Recent reviews by Hugo

I have tried and tried and tried to enjoy this game. I've gotten good and came back to this multiple times and it's just still so utterly awful every single time. This game has none of the qualities that made the original Dark Souls good. Miyazaki has lost sight of his original vision and has instead decided to pursue a misguided notion of gravitas and spectacle rather than the mindful and careful purpose that was integral to the quality of the first game.
The open world is barren and worthless. 9/10 items you find are completely worthless crafting items. This would be tolerable if you could just safely ignore them and get on to the actual content, but there are integral items randomly sprinkled in. The enemy placement is random and mindless, groups will just be standing in open fields not even guarding a trash item, just filling in space. Every moment spent in the open world is a moment wasted. If you try to have an organic playthrough it will be miserable. I don't want to be following a wiki-checklist to play the game. I refuse.
The intended areas that were actually designed to be played through are alright, but they have the same problems as the open world. Most of the items are garbage and useless. Enemy placement is nonsensical and spammy.
The enemies themselves bosses included all rely on cheap tactics such as undodgeable zero windup attacks meant to chip damage you or stun lock you into getting killed and unnatural delayed attacks that were purposely designed to be slightly slower or faster than your brain would expect them to happen. Animations as a result always look comically floaty or sped up. Pressing roll 20 times and hitting the boss once is not fun or skillfull. It's just tedious.
This entire game is tedious. Walking off in some random direction is tedious, clearing a camp of trash mobs that don't even give you good amounts of runes is tedious. Doing dungeons and getting a single trash item from them is tedious. Trying to figure out NPC missions without a guide is TEDIOUS. THIS GAME IS TEDIOUS. ITS BORING.

Fell for the slop of the month again award

Great gameplay loop and aesthetic but falls to the genre trappings of tryhard players pushing out the casual side of the community. I recommend, but be prepared to get crossmap quickscoped by some trog using his neckbeard to aim.

Bought this to own the troons and I unfortunately have to admit that I fell for the bait and wasted my money. This game is a glorified walking sim collectathon that takes years to get going and fails to provide anything interesting in combat, exploration, and especially the absolute goober cast of flat and one note characters. If I had to play it again, I would learn the killing spell as fast as possible and then kill every single character I could.

I want to like this game soooo badly, but it just doesn't click with me. Tried to play it with a friend and playing fast and slow both felt kinda meh.

Maybe I just didn't get it, but the gameplay systems seem archaic and obtuse. From my understanding all you do is crawl around and pick up random things? Why? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Unanswered questions that would be intriguing if the gameplay loop was entertaining. Unfortunately I don't want to crawl around and die to random monsters that I have no idea the mechanics of.

Great game, makes me wish I had friends.

Pretty much every quest is walk this long distance, do one thing, then walk back. I had a questline where I went to this village to find clues about a monster. I get the clues, then have to walk back to spawn, and then WALK BACK TO THE EXACT PLACE I WAS JUST AT TO GO INTO THE BUILDING RIGHT NEXT TO THE ORIGINAL WAYPOINT. Waste of time.

Genuinely, after playing this game for a while, I can confidently say that this is just a terrible game. Every mechanic is half-baked and unpolished. The levels don't flow into each other like DS1, so you have to have the wiki open at all times. Rudimentary mechanics like the CAMERA LOCK DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY. What is the point of the lock on button if locking on doesn't make you swing at the enemy. You will genuinely swing in the opposite direction. if you aren't looking directly at the enemy when you start your swing, you won't turn fast enough for the swing to connect. It's insane.
Enemy placement is seemingly random. There's about twice as many as there needs to be, and their aggro range is inconsistent and much too high. In a single room, you'll pull enemies ACROSS THE ROOM IN THE NEXT AREA, while simultaneously standing ten feet in front of a guy and he won't aggro (also you can't lock onto him despite him being ten feet in front of you with line of sight, but don't worry it'll lock on to the guy a floor beneath you that you didn't know was there literally every time).
This game is an actual headache. Actual hell. The people that were involved in making this should be gutted and left to bleed out in the ♥♥♥♥ filled gutter.

Very atmospheric and fun, definitely worth getting into. If you have friends who aren't lame, get them to play the pvp with you, super fun!