Definitely one of the best games I've played in recent years, but since there are already thousands of reviews singing the game's praises, I'll focus on the shortcomings instead.

- The difficulty is all over the place. I realize it's hard to balance an open world game, but this is the first Souls game where you can walk into a boss room and 3 shot the boss in 3 seconds. Many non-story bosses just seem way undertuned.
- Weapon upgrade materials are too limited, you have to focus on 2-3 weapons until the end game when you can finally buy as many as you'd like. Regular upgrade path going all the way to +25 requiring 97 (!) stones total is just way too tedious. Given that the game is 100+ hours long, not being able to freely switch weapons until the end game is just too odd of a design choice, it discourages experimentation.
- You will have to wiki the NPC quests because it's an open world game with no quest log and the NPCs can move literally anywhere in the world, and there are often 0 clues for the next step of their quest line (e.g. Diallos moving to Jarburg).
- Everywhere but the tiny hub is a warzone. Some traditional RPG towns would have helped a lot, like e.g. the capital city in Dragon's Dogma.
- Some weapon classes like the great hammers have been nerfed since Dark Souls 3 and are rather underwhelming compared to other weapons.
- Rats and dogs have been buffed up massively, in both damage and poise. You can no longer poise through their bites with a greatsword.
- Too many hard enemies boil down to "flails randomly with infinite poise". How do we make our famous series harder? Just make the enemy a walking hitbox. Yeah, fun.

PC port:

- CPU optimization. The game tends to put too much load on the first CPU thread instead of distributing the workload evenly, resulting in a very CPU heavy game. Particle effects in particular can be very CPU intensive. You need a good recent CPU to run this game comfortably, and it'll still drop frames in a few specific scenes (e.g. the Walking Mausoleum in Consecrated Snowfields).
- Crashing. The game does occasionally crash and sometimes even lock up, especially when quitting back to title and reloading a save, possibly due to a memory leak. In some rare cases the crashes can also corrupt your saves, so make sure to make manual save backups just to be safe.
- 60 fps lock, no ultrawide support. The engine does support these things, and there are mods that unlock both, so it seems like these features were intentionally locked to maintain parity with consoles. E.g. the game actually supports ultrawide perfectly, HOR+, no UI stretching, but then it ADDS BLACK BARS on top of it, just to spite you, seemingly. People know this because the black bars are buggy and sometimes do not load, letting you play in actual ultrawide for a bit.
- No DLSS, FSR or any other upscaling support. Again, available through mods, but you'll be forced to play offline because of the anti-cheat. And it's a shame because the raytracing mode that was added in a patch is basically unusable without DLSS unless you have a top end GPU.

Definitely one of the best games I've played in recent years, but since there are already thousands of reviews singing the game's praises, I'll focus on the shortcomings instead. - The difficulty is all over the place. I realize it's hard to balance an open world game, but this is the first Souls game where you can walk into a boss room and 3 shot the boss in 3 seconds. Many non-story bosses just seem way undertuned. - Weapon upgrade materials are too limited, you have to focus on 2-3 weapons until the end game when you can finally buy as many as you'd like. Regular upgrade path going all the way to +25 requiring 97 (!) stones total is just way too tedious. Given that the game is 100+ hours long, not being able to freely switch weapons until the end game is just too odd of a design choice, it discourages experimentation. - You will have to wiki the NPC quests because it's an open world game with no quest log and the NPCs can move literally anywhere in the world, and there are often 0 clues for the next step of their quest line (e.g. Diallos [spoiler]moving to Jarburg[/spoiler]). - Everywhere but the tiny hub is a warzone. Some traditional RPG towns would have helped a lot, like e.g. the capital city in Dragon's Dogma. - Some weapon classes like the great hammers have been nerfed since Dark Souls 3 and are rather underwhelming compared to other weapons. - Rats and dogs have been buffed up massively, in both damage and poise. You can no longer poise through their bites with a greatsword. - Too many hard enemies boil down to "flails randomly with infinite poise". How do we make our famous series harder? Just make the enemy a walking hitbox. Yeah, fun. PC port: - CPU optimization. The game tends to put too much load on the first CPU thread instead of distributing the workload evenly, resulting in a very CPU heavy game. Particle effects in particular can be very CPU intensive. You need a good recent CPU to run this game comfortably, and it'll still drop frames in a few specific scenes (e.g. the Walking Mausoleum in Consecrated Snowfields). - Crashing. The game does occasionally crash and sometimes even lock up, especially when quitting back to title and reloading a save, possibly due to a memory leak. In some rare cases the crashes can also corrupt your saves, so make sure to make manual save backups just to be safe. - 60 fps lock, no ultrawide support. The engine does support these things, and there are mods that unlock both, so it seems like these features were intentionally locked to maintain parity with consoles. E.g. the game actually supports ultrawide perfectly, HOR+, no UI stretching, but then it ADDS BLACK BARS on top of it, just to spite you, seemingly. People know this because the black bars are buggy and sometimes do not load, letting you play in actual ultrawide for a bit. - No DLSS, FSR or any other upscaling support. Again, available through mods, but you'll be forced to play offline because of the anti-cheat. And it's a shame because the raytracing mode that was added in a patch is basically unusable without DLSS unless you have a top end GPU.