By Matthew Codd
"You died." If you've ever played Dark Souls, that's a phrase you will be intimately familiar with - by design, it's a brutal and unforgiving game.
However, the difficulty is carefully crafted, the kind where every death is a learning experience that keeps you coming back for more. When you die in Dark Souls, you curse yourself for the mistakes you made, not the game for being unfair.
I believe that it's this balance, coupled with an incredible amount of depth in character customisation and combat mechanics, that made Dark Souls such a breakaway hit when it released in 2011. If there's one thing the title's cult following wants from a sequel, it's more of the same; judging from the preview build I played, that's exactly what From Software is delivering with Dark Souls II.
Rather than going the direction that many sequels do and trying to innovate or create a new, unique experience, Dark Souls II is essentially a bigger Dark Souls with a new plot and some minor mechanical tweaks. The core experience is near identical, so you can take it as a given that if you liked the first game, you'll like this one.
As an action RPG, combat is front and centre in Dark Souls II. It's essentially the same as in the first game, a slow paced but deeply tactical affair where knowing and predicting enemy movements is paramount and mistakes come with a heavy cost.
Changes to the formula are few: backstabs are no longer invincible, and you can equip three weapons per hand for on-the-fly switching instead of two. There's also a new petrify status effect, though I didn't get to see it in action.
Perhaps the most significant change is not to directly to do with combat itself, but the consequences for failure: each fall now comes with a 5 percent penalty on your max HP. Repeated deaths will see your health bar shrinking further and further, but luckily it can't drop lower than 50 percent.
While an interesting idea, I'm not convinced that it's the best fit for a game like Dark Souls. As strategical as combat is, there's a large trial-and-error component as you figure how exactly to approach each new enemy; punishing failure like this just doesn't mesh well with that kind of design. Learning how to succeed by failing repeatedly is fine, but that gets undermined when a loss puts you at a disadvantage on the next attempt.
You can recover your lost health, of course, but the items to do so are few and far between. At some point in the game they become available for purchase, but I ran into a seemingly insurmountable obstacle before I had access to any vendor, let alone one selling the consumable in question.
Which brings me to what concerned me most about the preview build: balance. Dark Souls was a merciless game, but it was fair in its brutality. When you died, it was because you made a mistake - and that was a mistake you knew not to make in the future. As plentiful as deaths were in that game, every one of them was a learning opportunity.
This is true enough for much of what I played of Dark Souls II, but for at least a few encounters, success seemed more to do with luck than anything else. One particular battle against a group of patrolling foes bested me probably 10 or 15 times, yet I never felt like I was learning how to fight back and victory felt hinged on luck more than anything.
The melee starts when you reach the top of a ladder. If you're lucky, one enemy will be right there for you to fight one-on-one and maybe kill before the other two rush you; if not, the three will be further along their patrols, equidistant from you, and will all rush you at once. With your back against a giant pit, you have little room to maneuver, and beating all three at once seems nigh-impossible. The worst part? This is within the first hour of the game.
It could just be that I'm bad at the game, and part of the charm of Dark Souls is its take-no-prisoners approach. I'm not going to pretend I'm some sort of master, but I got as far as Blighttown in the first game and, hard as it was, that game never felt unfair in its difficulty. In this one encounter, Dark Souls II did.
Despite these concerns, Dark Souls II is looking like a game that knows why its predecessor worked and runs with that, instead of trying to reinvent the franchise. The tweaks are there, but ultimately, it's a revisit to Dark Souls - and something tells me that's just what fans want.
NZGamer.com
source: newshub archive
