Gadgetory

what's up guys Kevin here with TLD bringing you our view of Dark Souls for the Xbox 360 and ps3 now first foremost this game is hard really hard but in a good way one thing that anyone who's gonna play this game has to be ready for is that you are going to die and you're going to die along whether it's because you agro too many enemies and got overwhelmed or you underestimate an opponent or you exploring a new area and you hit a trap you didn't know about or you're just plain stupid and do something like it knocked off of a cliffside you're just going to die and you're gonna have to accept that fact when you play this game now the game does do a couple things to help alleviate the suffering for instance whenever you die if you can make it back to the point where you died you can reclaim all the souls you lost you're also able to use what are called bonfires that you can light and act as checkpoints so that it's not only gets sent back to the very beginning of an area or world like they did back in Demon Souls you're actually able have checkpoints where you can safely rest relax and even refill health potions now as far as character development goes players have a good deal of control over how their character grows you do make a starting choice of one of ten different classes but these are more like starting packages rather than restrictive long term class choices it's basically just what weapons of armor you start with as well as where your stat points are allocated as you keep playing the game all enemies you kill will drop souls which basically acts as the main currency for everything use it to increase your stats you use it to buy weapons and armor you use it to upgrade equipment you even used to learn spells it is how you do basically everything in the game so that's what you save up and that's why when you die you really want to get your body back because you don't want to lose any now players are able to switch out their equipment in all kinds of situations so you can wear lighter armor if you want to be able to move faster or dodge roll or heavy armor if you just need to be able to withstand strong attacks the only option you really have that's permanent is how you grow your stats each stat is useful and important in its own way so there's not really what you can really waste your points except if you don't really choose to focus on the right set of them for instance strength and dexterity are both used for different weapons so you really have to focus on one of the other focusing on both can kind of just end up making you not as good with either group of weapons really when it comes down to it the most important part of how you develop a character is your ability to adapt and that's really much more about what equipment and spells you bring along entire stages or boss fights can be very very different in terms of difficulty depending on how you prepared you our first particular situation having access to a certain elemental spell or a certain type of equipment or even just a special accessory that does something like increase your movement speed on water can make all the difference how boss fights or levels can be clear now speaking of boss fights these are the main key difficult points in the game however it does do a good job of giving you a few options to make them a little more manageable for instance you are able to offer your services to other players as a summon so you can work together to take care of that enemy and in case there are no players available to summon the game also will occasionally offer special NPCs you can summon to help aid you as well in some cases these can make the fights much easier a lot more manageable and in a couple select cases even trivialize them of course one of the caveats to being able to summon players is that you have to be in your human form as opposed to undead now the downside to being human is that while exploring an area other players can choose to invade and attack you in order to gain your souls and humanity this adds an interesting PvP element to the game in which players do have to not only defend themselves against enemies in the environment but also other players that want to take their experience away now one of the things I love most about this game though is the flow of the actual gameplay itself while the game does have a linear main quest for you to complete it doesn't a very nonlinear way you're able to kind of freely explore different areas occasionally kind of have to go one way but most of the time if you explore enough you can't find plenty of different alternate routes as well as just interesting little things to discover you're actually rewarded and benefit from not only exploring these areas but even taking down special hidden bosses or mini-bosses that can drop special useful items to help customize your character another interesting aspect of the game is how the plot is handled there's very little in the form of narration or cutscenes only a little bit in the very beginning however the plot does develop as you continue on a lot of times we'll notice that you'll run into different NPCs you can talk to them learn a little bit more about the backstory and does it get farther in the game things can't happen to these NPCs there are situations where you can run into someone talk to them they disappear later and later on you run into them find out they died and then there's some kind of undead enemy you have to kill it's a very interesting sort of indirect storytelling method rather than just heavily narrating or using cutscenes to tell you what's going on now honestly I could go on and on and on about all these little different details about why I love this game but there's just too many little different descriptive moments I've done the best to kind of give you the overall general sense of why this is a great experience but honestly I can't emphasize enough how much I'd really recommend for people to actually just try it out for themselves and see why it's such a great game if you're into RPGs or even just normal action-adventure games it's definitely worth picking up and trying now one of the warnings I have to give you though is that the game does have a very very steep learning curve part of the biggest poor challenge of the game is that you really don't know what you're doing for the first five or even ten hours however once you get comfortable and really get a better idea of how to play the game you'll start to enjoy it more and more and it actually has a lot of that sort of old-school video game difficulty appeal where while it's very challenging and will make you ragequit quite a few times once you're able to successfully complete different missions and kill bosses you just feel really awesome about it simply put this game is well worth picking up even at full retail price and don't let the difficulty scare you because it's one of the best experiences you can have to be honest this is some of the most fun I've had playing a game that's come out this year and I really can't recommend it enough to anyone that enjoys RPGs or action games that's our review for Dark Souls for the Xbox 360 and ps3 make sure to check out what I'm going to do my Batman review later this week till then I'm Kevin Bertie LD thanks for watching you