Game link: http://www.darksoulsii.com/us/
Steam link http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/236430/( not release on PC yet but you could pre-ordered it )
As such, your first hours in Dark Souls II are about identifying, and adapting to, the subtle differences between it and its predecessor. Majula’s blacksmith, for instance, doesn’t carry an infinite number of the Titanite Shards you use to improve your gear. He has just ten, and upgrade materials remain scarce throughout the early part of the game. Indeed, most merchants’ stocks are limited; you’ll wish you could stock up on the Human Effigy – this game’s Humanity equivalent, which now not only lets you summon help for boss battles but also restores a health bar whose capacity depletes after every successive death – but you can’t.
The only item available in unlimited quantities from the outset is the Lifegem, a new healing item whose very existence caused concern among the Souls series’ rabidly passionate community. Given out like candy in prerelease demos and the network beta, it’s a rarer commodity in the final game: an uncommon drop and sold by merchants for 300 souls apiece. It’s an essential tool early on, given that at the outset your Estus Flask can be used only once.
That meagre limit can be raised by finding Estus Shards locked away in Drangleic’s darkest corners, but our flask was good for just eight swigs by the end of the game, compared to the first game’s 15. Healing options aren’t just well balanced in terms of supply, but usage, too: Lifegems are quicker to use than your Estus, but they refill less of your health bar and take significantly longer to do so. It’s just one more thing to consider in a combat system that’s an endless procession of split-second life-or-death decisions and which often feels more RTS than RPG.
Little balancing acts exist elsewhere, thankfully. A chest in an early area holds a ring that reduces HP loss after death. At first, bosses drop generous amounts of souls, letting you level up and improve weapons and armour at a fair lick. In Dark Souls, only the forward roll had invincibility, but now the backward one does too. Unless our timing was flawless, there are even a few frames on the sideways version.
Most significantly of all, enemies eventually stop respawning. This serves two purposes: shutting down soul farming, and removing the frustration of making a mistake against a grunt you’ve already killed a dozen times on the well-travelled route from bonfire to boss. It’s one of the few helping hands FromSoftware offers, acknowledging that you’ve learned all you need to from that group of enemies, and getting them out of your way. It doesn’t make the game easier or less rewarding than its predecessor. After all, the elation at beating Ornstein and Smough had nothing to do with the times you slipped up against the Knights on the approach.
It does, however, undermine Drangleic’s sense of place. Lordran was a consistent, coherent space, its enemy placements forever fixed, its individual areas looping back on themselves and each other. We could guide you from the top of Anor Londo to the bottom of Tomb Of The Giants turn by turn, and tell you exactly what you’d face along the way. For all that you’ll welcome despawning enemies when struggling against a Drangleic boss, it’s a different matter when you return later on and find that a place that was once teeming with Undead is now a ghost town.
That doesn’t tell the whole story, either. Just as you’re starting to feel that the end is in sight, it transpires that FromSoftware has other ideas. The difficulty ratchets up yet another notch, the world design team sends you to greater heights and new depths, and you realise that the single greatest way in which Dark Souls II differs from its predecessor is that, rather than tailing off towards the end, it just keeps getting better. This late-game rug-pull pivots around a single moment in which not a sword is swung nor a word is spoken. It’s a remarkable scene that serves to remind you what FromSoftware does better than any studio in the world – finding beauty in the darkness and majesty in the grotesque.
The first playthrough is only the beginning, of course. Finish the final boss and you’re not immediately dropped into New Game Plus, but sent back to Majula, free to explore and mop up before starting your second journey. And when you do, FromSoftware gives you all of five seconds before bringing you back down to Earth with a bump. Let’s just say that a new game is about far more than bigger enemy health bars and higher damage output. Good luck – and try running away.
What, then, of the infamous claim that Dark Souls II would be more accessible? Well, friendlier bonfire placement helps and, after a couple of spikes, the difficulty curve is a good deal smoother early on. The ability to respec your build using a rare item will help those who unwittingly level themselves into a corner. Yet for all its little tweaks, Dark Souls II is, foremost, a game made for Souls players. It is a game that asks everything of you and gives so much back, keeping its cards close to its chest, and revealing them only to those prepared to die and die again. It is made to be played for hundreds, if not thousands, of hours as you try new builds, explore PVP and experiment with covenants, all the while slowly peeling back the layers of its lore. Some of its ideas work better than others, and Drangleic is no match for Lordran’s intricate design, but Dark Souls II is, like its predecessors, brilliant, beautiful, and absolutely essential.So i would like to give this game a score 8 out of 10. So what do you guys think, rush to the comment section now.
No comments:
Post a Comment