Rarely have gamers been given a chance to play such a niche title in this day and age where casual gaming is the norm and those who grew up playing video games where skill, dedication and no internet to search for cheats or walkthroughs were around to help could defeat the hardest games and say with pride I am the best. Now days you have to take every boast with a big grain of salt but pucker up girls and boys because even with helpful videos and walkthroughs this is a game which will punish the weak and leave many a gamer in tears.

Demon’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 simultaneous cooperative play, working together to topple some of the game’s colossal bosses, or force your way into the games of skilled players and challenge them to PvP battle. Leave hints and clues for those who will follow in your footsteps; either intentionally or through your own inadvertent demise, your bloodstains will allow your successors to view a replay of your death, hinting at how to avoid your gruesome fate.


Gameplay

Demon’s Souls is a heavy duty action game where you will use sword, magic or arrows against a wide variety of monsters in real time. Each kill brings with it a soul which you use as currency to buy weapons, repair armor and upgrade your equipment and your stats. This sounds fairly straight forward but where the game becomes difficult is during the game if and most certainly when you die you will lose those souls and start back at a nexus portal which is usually fairly far from where you died. You then have to return to where you died to reclaim those souls and continue but you must again fight your way through all of those monsters. Sounds like fun doesn’t it?! Well it is once you begin to make progress and figure your way to the next area and level up.

The gameplay side of Demon’s Souls is completely in real time, you will strike with your weapon or cast spells and block when you need. You can also pull off special block attacks for extra bonus damage but they are not as brutal as they could have been. Range weapons are helpful at pulling or attack long distance monsters but you must be ready to switch weapons, block or dodge when the enemies come in to attack you with their melee weapons or attack you with their ranged weapons.
The hard part and great part of Demon’s Souls is you are always fighting an uphill battle. There is always a harder boss or hard demon to kill; there is always a corpse of yours you must return to or some other obstacle which you must overcome. The game saves only at certain times, like when you zone back into the nexus area or defeat a demon boss.

Multiplayer is unique and an amazing experience in so many ways. First off you will see wandering ghosts that were actually other players who were playing their game. If you follow them or see where they came from you may see a secret or interesting area you may have missed. There is also graffiti on the ground, but this is not normal graffiti in fact these are messages left from other players that you can rate if they were accurate or helpful. Sometimes they are, but sometimes these are false and can lead you to your doom. The other nice multiplayer online aspect that you see a lot is blood stains which you can touch and see how other players died.

When you die and return to spirit form you can return to your solid form by become a Phantom or a Black Phantom. Phantoms are helpful because you enter another player’s world and help them defeat their current objective. Black Phantoms are nasty and evil and you will hunt down and kill the other player whose world you have invaded. Once you have completed your objective you will return to your solid state and your own world.

There are many different classes to play in the game each with a large variety of stats and starting weapons. Some just have good armor and weapons, others speed and range or magic and guile but in the end how you play the game and upgrade your character is up to you. What I do recommend is play a few different characters until you find the one you find easy to play with your style and do not quit. It took a few hours for me to get the game and once I did it became very rewarding but there will be those times when a giant slime kills you or a dragon slays you and you feel cheated. But do not despair because you can beat them and you will.


Graphics & Audio

Demon’s Souls is by far one of the better looking titles on the Playstation 3 right now and while the game might not look as good as a Killzone 2 or a Drakes Fortune 2 on a side by side comparison screen shot. But in action with a huge dragon or two hundred foot tall giant armored knight attacking you and everything that comes from their destructive attacks happening you will appreciate what FROM has created for the Playstation 3 hardcore gaming crowd.

Every weapon, armor, character, monster and area has a great look and feel to it. The entire game looks like it was designed by a Western developer who played a lot of Oblivion and Gothic who also wanted to add their own touch to it. This is certainly a feast for your eyes in every single way.


While some of the voice work in the game is annoying, the rest of it is rather well done and impressive on a scale we rarely see from a Japanese developer. Great sound effects and music top off the audio. Every sword strike, weapon clash, roar from a dragon and claw scratching across stone with ring in your ears as the amazing combat music plays with an exciting temp and beat.

Value

To put it simply the value of this game is extremely high, so high it is the kind of game I can see gamers playing for the next few years, hopefully until we see Demon’s Souls II. But the value of the game is only high for those gamers who are hardcore. Soft squishy gamers need not apply.

Bottom Line

If you are not a hardcore gamer or a gamer who can play your average action RPG on a difficulty above easy you probably will hate yourself for putting a single dollar out for this game. But if you are a gamer looking for a true challenge with plenty of extreme action, fun replay value, great multiplayer and a unique twist on everything then this is a game you must own.