas would be good to start. Demon’s Souls tells the tale of demons ravaging the lands and you as a hero must collect their souls to grow stronger and stop them. Great, I don’t mind simplistic stories and in this department Demon’s Souls does its job. Actually this is one thing I have nothing but good things to say about this game. Demon’s Souls does an excellent job at setting an atmosphere. From the ambient modest background tune in the Nexus to the varied ambience of each of the worlds really give the player a sense of dread. The world is coming to an end and it is up to you. I really enjoyed that in Demon’s Souls.

(Tower Knight: An annoying boss but really cool looking)

So what about the gameplay? How does Demon’s Souls do as a game? Well not very well I’m afraid. The game lacks a certain level of polish that we have become accustomed to in recent generations. Players can easily attack through walls with certain weapons, defeat whole bosses without them noticing with the help of a certain ring, enemies and players cannot attack at an angle so elevated positions are actually at a disadvantage and one boss can be taken out through a wall of fog that separates the regular level from the boss area ala Megaman style. This game feels like it should belong to the Playstation and Nintendo 64 era as the stupid exploits I was using felt like the stuff I did from that time.

The game mechanics are shallow as well. Touted as an intense action-RPG, the actual RPF elements are weak. As heard on a GameFAQs thread, the game really degenerates into arrows and clouds. For those not familiar with the game, arrows and two area of effect spells can be used throughout the whole game and can dispatch foes rather easily EVEN the final boss! For every design choice to foster difficulty there is an exploit that can be used. Also because the developers wanted to create such a difficult game, there are a number of one hit KO moves. Even many regular enemies have this. Now at face value, that doesn’t seem to be an issue, but when thought through especially for melee characters it really weakens. No matter how much you pump into Vitality, bosses and many strong regular enemies will still one hit KO you putting many melee characters in a really bad position and makes them resort to whoring arrows and those cloud spells mentioned earlier.

(Yep, he will one shot you like most things in Demon's Souls...)

Demon’s Souls also suffers from a design philosophy that has largely been scrapped by most developers. The attitude of a player will figure it out or die trying as mentioned in an earlier Bitmob article. The tutorial ends with a boss that will kill 90% of players or will give them a sword after that boss...then kill them. You awake in the nexus in “soul form” where you HP is halved and the only way to get back your body is to “collect demon’s souls” says the game. However it is not that easy. You have to kill a boss, use an item or hop online and help someone else kill a boss.  I only found this out after 30 minutes of trying to get back to the tutorial to get my body back reminiscent of Diablo 2. The game never explains anything past that tutorial. This can lead to much frustration as the player will have to fumble around like a blind man figuring his way through the game. For example, each player has a stamina bar. This bar governs all actions such as sprinting, attacking and firing arrows. After blocking an attack, your stamina bar lowers based on the strength of the attack but also your shields stats. What isn’t so obvious is that the lower your stamina, the more chance you will get stunned and being attacking in a stun state will do about double damage. Usually an instant kill too. There is no hint or notification about this, many players will have 20% of their stamina still and raise their shield thinking they will be fine but in fact they won’t.

Demon’s Souls also fails to explain any of the other whole game impacting elements. Things like character tendency and world tendency are just hinted at on the back of the box, yet a player entering a black world tendency will face tougher enemies, have lower health in soul form and there might even be extra enemies thrown in. The only way a player can know is by checking the start menu and seeing how the colour of the arch stone waypoint looks.  Now that sounds like a reasonable way to convey the information of a given world’s tendency, but my problem is the game doesn’t tell you HOW world tendency changes and how that affects it.

Now let’s take a break from all this pessimism for a second. Many of you are probably thinking “Wow, this guy sure is trolling right now” but Demon’s Souls does do one thing probably even better than atmosphere, the truly innovative multiplayer. The story of Demon’s Souls lends itself well to the multiplayer component. Players who are dead and in soul form can be summoned to help players alive to defeat the boss of an area or players in soul form can invade another player’s game to kill the host player. By either killing a boss or a host player, the soul form player will be revived. Players can also leave helpful messages on the floor that can be voted on like YouTube comments to tell other players about powerful enemies or booby traps (These bobby traps are usually one hit kills too).  So while it is mostly a single player game, From Software made it so that you aren’t lonely in your quest to defeat the Demon Army. I really enjoyed that aspect of Demon’s Souls and really hopes it catches on. The downside to Demon Soul’s is the strange glitches that come from playing online. Going online can reset your World Tendency to neutral or send it to pure white. This can be frustrating when a skilled player has purposely manipulated the game to get a pure black world tendency. Also in a more personal experience, even when I log onto the Demon’s Soul’s server at the start of the game, it doesn’t put me online. I don’t see other players ‘bloodstains from here they died nor does the game allow me to summon help when I am in my body. But credit must be given for thinking of and implementing this multiplayer.

(Demon's Souls does have a colourful cast of bosses, like the one seen here. The Adjudicator who is one of my favorites)

Another useful and rather fun aspect of Demon’s Souls is a new game+ feature. After beating the game, you can transfer over all your items and equipment and play the game again. This second game, the enemies will do more damage and have more health. My only problem with New Game+ is that while regular enemies will up the amount of souls they give you, bosses don’t. Near the end of the game that is where the majority of your souls will be coming from. After awhile a whole game cycle will only level you up about 10 times but still are just as hard as your first game cycle. I think that is a silly choice. If the enemies and bosses will be just as hard for me even at a higher level, I should receive the same amount of souls scaled to my respective game cycle.

The last thing I want to talk about with regard to gameplay are the controls. Now there are many games out there with reputations for difficulty, for example Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry 3. What makes games get away with their difficulty is that they have great control schemes and reward skilful players. They are smooth, responsive and can keep up with the touch enemies in their respective games. The same cannot be said for Demon’s Souls. While most of the controls are fine, and of the usual Action-RPG fare. The problems with Demon’s Souls control wise come down to two things. The circle button and spells/miracles (alternate magic).  The circle button can do back steps, rolls in all directions and sprinting. Quickly pressing the button results in a backstep or roll if used in tandem with the control stick. The way to get a sprint out of the circle button is to hold it down for half a second. Sometimes when fighting a tough enemy or boss, you need to sprint to get out of an area of effect or to run in to attack. Sometimes that half second to register the sprint doesn’t come out and your character rolls and many times the boss or enemy will punish you....with an instant kill. Secondly spells and miracles are governed by the up on the D-pad. Having one selected with certain will allow you to cast, however there is no hotkey/spell wheel. If you are a mage character with numerous spells equipped, the only way to select a spell is to scroll through all of them till you reach the one you want. Once again in tight and frantic situations this can cause trouble. The controls while effective for the most part, can really fall apart in bad situations and don’t compliment the difficulty of the game.

So is Demon’s Souls a hard game? I would argue no. Some of the best equipment in the game can be picked up within an hour of play. I am still using two pieces of equipment from my first game cycle and they are common weapons. Not unique or special, just a bow and shield upgraded with some ore. Also with all the exploits out there, there is no reason why anyone can’t beat Demon’s Souls. For people who think they are “Hardcore” because they can play and beat a game like Demon’s Souls I would recommend they remove their heads from their asses.

Demon’s Soul is a game that suffers from a poor design philosophy. The developers have said in many interviews they didn’t want to make a hard game. They wanted to make a rewarding game. Let’s think that through. How is ANYTHING in life rewarding? TOUGH things are rewarding.  If you sit down and go out of your way to make a game hard, you will generally fail. I guess From Software spent so much time trying to punish the player, they missed a bunch of exploits and issues in the quality assurance step. Demon’s Souls is old school, but for the wrong reasons. The difficulty in that game isn’t UNFORGIVING, which makes player mistakes have deep consequences but instead it is PUNISHING, which punishes players for choice the developer made. Also with other RPG and RPB hybrids out now like Dragon Age and Borderlands, it is very hard to recommend this game at full price even to RPG fans.

Even if you are tempted by it, this game only deserves a rent first with a follow up purchase after the price drops.

Score: 5/10 or 6/10 if you are a diehard RPG fan.