Dark Souls invites you to travel through a extremely hostile world full of challenges and foes.Prepare to Die.

User Rating: 10 | Dark Souls PS3

When Demon's Souls was released by the end of 2009 a lot of people complained about it's difficulty but Dark Souls, a spiritual successor to the game, manages to be even harder and improve in many areas over it's predecessor.

Created by From Software, the same creators of the Armored Core and 3D Dot Game Hero series, in Dark Souls you play the role of a undead hero whose main mission is to explore this unfriendly, oppressive and yet beautiful world.

For many reasons, like the possibility to alienate the casual consumer, game companies do not make difficult games anymore so the games from the present generation are very easy and forgiven but From Software proved again that the company is not afraid to release a game that challenges it's audience skills in order to keep the game immersive as it should be. Of course this bold move has a price and the difficult will make a lot of people to give up before the end because of the frustration of not been able to master the game.

The game will crush you in many different forms and you will die a lot, but rest assured that every time that you died it was due to your own lack of skill, attention or knowledge and not because the game is cheap or because the AI is cheating.

The game's mechanics are very simple but also very precise and tight too. Your actions will resume in basically dodge, kick, jump attack, parry, defend, attack, hard attack, magic and back stab but if you want to succeed and triumph over the game you will have to strategize and precisely measure your timing before taking any actions and this takes a fairly amount of skills.

The difficult is not restricted by the foes or tricky dungeons. Dark Soul is not a game that will take you by the hand and teach you step by step most of it's concepts and mechanics like humanities, items, monsters or online interaction are not explained through a tutorial, the game will make you think for yourself until you figure out by either reading the item description or by learning through experience and death.

The online interaction is a lot of fun both cooperative and competitive but it could be better. I really feel that should be a better and easier way to connect to your friends than the soulsign or invading items.

The game has some technical issues like texture problems and frame rate drop but those were so small and happened so few times that it doesn't really affect flow of such a big game.

Dark Souls is not a perfect game it have some flaws like the already above mentioned technical issues and the online interaction that could be improved but the game still manages to be incredibly good and it is also not afraid to be different from the others and it's difficulty level will reward you with an achievement sensation like no other game. With that sensation combined with tight mechanic and amazing world FROM SOFTWARE managed to deliver one of the most immersive games of all time.

As closing comment is very important to note that From Software has showed to be a very supportive studio releasing many patches to improve even further the game and the on-line experience.