Recent reviews by ThePostalGamer

Much more longevity than Dark Souls: Remastered and I get railed in it about as often. 10/10

This game is a perfect example of wasted potential. I’ve had fun with it, I wouldn’t have spent so much time in it otherwise and I want to like it so much, but it takes so long to get to the fun that it’s barely worth it and the developers have actually taken several steps backwards for each one they took forwards from Xenoverse 1.

In XV1, you only had one character slot until you finished the main game, unlocking seven more but all of the progress you’ve made in the main game, everything you've unlocked and all Parallel Quests also carried over between characters. Here, you have all eight slots available right away… but your progress through the main game and the PQs are reset every time, ruining the best reason for having those character slots available right away. This is a HUGE step backwards, is an arbitrary waste of time on each new character you make and creates a problem that the previous game already solved.

In almost all quests in this game there are points where something minor will happen like a character arriving, leaving, reviving or transforming and these take place within miniature cutscenes. These are frequent, can chain together, interrupt whatever any character is doing be it a transformation or an attack and while they are going, time marches on. If you’re transformed and your ki or stamina is depleting, it will keep running down during these cutscenes. If you’re in the middle of melting an enemy’s health bar with a Super/Ultimate attack and a cutscene pops up, then your attack stops dead and the only mercy of this mechanic is that it can also apply to enemies. There are also times where enemies you're beating up will have some dialogue begin at which point their health will not go any lower until it's finished, stalling things further. Finally, there are a few PQs where characters will talk to each other for almost a full minute before you actually get to fight something. This is padding on top of problems that all add to the artificial difficulty that getting the Ultimate Finish for the best rewards on these PQs already has, usually due to them relying on time limits to clear quickly. I'm known by many of my friends as having extreme patience but this system has caused me to give up on trying to unlock something that I was after many times because the game is a grind on top of having drop chances that would put gacha games to shame.

There is a new type of currency called TP Medals used to buy things from the also new TP Medal Shop. Except that this shop rotates its stock every few days... and it was previously only open on weekends. Worse yet, most things from these shops cost an obscene amount of medals. There are events where some limited time gifts were all available at once and at one point it all cost - I am not joking here - 8,331 TP Medals. Hypothetically, if you were to do Expert Mission 16, taking you exactly one minute to complete it and earning you 16 medals per pop, then you would have to do that mission 521 times in order to go from zero medals to enough for every gift, adding up to just under nine solid hours of nothing but beating the tar out of the same opponent over and over again, not taking into account losses, loading times or any other thing you can buy with these medals, of which there are many. This transcends padding.

Speaking of Expert Missions, they are one of the worst parts of the game. Enemies fought within them have some new exclusive attacks, by far the worst of which being Brainwash Attack. Absolutely nothing can stop it, it happens at set points based on the boss’ health even while you’re actively pummelling them and I have no doubt that many innocent controllers have died to these moves since it creates a tedious slog for the one lucky remaining character to get everyone back in and resume the fight. Later EMs throw you into a gauntlet against no less than five enemies in a row that all auto-dodge your basic attacks. This is only disabled when their stamina is broken, resulting in you having to pile on a cheap combination of skills to even land a hit, usually including God of Destruction's Anger and Emperor's Death Beam. Even further, you’ll encounter an enemy that has permanent super armour and have their stats cranked up so high that they can KO any level 80 character in two basic heavy attacks and this super armour is disabled while the enemy is poisoned, of all things. A specialised setup is necessary for completing these missions since you can’t use items, die or have any hope to fight them with any reasonably well-put-together build.

There’s an item in the game that you can use to revive yourself if you get KO’d. Problem is, if a failure condition in a PQ is you being KO’d then you just lose without even being given the chance to use it and the same applies if you’re the last to get KO’d on your team. Got an ally with you that causes instant mission failure if they get KO’d? None of your healing abilities will work on them, forcing you to watch them like a hawk and even that may not work because friendly AI is braindead and they can easily get one-shotted by a powerful Ultimate Attack - I’m looking at you, Gigantic Roar - failing the quest instantly through no fault of your own. It’s also possible to have a character on your team be revived as the one doing the reviving is KO’d, resulting in the game telling you your score and giving you a D rank for failing it while the newly revived ally gets smacked around trying to revive everyone else.

The lock-on system is the worst I’ve seen in any game, ever. Assuming you’re using a 360 controller, you press RB to lock onto an enemy and press the right stick left and right to scroll through targets. It sounds simple but the problem is that it’s so broken that it can genuinely be considered a boss. You can only vanish out of attacks that are coming from an enemy you’ve locked onto and you can also only revive allies that you’ve locked onto, but the lock-on will constantly switch between characters that are not a threat on the other side of the area instead of the one currently rearranging your face or the ally you’re desperately trying to revive. I’ve been KO’d while furiously flicking the stick back and forth trying to lock onto my intended target only for it to lock onto everyone else and I just run out of health before it finally works.

As for extras, the ungodly amount of DLC adds either useless fluff or essential build making items with no middle ground plus the limited time raids are unannounced outside the game and constantly announced in-game when one isn’t actually happening. Lastly, the milk delivery minigame is the most absurd, tedious, boring and nonsensically hard mission ever. I tried it twice and never will again. It needs to be seen to be believed but in a nutshell: You slowly skip from point A to point B on the map while carrying a milk crate and can time pressing a button with your foot hitting the ground to go faster. Mistimed a button press? You drop the milk. Start over. Walk over the curb at a weird angle? Start over. I've never been this bored in a Dragon Ball game before. You also look really stupid while skipping.

There are parts of this game I do like. It allows me to go nuts with a custom character in the Dragon Ball universe and it’s a lot of fun at times. But the hoops you have to jump through to get to the fun mostly through skill farming, the unintuitive crafting system for the QQ Bang equipment that will glue your build together plus obscenely difficult/tedious missions and a collection of smaller things that should have been fixed long ago or in this very game, to things that can only be there to waste the player’s time or sanity that you have to endure means that you’re seriously going to be working hard to earn your fun. This game has its good moments for sure, but they are massively overshadowed by the irredeemably objectively terrible design decisions.

Thanks, Kinguin!

This is easily one of the best free to play games available on Steam.

If you like RPGs in the same vein as Diablo, you will absolutely adore this. The developers have been consistently supporting the game for six years now since its release, adding an absolutely incomprehensible amount of new content to it over time and the enormous amount of build variety available to the player will keep anybody who likes this kind of game coming back for hundreds of hours.

While there are microtransactions, they are either cosmetic swaps/additions to equipment on your character or so expensive that they are for the seriously dedicated fan, some of them allowing you to buy actual Path of Exile branded clothing. The only microtransaction that impacts gameplay in any way increases the number of your account's stash tabs. The more stash tabs you have, the more items you can store and four is the default amount which is more than enough to get you started.

Additionally, take note that the game cannot be played without a constant active internet connection so if yours is slow or spotty, you will run into problems... *cries in Australian internet*

Me: "Why do my arms hurt?"
Beat Saber: "You've never used them before."

This is the only program that I've managed to successfully watch IT: Float with from my hard drive. If programs like Virtual Desktop and Whirligig aren't working for you, try this instead.

You'll float, too.

- I'm the Defuser and my friend is the Expert.
- We have 45 seconds left with one strike already.
- I forget where the strike was from.
- We also took forever to get through the first module, can't remember why.
- Finished two out of the four modules and had two complicated wire modules left to go.
- They are next to each other on the bomb.
- I had cut one of the wires on each of them already, so we had ten more wires left to go through, one by one.
- Was told "Do not cut the wire" for white wires with the LED on.
- Alrighty then.
- 30 seconds left.
- Yeah, I'm not very fond of our chances.
- Me: "Blue and red wire, no star, no LED."
- Time passes.
- Too much time.
- Friend: "Is the last digit of the serial number even?"
- Me: "No."
- Friend: "Don't cut it."
- I look at the timer.
- 12 seconds left.
- We're not going to make it.
- Me: "Alright, screw it, I'm going to cut them randomly."
- *snip*
- *snip*
- *snip* Amazingly, no more stri--
- *cuts blue wire with a star*
- BEEP!
- Oh no.
- Second strike.
- One more mistake and I'll need to be hosed off of the walls.
- Could inflate a car tyre with my heartbeat at this point.
- Five seconds left.
- *snip* Oh God.
- *snip* OH GOD.
- *snip* HOW AM I STILL ALIVE.
- I quickly glance at the countdown timer.
- Two seconds left.
- ...
- *snip*
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=735704048
10/10

This review will focus purely on the single player campaign, ignoring multiplayer and SnapMap completely.

(For those who enjoy drinking games, take a drink every time you read the word "upgrade" or a variant of it in this review.)

This is genuinely one of the best first person shooters I have played in a long time.

I had previously only finished Doom 3 along with Resurrection of Evil and was very curious to see what DOOM would bring to the table. It turns out that not only does it bring a lot more than I could have ever been prepared for, but it gleefully cut it all up with a chainsaw which then erupted into a glorious volcano of blood and gibs... and it was spectacular. If you have seen the trailers for the game, then they don't do a justice to the full game in the slightest.

Gameplay is more fast-paced and hectic than you might be expecting it to be. It's closer to the original Doom, or for a more modern comparison, Painkiller and Serious Sam than it is with Doom 3. Most of your time shooting things will generally be spent in a large room fighting a multitide of enemies all at once, slowly thinning the herd and then focusing on the big guys once all of the other squishier demons are dead. Against weakened enemies, you can also perform what the game calls a Glory Kill, a short animation in which you messily execute the unfortunate demon and whatever you kill this way tends to spit out a bit more health than they otherwise would.

The single player storyline focuses around-- just kidding. This is Doom and you're here to shoot things, am I right? The game handily provides that in spades with its weapon selection. All of the standard weapons sans the Pistol and Super Shotgun and of course not including the unique Chainsaw and the BFG can have two upgrade paths on them unlocked, each. Once these paths are unlocked, you can swap between each of them at the tap of a key if you have both of them and you will use weapon upgrade tokens to upgrade an aspect of that weapon upgrade path that cost more and more as you continue to upgrade that path.

Once you have finished upgrading a weapon path with tokens, you will unlock a mastery challenge which involves killing things using that weapon upgrade, such as the Heavy Assault Rifle's Tactical Scope requiring 50 headshot kills while zoomed in. After completing that, you are awarded the mastery upgrade immediately at no cost of tokens.

You may also upgrade your maximum health, armour and ammo capacity and if that wasn't enough upgrading for you, there are runes that you can earn through short Rune Trials that allow you to shape the gameplay to your playstyle. If you enjoy the Glory Kill execution animations, you can grab runes that boost enemy damage resistance while demons are staggered allowing easier Glory Kills, make demons drop ammo when you Glory Kill them and allow you to perform Glory Kills from farther away. Those who prefer being mobile may want to run with runes that allow full air control after jumping, increase your movement speed after a Glory Kill and perform Glory Kills faster. I tend to enjoy being as powerful as I can possibly get in most games like this that I play, so I upgraded the Mobile Turret on the Chaingun and my rune setup gives me unlimited ammo for all standard weapons if my current armour is high enough, makes demons drop armour when I Glory Kill them and boost enemy damage resistance while staggered so I can pretty much hop around every single room peppering it with bullets and since almost everything will get staggered by the hail of bullets I'm raining down on them, I can perform a Glory Kill on everything and continue being unstoppable. Each rune is also upgradable by performing a specific action a number of times and it will either increase its potency or add another unique effect that synergizes with its existing effect.

The Chainsaw is no longer a case of "hold down button, receive intestines", it now runs on fuel that is only consumed when the chainsaw is actually used on an enemy. The most basic cannon fodder requires only one unit, but the bigger, beefier demons can take up to five units of fuel and if you’re not upgrading ammo, you will only have three maximum units of fuel. The trade-off for this is that killing any enemy with the chainsaw will make them spew a geyser of ammo for you to pick up, which is a good way to keep you going if you’re running low.

Secrets are also very well handled in this game, too. Any classic map areas and everything you can collect in any level will all appear on your AutoMap as soon as you get close enough, if you have the suit upgrade that reveals all of their locations, but not the map itself or if you download the entire AutoMap from a terminal available in each level and it's more of a matter of figuring out how to get to it. Sometimes you will be teased by being able to see a secret or a collectable on your map, but have no way to get to it right away. It's more of a case of figuring out how to get to the secrets as opposed to having to look absolutely everywhere and hope you run into it, which is great because it doesn't waste too much of your time. It's not often a scavenger hunt, it’s mostly a case of "I know where that thing is, but how do I get to it?"

Now, the bad news. The game has an annoying habit of locking you out of areas after passing a non-obvious point of no return and then immediately slapping you with a checkpoint, forcing you to restart the entire level or come back again later if you want to grab something that you missed or chose to look for a path to later. The early levels are quite happy for you to backtrack and explore the whole level but later on, pushing too far forwards will get you locked out from it and the lockout happens fairly often in the later levels. There are also no manual saves or quicksaves, you've got checkpoints and only checkpoints to work with.

The game also introduces optional challenges to you quite early on and a couple of them are a little bit tricky to do. There is a few in particular where you have to perform a specific Glory Kill animation on a certain enemy and it only counts if you're aiming at something like the right leg or the lower left leg when you perform the Glory Kill, depending on the challenge itself. These can be tricky because you might be aiming at the leg, but the game will think that you’re aiming at the body or the arm because the hitbox for that happens to be in the way according to the hitbox, but not the texture. This is relatively minor, likely only requiring the player to get used to and all of the other challenges are completely straightforward by comparison.

Finally, the bosses that you fight in the game are a little disappointing. While they are very cool in terms of aesthetic design and their entrances, they lean towards bullet sponge territory and are a little bit artificially difficult. You will also fight the first one twice back to back and once you kill the second boss for the first time, two more of that boss are thrown at you. They're not bad by any means, but not perfect.

As of this review, my playtime only sits at about 14 hours, but I absolutely intend to spend as much time as is necessary to 100% every stage and get every achievement from this game because I had an absolute blast during the campaign. I highly recommended DOOM for anybody who enjoys first person shooters and upgrading things.

Are you still playing the drinking game? If so, UPGRADE UPGRADE UPGRADE UPGRADE UPGRADE UPGRADE UPGRADE.

Foreword: There will be marked spoilers ahead.

This game is terrible.

I was hoping that after five games, we would be receiving an omnipotent super-game that would easily blow every Souls game before it out of the water with the amalgamation of all of them melded into one perfectly constructed gift from the heavens. What we received was a scrunched up ball of blatant, shameless pandering to the fanbase coupled with the cheapest enemies that the franchise has ever seen, bosses that have zero creativity, a recycling of its own areas and basic enemies that are capable of annihilating you even if you’re overprepared thanks to their zero wind-up attacks, unlimited stamina and absurdly high damage.

I'm going to quickly cover the very few good points that this game has before I tear it apart. To begin with, the Focus Points system, mechanically identical to an MP bar which hasn't been used in the series since Demon’s Souls, is no longer completely useless for melee characters thanks to the new Skills system. These Skills consume your FP to use some kind of special ability. As an example, the Club gets one that grants it a damage boost and the Longsword gets a sideways slash that bats away shields. Focus Points can also be replenished using the Ashen Estus Flask which upgrades alongside your regular Estus Flask and you may divide the maximum charges between them at the blacksmith. It’s a clever mechanic that allows melee-only characters to take advantage of their formerly useless MP bar.

NPC questlines are worth seeing at least once, in my opinion. A handful of them will even move around the game world instead of all just ending up in one spot without some kind of conclusion to their own personal journeys, a common complaint about Dark Souls 2.

Lastly, after four whole games, they finally implemented a way to hand over multiple covenant items at once. Hallelujah. You can also now swap your devotion between each covenant through your inventory.

Unfortunately, that’s about it for the good stuff. It’s actually quite an outstanding game in the first few hours, but it begins to fall apart very early, at Road of Sacrifices.

As soon as you enter this area, you are greeted by a large swamp littered with enemies and some areas of this swamp slow you to a crawl. This is nothing we’re not used to, but this doesn't mean it was a good idea in the previous games, either.

Even knowing that traversing the swamp is much faster if I equip a weapon that has the Quickstep skill and use that to speed through the parts of the swamp that I'm otherwise forced to slowly walk or fat roll through, this doesn't change the fact that there are enemies everywhere that can all move at normal speed, so the end result is a desperate slow walk to dry land so you can hope to kill the horde that will have followed you. Also, if you’re playing online, you'll have the Watchdogs of Farron player invaders akin to the Forest Hunters in Dark Souls to worry about, as well.

Once you’re past all of that for the first time, you get to do it again in Farron Keep. The swamp slowing your movement speed was tolerable, but the fun drops way down into the negative numbers when the swamp is about three times larger, poisonous, you’re forced to locate three shrines and extinguish the fires on each of them and the new enemies here get a weapon that launches about twelve homing projectiles at you. This is about the point where I started eating my controller, the taste of which wasn’t improved when I found out that there was no Rusted Iron Ring.

This was not made any better after I hit Irithyll Dungeon, at which point I was introduced to the worst enemy in Souls and possibly video game history: the Jailer. This enemy has the ability to drain your maximum health all the way down to 1HP if you’re standing near him and he has a soldering iron that he will instantly poke you with to ruin your movement speed thanks to a debuff, then quickly perform a grab attack that WILL strip about 1,500 health off of you. There are also eight of them patrolling around a room near the end of the level. This entire area infuriated me so much that I defied my own usual rules with these kinds of games and rushed the rest of the game because I just wanted it to be over.

There are also the dogs in this game, which WILL kill you repeatedly because there’s no defending against them. Try to swing and they'll read your inputs and dodge away, try to block and they'll bounce too far off your shield for you to hit them, try to run away and they'll nibble on your ankle the moment you slow down to heal. If there are two of them on you, you might as well put your controller down because you won’t win. Swinging blindly hoping that you'll tag them is seriously your best bet.

Most of the bosses, final boss included, are more of a spectacle or something for fans to beat themselves off with using the game’s lore that was hastily stapled onto it for fan service than a genuine challenge on a level playing field. Once I was finally able to kill most of them, my initial reaction was a sigh of relief at the fact that I didn't have to slog through it again rather than what should have been a respectful salute to the worthy adversary that I’d just defeated. For the most part, they’re predictable like clockwork, stunlock-happy and deal way too much damage.

Fanbase pandering is absolutely everywhere in this game and it’s worse than it’s ever been. I can’t possibly go over them all with the 8,000 character limit, but as a few examples: When you first run into this game’s hub world, Andre makes his return from Dark Souls as your blacksmith. There’s no reason for this, he’s just there. Later in the game, you will return to a frozen version of Anor Londo and there are chests dotted around the area that contain equipment that’s all ripped right from Dark Souls. They’re not even boss soul items or picked up through a questline or anything, they’re just in chests for you to find.

In closing: This game is actually so bad that after I finished it for the first time, not only did I fully reverse my initial idea that my first playthrough of Dark Souls 3 was simply the exploratory phase and I don’t yet have the first hand experience or knowledge to consistently overcome it, but I revised my initial thoughts on whether I was actually having fun with all of these games, or simply tolerating them so I could squeeze whatever little bits of enjoyment that I could get out of them. If there’s some aspect of this game that I'm simply not seeing that pushes it to the glowing 9/10 scores that everybody else are giving it, then that’s great. I would love to be proven wrong and actually begin to enjoy it again.

This review was written before any of the DLC came out, so if the Rusted Iron Ring makes a return and updates make it so the enemies that don’t have wind-up on their attacks are given some, the enemies that can attack you relentlessly are given a limit on their stamina and the damage you receive is toned down to more reasonable levels, then that would fix every major problem that I have with this game and I would happily change this to a recommendation. Until then, avoid this game.

DLC UPDATE:
Both DLCs consist almost entirely of enemies and bosses that have their stats bumped up to absurd levels, bosses that are either endurance tests or ganks, the latter of which is including one that calls back to the much better-executed Old Monk from Demon's Souls, one more recycled Patches questline and the best reason there is to go through any of it is to play around with the new and almost entirely useless flashy weapons and spells, then get bored after a few minutes. If DS3 is anything less than your favourite game ever, don't buy them.

It’s quite safe to say that Dark Souls 2 is one of the more polarizing games in the franchise. Back when it first came out, people flung their poo at it and called it a disappointment compared to the previous game and while most people now still do, I have to admit that I was among them at first. I thought that Dark Souls 2 had tried too hard to copy its predecessor, resulting in a fanservice-riddled mess of a game that couldn’t decide whether or not it wanted to be a worthwhile addition to the franchise or a shameless rehash of what we’ve already been through. Thankfully, Dark Souls 2 is mostly the former.

Bad news first: This game is indeed sprinkled with shameless fanservice. As an example, you will run into Ornstein as an early boss with no real justification as to why he’s there and you’ll get the same weapon from his soul that you did from the last game. There’s also the Great Lightning Spear miracle which directly references the “grossly incandescent” line that the internet loves so much in its description.

The worst part about this game is probably how it, like every other game in the franchise, gets off on killing you as much as possible. There will be a number of occasions where you’ll run into another bonfire not far away from a boss, but there is still a gauntlet of enemies you’ll need to get through in order to actually reach the boss which will likely cost you some healing items and durability on your equipment.

Speaking of durability, all of your weapons seem to be made out of butter in this game. Standard weapons like the Broadsword might last you through an area or two, whereas the more fragile weapons like the Malformed Skull won’t even last you through a single boss fight. There was also a bug that originated in the PC version where your hitboxes were tied to your framerate, and the PC versions had a framerate of 60 over the 360/PS3’s 30, so every weapon you swung broke twice as fast. This was fixed after the Scholar of the First Sin remake came out... eleven months after the PC version was released.

Design in general is lacking. Enemies don’t have as much variation as they did in the previous game. A fair few of them are humans with regular weapons and some of them are humans with variations on what weapons and armour they have and in varying sizes. Bosses are also mostly large armoured humanoids with greatswords and don’t show much variance there and if we’re including DLC, then in Crown of the Old Iron King, you’ll run into a reskinned Smelter Demon that now creates an AoE explosion when it powers up its core and can now slow down its attack animations to throw off your roll timing. There’s also the Crown of the Ivory King DLC where you’ll run into one new boss, then later on you’ll encounter the same boss again, but you’ll have to fight two of them at once and they have a fun new self-buff ability when one of them dies. They’re accessed through what has to be the most tedious area in the whole game and possibly video gaming history, the Frigid Outskirts. It takes at least five minutes to rush through the area and you’ll have horses shooting lightning up your rear end the whole time. There’s no bonfire any closer to the boss fog, either.

There are also a few strange design decisions thrown in, such as a weird, pulsating bloodstain overlay texture appearing on your screen during every pre-boss fight cutscene. There’s no good reason to include this. I can see the giant armoured humanoid with a greatsword in the cutscene, thank you. It’s an eyesore and adds nothing positive to the game and if there were no fog walls mid-stage, there would be absolutely no possible reason to include this.

Now, the good news. There are a handful of good game design decisions that make Dark Souls 2 a more player-friendly experience. For starters, you no longer have to venture into the seventh circle of Hell to get to a blacksmith just to ascend one weapon to Fire or something, then upgrade the next four levels later on at a bonfire but only if you have a certain key item like you had to in the previous game. As soon as you find the Dull Ember, you take it to one single blacksmith and he will handle every single one of your weapon’s infusions. He can also upgrade your items just the same as the one in Majula can. You can also swap between weapon infusions and your weapon will retain its upgrade level, instead of having to downgrade your weapon to its +10 standard upgrade path then infuse it into its new upgrade path and wasting all of those upgrade items.

For those who find the game too hard, you have the option of using a Ring of Life Protection to prevent yourself from losing your humanity and your souls at the cost of the ring breaking. Unlike the Ring of Sacrifice in Dark Souls 1 and 3 which disappear after use, these rings can be repaired for a few thousand souls each and are very useful for those who either wish to make the PvE easier, or hosts of PvP worlds who do not wish to use their more valuable human effigies should they die. Conversely, there’s the Company of Champions covenant which you can join if you feel like the game is too easy. Joining this covenant will disable your ability to summon phantoms into your world for co-op, make enemies dish out and take more damage and your reward for this is the occasional Awestone drop, which can be traded for a few unique rewards, including a ring which increases your bare fist damage by a lot, making it a very feasible weapon for the whole game. There is also no penalty for abandoning any of the covenants.

For those who prefer to play their games in co-op, you’ll be pleased to know that this is easily the best implementation of it that the series has ever had. In the previous two games, you had no direct method of control for who saw your summon sign. Here, a new item called the Name-engraved Ring allows you to pick between ten different gods to favour, then while the ring is on, only people who have also picked that same god can see your summon sign and receive yours. I live in Australia and I have been able to connect to people who live in the US and Canada and it's never taken longer than twenty seconds, compared to Dark Souls which has taken half an hour and Bloodborne, where a connection couldn't be established after a full hour.

While this one may be subjective, I feel that it’s worth mentioning that there is also a noticeable degree of absurdity in this game that sits quite well with me. If I can find a weapon in the game that’s both practical and aesthetically pleasing, I’ll use it. There’s the top half of a dragon’s skull, a giant melted lump of iron and a straight up beam sword that all have their uses depending on what you want to build, plus they’re fun to use, very creatively designed and balanced well.

While the Souls games have been generally renowned for their ability to be the video gaming equivalent of throwing cupcakes at a wall to knock it over until you eventually do which people seem to perceive as “difficult, but fair”, Dark Souls 2 does have enough good points to contrast against its flaws to the point that it gets a content single thumb up from me, rather than two enthusiastic thumbs up. There are still problems with it, but it’s absolutely serviceable as a video game and while I wouldn’t recommend picking it up at full price, waiting for a decent sale will at least soften the blow if you find it disappointing at all. It may leave a bad taste in your mouth at first with its shoddy art and enemy design, but it’s worth trudging through in the end for the gameplay, weapons and even co-op.