Demon's Souls: Video Game Review (PS3)

Demon's Souls is a role-playing video game released for the Playstation 3, developed by From Software. Role-playing games once received large amounts of attention and hype, but it's gone down over the years from massively multi player online games and the first-person shooter revolution. Let's see how this game breaks down.

Story : Most games either have a full blown story, no story, or just a simple back story. This game couldn't decide on any of those and instead is just an awkward combination of all three. However, it just doesn't work. There was nothing here to make me care about what happened to the characters or what would happen in the story.

Graphics : The graphics are good enough. Average compared to other games released this year, however. The characters and animations all look good, the backgrounds also look decent. The game is really dark in many places, which give you a dreadful feeling when playing it. Really dark games can be atmospheric, but that isn't what happens here unfortunately.

Sound : This game has a serious deficiency of music. Where did all the music go? It makes it feel like a very unfinished game. I'm not sure what they were going for here. Either way, the sound design is good enough and all the effects are appropriate and sound nice. However, the lack of music really dampers the game sound-wise.

Game play : The game isn't all that unique and will most likely play like many other games you've played before. There are a considerable amount of options available to you. The multi player aspect of this game is horrible and I recommend avoiding it all together. The difficulty in single player mode can get quite high so be prepared for a challenge if you want to tackle this game.

In fact, most of this game is needlessly complicated and not much fun. There are a few positive things to be found in this game, but they're not in the game play unfortunately. Too much here left me unsatisfied. The game isn't intuitive and has a large learning curve. The controls are good enough but this isn't the type of game that requires great controls. This is a long game, though you can probably finish it in 30 hours if you really rush through it. However, I don't think many people will get that far.

Re playability : If you manage to beat the game, you'll unlock a new game+. However I can promise you will not be playing the game again any time soon.

Overall : 3/10. Not many positive things I can say about this game. The lack of effort shows.