Once it sinks its claws in, you'll find it nigh on impossible to escape until the Kingdom of Boletaria is free from the horror of The Old One. In short then – Demon's Souls is a modern classic.
The word of mouth on this game is going to be great, unless your friends only play WiiFit. Demon’s Souls is what an 8-Bit game would play like if it were popped open and dumped out in your lap. Gorgeous, thoughtful, and complete unto itself, it’s the second-best title I’ve played this year. Maybe even better.
Demon's Souls asks much of you. For some it may ask too much, but, if you are prepared to rise to the challenges it presents you will be rewarded with one of the most satisfying gaming experiences of this generation.
It's stoic, uncompromising, difficult to get to know, but also deep, intriguingly disturbed and perversely rewarding. You can learn to love Demon's Souls like few other games in the world. But only if you're prepared to give yourself over to it. [JPN Import]
The enemy design is, simply put, wonderful, and so many different elements of Demon's Souls call out to me, demanding love and affection. Sadly, I cannot return its calls. It just goes so far out of its way to be difficult that it misses some key, important elements that would have made it a vastly better game.
As far as the 'SoulsBorne' franchise goes, their first entry, debuting exclusively on the PS3, is a strong game for its time
It has enough difficulty to be hard, but has too much quality to rage quit.
Although, there were bound to be annoying areas and weird bugs. As they were trying something different, AND this is from before 2010.
But as far as the technology and gameplay goes, this game is good.
Demon's Souls bounces between being great and being poor constantly. Some of the settings in the game are absolutely gorgeous. Others, while neat, fall quite short. Enemies are only dangerous in numbers, except for the spear wielding red eye knights (which I soon found myself avoiding as much as possible). Boss designs range from sub-par to interesting; most boss fights are supremely boring.
Combat feels fast paced yet sluggish. Hitboxes decide to show up for work only when its in your deficit-- but then again that's a core part of Souls games.
Fun, but flawed
Demon's Souls was horribly out of date on launch. The artificial difficulty from poor controls and no save points made the game pointless. The atmosphere, music, and character creation were good enough to get the game a sequel. The meat of the game is unplayable and only those who enjoy finagling the glitchy gameplay stay with it. It reminds me of Shinobi, but there isn't much action going on. It is not like this is DMC3. Its slow, boring, and uncontrollable. It's a super bad game that had cool atmosphere. Its NOT a hidden gem or a good game.
I have flip-flopped on my feelings toward this game a few times, but after giving it plenty of thought over the years, I think I have decided that the "Souls" series it quite overrated. In the end it just comes down to gameplay for me. I appreciate the difficulty in this series of games, but the gameplay is just too shallow. There's not enough variety, strategy and depth to the gameplay for it to be compelling. It's basically just "kill all the bad guys." Sure, you can kill them in different ways by choosing different weapons and spells, but after a while you realize that you're just shooting and slashing at enemies and it gets pretty repetitive. I wasn't all that frustrated with the difficulty - like I said, I enjoyed the **** gameplay was just boring. Plain and simple. There isn't enough variety to how you can approach the game, and not much AI to speak of (no stealth options or strategy to vary the experience), so the gameplay is really nothing more than "wander around the world and hack at enemies or run away from them." Basically just a glorified "hack-n-slash" with a lot of weapons to choose from. Meh.
SummaryDemon's Souls promises to be the hardcore action RPG experience PS3 owners have been waiting for since the platform's launch. Revolutionary online features support your adventure like never before, presenting seamless interconnectivity that serves in every instance to enhance the single-player game. Team up with two other players in simu...