If you have never experienced the increase of a difficulty curve in a videogame before, and want to; look no further. Dark Souls is the perfect example of fun, immersion, depth and mind numbing rage.

Previously in Demon’s Souls you did a quick tutorial level, where the boss was intended to kill you, if you pulled off the next to impossible feat and slew him, you would be firmly punched in the face by one of the games later bosses and begin the game proper in The Nexus. The hub of everything and only bastion of safety from enemies and players seeking to kill you. Levels where separated and disconnected and unlocked checkpoints for every boss you managed to kill.

Dark Souls is fully interconnected, within the space of one giant city, Lordran. Your bastion of safety is the heat of a bonfire flame, to where you are the closet you will ever feel to 'safe'. If you venture beyond the safety of these scattered bonfires you will fight through undead armies, creatures of the deep, apparitions, to mythological creatures. And that’s not even including the bosses.

Demon’s Souls was a pretty big game, but it mainly depended on you farming the levels repeatedly for more souls, the games universal currency and experience points. Each stage of the way in Dark Souls seamless world you will be put to a challenge you must overcome. While the new players will die repeatedly, veterans of the previous game will find that it is nothing they cannot handle... to begin with.

Dark Souls unlike its predecessor, eases the player in where death is guaranteed on a repeated basis. But herein lays the thrill of a Soul’s games. Most games appeal to the audience to give them a crescendo with a boss fight. In Dark Souls the boss fight is something intended to batter you to your knees until you learn the proper way to defeat it, to which you then feel a massive amount of elation and achievement.

Dying is the most frustrating part, not because it was cheap, or because you where no way near something. If you die, it is not only completely your own fault, it is in aid of learning something new, or causes you to change up your tactics and become a better player. Death teaches you so many things in Dark Souls, be it the location of a trap if you managed to die by it or fall in it, potential ambushes, to in rare cases where you need to go next.

As a single player experience Dark Souls is one of the most brutal, unforgiving action RPG’s you can play today. While you can never exactly feel god like in the game, you will feel like a battle hardened warrior, priest, mage or whatever you make your own class to be.

Dark Souls took the immersion from the previous game, stuck you in it permanently and then quadrupled it in size and scope. When it comes to design it trumps its predecessor better than I could ever of hoped, the vistas are amazing, the world is connected just as good if not better than a Castlevania game, it is a marvel.

So what are its problems? Well just like before even if it is early days yet, the co-op has to be the biggest failure of this game. I know people who specifically bought this to play with friends only to find out that the game purposely blocks such interactions in every way possible. For me I got through the entire game by some fashion completely solo and only saw three summoning signs that weren’t AI companions you can unlock via the games covenant system.

At least in Demon's Souls you could at least work out a way to summon a friend or regular player without much fuss, and made the game infinitely more enjoyable and last much longer than it may have lasted as a completely solo experience.

So disjointed is the co-op system it seems that even the other aspect of the souls franchise, that it was made infamous for, the black phantom break-in’s fail to work a majority of the time. The connection errors on top of a limited co-op, causes the game to drop in overall difficulty by no one other than the occasional easy to kill AI phantom’s that have been added to break in once every blue moon.

Death is also no longer a penalty gone is the half-health for being dead negating the necessity to even become a human again. The only way your health drops to half is if you suffer the new status effect ‘curse’ which can remain a permanent side effect unless you have the purging stone to correct it, or see someone capable of breaking it.

If it wasn’t for the fact the first half of the game is a challenging walkthrough, any genuine attempt at determination and persistence can breakthrough, I doubt it would be as addictive as it is. The latter half of the game though soon cranks up to the difficulty demon’s souls players would expect from the game, until the last few stages where the game gets stupidly tough, to the point I believe regular players will never so much as finish regular New Game difficulty, let alone the NG+’s beyond a single completion.

The game quite literally takes you through its own versions of heaven and hell, and by the time you’ve possibly finished one run-through you will feel like you have been dragged through it yourself.

Dark Souls would have been the perfect game of this generation if its co-op wasn’t purposefully flawed. It refuses to hold your hand the same way ascending a mountain refuses to hold your hand, because eventually you will experience the vertical climb and the occasional overhang if you ever want to progress up the ladder on this beast of a game. Just don’t ever hope to get any help from your friends... as it won’t let you.

+ Perfect game for anyone who considers themselves a ‘hardcore gamer’.
+ A seamlessly woven world with both beautiful and disturbing scenery.
+ If you ever imagined a 3D third person Diablo game, this is as close as you will get.

- Co-op bans you from playing with people you want to co-operate with
- Connection errors if you ever try to get a game/invade a game
- Later stages will cause regular gamers to quit playing

8/10