Well after 185 hours, and getting all achievements in 2 separate full play-throughs I can safely say this game is absolutely GIGANTIC. Every time you feel like you're coming to the end a whole new area opens up, or there's new places you've not discovered before. The sheer scale of this game is immense.

The atmosphere and the world itself is a monumental feat, each zone has an extremely unique look and feel and play through vastly differently from one another. The weapon and armour variety is amazing, there's an endless amount of combinations between armour sets, weapons and ashes of war.

As soon as I finished my first play-through I immediately dove back into the game for a second round and still discovered tons of things I had missed on the first time.

I have very, very few gripes with this game and they are:

NPC questlines - you can very easily lock yourself out of some endings or progressing some NPC quests. Even while using the wiki guide for some of them I ended up locking some of them up, not the end of the world but did put a bit of a dampener on some of the items and stories I wished to obtain.

Crafting feels a bit tacked on, I've only used it a handful of times during my 185 hours of the game. The crafting isn't really a massive part of the game but I felt like there could've been items in the world to collect in order to craft some major game changing items but these are mostly for temp boosts and other small niche playstyles.

My final gripe is the balance. Some places feel like a breeze while others feel like you've been shot into space with a difficulty spike, but for a game in such a scale as this and with the endless amount of things to do and see, you can bypass these spikes purely by over-levelling and dungeoning in the areas you're struggling around.

All in all, the best game I've ever had the chance to play, and I cannot wait to see what they do with DLCs and the future of this game and others like it. FROMSOFT has set the new standard for openworld games that do not hold your hand.

Well after 185 hours, and getting all achievements in 2 separate full play-throughs I can safely say this game is absolutely GIGANTIC. Every time you feel like you're coming to the end a whole new area opens up, or there's new places you've not discovered before. The sheer scale of this game is immense. The atmosphere and the world itself is a monumental feat, each zone has an extremely unique look and feel and play through vastly differently from one another. The weapon and armour variety is amazing, there's an endless amount of combinations between armour sets, weapons and ashes of war. As soon as I finished my first play-through I immediately dove back into the game for a second round and still discovered tons of things I had missed on the first time. I have very, very few gripes with this game and they are: NPC questlines - you can very easily lock yourself out of some endings or progressing some NPC quests. Even while using the wiki guide for some of them I ended up locking some of them up, not the end of the world but did put a bit of a dampener on some of the items and stories I wished to obtain. Crafting feels a bit tacked on, I've only used it a handful of times during my 185 hours of the game. The crafting isn't really a massive part of the game but I felt like there could've been items in the world to collect in order to craft some major game changing items but these are mostly for temp boosts and other small niche playstyles. My final gripe is the balance. Some places feel like a breeze while others feel like you've been shot into space with a difficulty spike, but for a game in such a scale as this and with the endless amount of things to do and see, you can bypass these spikes purely by over-levelling and dungeoning in the areas you're struggling around. All in all, the best game I've ever had the chance to play, and I cannot wait to see what they do with DLCs and the future of this game and others like it. FROMSOFT has set the new standard for openworld games that do not hold your hand.