Dark Sous 3 is one of the very few games that have been recently released that I am actually very pleased with. From the very moment I put it in my PS4 after picking it up at the midnight release, the game has enthralled me within it's dismal, terrifying world to the point where if I'm not playing  it, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about what new armor combinations I should try out, or what new character build I should attempt. The game salmost seeps into your very soul (excuse the pun) and despite smashing you against a brick wall again and again, you keep coming back for more, eager for the inevitable punishment this game is going to deal to you.

From grotesque black ooze monsters to treasure chests that try to devour you whole, you will be faced with a wide menagerie of creatures that all want nothing more than to utterly destroy you. It's up to you to clench those cheeks, pull yourself together, hone your focus and head out into the world to combat the dark forces that oppose you.
Dark Souls 3's main gameplay mechanics are largely the same that they've been since the first game, with tight, responsive combat that requires a layer of strategy to effectively master and a character levelling system that you can finely tailor to set your character down whatever path you choose to take.  Do you choose to be a blade wielding knight that is able to overpower enemies with heavy damage, or a nimble swordsman that uses katanas and rapiers to dance around enemies with grace to harass them with quick light hits? If melee combat isn't your cup of tea then you can opt into the path of magic, being able to choose from miracles, pyromancy or sorcery, each coming with their own unique spells and buffs that can aid you on your ardeous adventure. You may even choose to mix the fighting styles up, combining the lightning spells of a cleric with the brute force of a knight, to create a hybrid fighter that pummels beasts into the ground with a lightning-enhanced greathammer. There's so many possibilites for different playstyles that replaying the game again as a new character is an exciting prospect. A boss that gave you minmal trouble as a melee character may be a walk in the park for a caster, and vice versa.



While I won't go to deep into the game's plot because I don't want to spoil it, it involves you, known as the ashen one, who has risen from their grave to seek out the lords of cinder who have abandoned their thrones. It's up to you to seek each of them out and try to politely convince them to return. And by politely I mean jamming a zweihander so hard through their body that you practically get stuck, being freed only when they burn away into nothing but a soul. A soul that you then use as nothing but an item to barter with, exchanging them for unique items or spells that can only be obtained once per playthrough.

Speaking of Souls, they are the game's currency and experience points, so to speak. Every enemy or player you kill drops souls that get added to your own soul count which is visible in the bottom right corner of your screen. You will carry them on you at all times, and if you should happen to die on your journey (which you most likely will) then you will have one chance, only one final chance to reach the spot where you died, at which your point of death will be marked with a glowing bloodstain on the ground. When you reach the bloodstain you may retrieve the souls you lost when you previously died at the spot. Should you perish once again before you retrieve your souls however, they will be lost for good. It can be incredibly frustrating when this happens, but it is a good idea to not let it bother you too much. When frustration builds up in the player's mind they tend to play less carefully, leading to more deaths which would have been easily avoided had the player been fighting with a more clear mind. The fact that the player has no way to store their souls anywhere means they must carry them at all times, bringing a high risk system into play at all times. If you have progressed far into an area, past hordes of now slain enemies and are carrying a large cache of souls,  you will have to consider one of the following two options: do you warp back safely to the bonfire to cash in your hard earned souls, or do you push on, through the encroaching misery to possibly reach another distant bonfire, while at the risk of losing it all?

It is this pulse pounding feeling that keeps you on edge throughout the game, the paranoia lingering at the back of your mind, keeping you fearful of what might be lurking around the next corner. The fear of the unknown is one of the most frightening things that has ever plagued man's own mind, and a first time playing the game can truly surprise you when you see just what awaits you down that long, pitch black corridor. Some enemies require speed and finess to kill, hopping around you while pelting you with throwing knives, while others are slow and lumbering, requiring you to hit them as hard as you can in order to dispatch them. Some enemies are more frustrating than others, and while some players may feel they cheapen the experience or get frustrated by them, I feel they spice up the mixture a bit and add a much needed flavour that's sure to leave you breathless and frantically trying to regain your stamina just enough to roll out of the way. One of Dark Souls 2's biggest missteps was overpopulating the game with humanoid enemies that became rather stale to fight, so it's a nice change of pace to fight a creature that looks like something somebody forgot to flush down the toilet after a visit to Mcdonalds.

Since the first game, the difficulty has been a major point of discussion and praise for the series. Bandai Namco's marketing department caught on to the fact that the game was challenging and required careful play and marketed the hell out of it, amping up the difficulty aspect of the game and plastering it everywhere, collectively rubbing it in our faces. While I won't deny that the game is difficult, it's not as soul crushingly difficult  (excuse the pun) as a lot of sites and magazines make it out to be. The game requires you to learn its mechanics, to master the controls and really delve deep into its gameplay. While playing you will find yourself getting more skilled, and the game will in turn feel easier to you. Again, the game IS hard but you will find yourself forcing your way through it with sheer iron determination. It'll be a long road, one paved with blood, sweat and angry curse words, but you'll make it eventually. And if you don't feel like doing it alone, there is always help to be found in the form of willing players. I'll go into more detail on that when we get to the multiplayer.

When it comes to the level layout and traversal, the game seems like a mixed bag of Dark Souls 1 and 2. The bonfire warping from Dark Souls 2 is back from the get go, but the levels also feature unlockable shortcuts and paths that make the run to the boss so much easier, harkening back to the twisty turny, interconnected levels of Dark Souls 1. The bonfire placement in some areas seems pretty questionable, as a new bonfire appears after every defeated boss. In one area, the bonfire you unlock after defeating a boss is only a very short distance away from the next one, rendering it pretty pointless. I wonder what Fromsoft was thinking when they put this feature in the game. The bonfire placements throughout levels seem pretty fair and balanced for the most part, giving you a significant challenge to progress through for the most part. There is a nice diversity of backdrops and vistas to explore, ranging from the dilapitaded walls of a sprawling castle to the fiery wasteland of the demon infested underground. I hope to see what interesting places we get to experience next when the DLC finally hits.

Dark Souls 3's multiplayer is an interesting concept that has evolved over time since it's inception back in the days of Demons Souls. Essentially, you are able to see and seamlessly interact with other players who are playing their own games. Occasionally you will see the outline of another player in the same area as you, performing their own tasks, most likely unaware of the fact that you're watching them. Player-written messages litter the ground, sometimes giving helpful hints towards the location of illusory walls, and other times providing humorous distractions to make the dismal situation just a little bit funnier, because if you ever find yourself surrounded by scimitar wielding skeletons and a flre breathing demon, then I reccommend you try tongue but hole.
You can also see bloodstains scattered around the world, showing how the player died, possibly hinting at a fatal drop or deadly enemy ahead that you are currently unaware of. They are often positioned near the edges of cliffs, it can be quite relaxing to sit there and watch the red silhouettes of perished players rolling to their doom.

Actual interactive multiplayer comes in the form of summoning, with which other players may enter your game, invited or not. In order to summon other players you must be in embered form, a state of being that gives you increased health and the ability to perform various multiplayer actions. You can gain embered by either being summoned as a phantom yourself and helping other players, or killing beasts that drop them. They can also rarely be found as collectible items around the game. When embered, you may see glowing summon signs on the ground that you can interact with, giving you the option to summon them. In order to be eligible for summonging, the player must use the white sign soapstone item to draw their sign on the ground, where the drawn sign will be visible in both their own and other players' worlds. From there it is simply a case of playing the waiting game. Areas with particularly challenging bosses are the most active places to be summoned, you will often find yourself being summoned to another world as a phantom within mere moments of setting down your sign.
Summoning signs can come in different colors, each providing a different purpose and service. White and gold summon signs will summon a friendly player who is there to help you progress through the level or kill the boss. A purple summon sign will summon an unpredictable mad phantom, who may either help you or hinder you. A red summon sign will summon a hostile player into your world with the intent to kill you, but these are generally accepted by the community as a way of beginning duels.

There other side of multiplayer summoning is invasions, during which a hostile phantom player forcefully enters your world with the intent of hunting you down and exterminating you.  You and the invader may both use whatever tactics and tricks you have up your sleeve to kill the other before they kill you. Invasions are often tense, suspense filled encounters. You may never know when you're about to clear a particularly difficult area and another dastardly player jumps into your game and mashes your face in with a greataxe.
Invasions' mechanics have been altered so they have been heavily prioritized to attack hosts who have phantoms with them. I'm not sure if this is for the better or the worse as while it tips the odds in the favor of the host who has an extra set of helping hands to ward off the dark spirit, it also encourages the ganking playstyle in which groups of players will sit around doing nothing with the sole intent of ruining invaders. However, the act of an invasion itself could be considered malicious as you are entering the host's game agianst their will, so really you're playing by their rules.
Covenants are a multiplayer based feature that gives you different rewards depending on what you are setting out to do in your summoning. Players who decide to join the Mound Makers covenant will be rewarded with a certain item for eliminating hosts or phantoms, while members of the Warriors of Sunlight will be rewarded with a different item for helping the host defeat the boss of the area.

There are some negatives that I want to adress, however. No game is without flaw and I think as a fan, it's a good thing to discuss these flaws, rather than just accept the thing is perfect and praise it blindly. While it is pretty sweet and nostalgic when the game reintroduces characters and items from the previous game, I do feel that it is overdone a slight bit. I wouldn't have minded one or two returning armor sets but I think as it is now, there's a bit too much. I  admit, it is awesome dressing up as Ornstein or Artorias again, but personally I would rather see what new things the developers can come up with, rather than just reusing old assets to please fans.  Hopefully with the new content we will have a wide range of sets to choose from and rearrange for our fashion souls.

There's also issues related to the player versus player, or PVP aspect of the game. While the system is functional, there are certain aspects of it that are just downright frustrating. For starters, the game appears to have a poise feature, that for whatever reason was simply disabled. Poise was a stat in the previous games that determined how much damage you could take before being stunned, or staggered, rendering you unable to attack momentarily. What this means for Dark Souls 3 multiplayer is that if a player has a fast or hard hitting weapon they can essentially trap another player within an endless cycle of spammy death, otherwise known as a stunlock. Weapons such as the estoc are the worst offenders of this, able to repeatedly jab opponents multiple times in rapid succession, essentially poking them to death while they are completely unable to react. I started using the weapon when I first got the game because I thought it was fun and powerful, but after seeing how damaging it was to the player versus player fights I held back, only occasionally using it as a last resort.
There is also the dark sword, which despite being only a straight sword has the damage of a greatsword, capable of inflicting colossal damage on unsuspecting players for moderate stamina loss. While I do believe that players should be free to use whatever they have in the game, I think that certain weapons would benefit from some tweaking or balancing.

Overall I think that Dark Souls 3 is an excellent game in its own right, and wether or not its a satisfying conclusion to the series is up to one's own interpretation. Like the previous games, the story is kept vague until you read the various descriptions and listen to dialogue around the world, and even then it may be unreliable since stories can be altered by whomever is speaking them. The bosses are memorable and challenging for the most part, the standouts being one of the later bosses along with the actual final boss, and the music is once again magnificent composed by Motoi Sakuraba, with a few songs being real earworms that you'll be humming unexpectedly from time to time. It's a game that can be replayed again and again, each time providing new hardships and experiences for the player who chooses to embark on their next journey. While there are a few missteps here and there I would definetely have to say that Dark Souls 3 is one of the best action rpgs currently on the market, and a worthy contender to the Souls series. I very much look forward to the downloadable content when it releases and I wish Miyazaki and his team at Fromsoft all the best in their future endeavours, whatever they may be.

I rate my games based on a scale of wether you should buy at full price, wait for bargain bin, borrow from a friend, or not buy at all. Dark Souls 3 is definetely a game that you should buy at full price, though if you're a fan of the series then you've most likely already got it or made your mind up to get it. If you've never played the series before and are feeling uncertain or nervous about getting it then I hope you have at least been slightly informed by my review and at least consider borrowing it. Just be prepared to die and get frustrated, but that's just part of the experience.