Written by: PlayDevil.com Staff

 

 

 

Perhaps my disappointment in the short demo of "Dark Souls" is for the best. After all my expectations when I first played the PS3 exclusive Demon's Souls (one of my favourite games this generation), were low. Maybe my hopes needed to be tempered before the games launch this October. Yet I cant help but feel that some of the changes being made to the format will diminish this new title.

 

For those unfamiliar with Dark Souls precursor Demon’s Souls a brief overview may well be appreciated. It was a third person dungeon crawling action RPG, with slow punishing gameplay that required a lot of grinding. A dark oppressive medieval world created an atmosphere that really captured my imagination, creating helplessness that framed the rest of the game.

 

My misgivings from the half hour I spent with the Dark Souls were multifaceted. Attempting the short segment available twice with different preset characters I discovered the game almost entirely unchanged from Demon’s Souls. A familiar castle environment and enemies lifted straight from the original did little to set it apart. There was a slight feeling of warmth now however; a subtle change in colour palate, making the world initially seemed less hostile.

 

Even mechanically Dark Souls seemed to change nothing from its forbearer with the controls mapped identically, and menus even using the same icons. One alteration came in a sense that gameplay may have been slightly faster, but this could just have easily been down to my character in Demon’s Souls being constantly weighted down by armour.

 

Similarities I was almost prepared to forgive, in what was one of the most perversely original titles of recent times, I would happily have settled for more of the same in new environments. What troubled me more however were the changes. Tiny alterations have been made to a few of the games key structure, and in the brief time I was playing these seems to have upset the game’s delicate balance. Arch-stones, a mechanic that functioned as a warp point to the hub world, have been replaced by Campfire waypoints. In a world where progression is based on struggle the (seeming) inability to warp location seems like a miss-step that could leave you stranded between areas. I would have surrendered months earlier had Demon's Souls required me grind either forward or back along a single path.

 

Technical issues also abounded. Detritus from destroyed items often remained hovering in the air, while corpses seemed (bereft of the laws of gravity) could be shaken around like rag dolls. The other huge sticking point was the amount of slow down in the demo. Frequently the on screen action changed to a slide show as number of enemies placed too much of a strain on the system cutting the frame rate down to single digits. It happened in the first game also, but not as frequently as I witnessed in the short snippet on show.

 

In Dark Souls defence it still has time to be polished, and the promised greater range of enemies and environments may yet prove to offer the hook the demo is lacking. My worries stand regarding the new, purportedly, more linear format of play, with such a challenging difficulty the idea of being stuck in a location does not appeal. While my time with the demo has dampened my excitement, I still hold cautiously to the hope that From Software will be able to do it again with Dark Souls.

 

'Dark Souls' will be coming to PS3 and 360 this October.