Recent reviews by Stacy's mom

The moral of the story is: new does not necessarily mean good. This kind of review lends itself particularly well to an itemized list, so judge for yourself.

The good:
1. I absolutely love the underbuttons. The very best thing about the controller.
2. The thumbstick feels pretty good.
3. I guess it works to have a trackpad thingy instead of the right stick? I agree that it makes sense to switch the stick/pad with the buttons.

The plentiful bad:
1. The plastic feels cheap. It is cheap. Surely this shouldn't have happened.
2. The bumpers are kinda hard to press. Of course, I *can* press them, but it doesn't feel nice and ergonomic.
3. Edit: indeed, lots of controllers have the dpad and left stick in the same position as the Steam controller. My oversight. But that has never made sense to my thumbs. [Whoever had a stroke and decided to switch the left thumbstick and the Dpad should not have had a stroke and should not have switched the left thumbstick and the Dpad.]
4. Why do the grips go up from the plane of the controller, as opposed to down? This means that I have to kinda press them end-first into my palms, so the controller doesn't sit in my hand and instead I always feel that I'm balancing it.
5. Getting a target lock in Dark Souls 3 requires pressing exactly the middle of the right pad. Everything becomes terrible if I don't get it exactly in the middle, but the pad doesn't have any sort of topological marker to mark the middle.
6. The haptics definitely don't replace traditional rumble. In fact, they're pretty useless overall, IMO.

In general, definitely wouldn't recommend. Granted, I've gotten used to it. However, especially at first, I longed for the original Xbox 360 controller. That felt comfortable, solid, and conscientiously made. The bumpers felt nice and smooth, the triggers were comfortable, the left stick was where the universe intended it be, and the thing was the right shape.

Speaking as a first-time Dark Souls player, I have to say that, on the whole, I'm impressed. The huge, intricately detailed, and almost completely accessible level design is most of the cake for me, but there's icing too: lots of the monsters feel solid and well-developed, random cool interactions, and the stupidly satisfying feeling of slamming my Great Machete on something. And the game is hard as ♥♥♥♥, which makes it quite cathartic in some unhealthy sense.

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT. There's a but.

Getting into the game was hard, not in a good way. It does not help that I bought this POS Steam controller along with the game. I persisted basically out of spite and because Steam's return service is apparently craptastic. I can't remember everything that was awful because I've had an exquisitely wide variety of little bugs and other issues getting everything to work:

1. Game crashes around bonfires, fixed by setting lighting to low.
2. Occasionally, the character will randomly start guarding and never stop.
3. WHY THE HELL TITS WOULD THE TARGET LOCK SYSTEM ONLY WORK IF I PRESS THE CENTER *UND PRECISELY THE CENTER* OF THE RIGHT DPAD? CLICKING A LITTLE OFF-CENTER MIGHT HIDE MY SHIELD OR HIDE MY WEAPON AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, FAIL TO LOCK ON. WHO THE HOLY ZOMBIE ♥♥♥♥ DECIDED THESE WERE GOOD CONTROLS? WHY DOES TARGET LOCK ONLY WORK WHEN I'M FACING A BOSS AND NOT WHEN I'M RUNNING AWAY AND HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT IS BUT WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO KNOW? From Software and Volvo must've worked very hard to make the worst target lock system known to man.
4. Seriously, this target lock system. WTF, man.
5. Whoever made the Dancer of the Boreal Valley was Hitler in a past life, but that's okay. I beat her. I beat Hitler's offspring.
6. The A and the start button would randomly stop functioning.
7. I could go on, but I think I got the interesting points across.

And the storyline's kinda poo, but we all knew that before we bought the game. XD

I forgot to eat dinner. I wandered around the penultimate level for two hours, simply exploring. I was too scared to go into the vast dark room, and I spent a good ten minutes just staring at the city. I went on a furious internet search for that happy-yet-demented track that plays when you're jumping around the ruined buildings (it's "Plage arrière du temps perdu" by Patricia Dallio).

Best game I've seen or played in a few years.