Mini Review – Demon Souls

RPG

We got to stop it I tell you, we got to stop the movie!

Matthew

It’s rare these days that a game comes a long that is genuinely innovative, unique and genre-defining, and Demon’s Souls is just that. The feature that sets this game apart from the rest are the unique features it’s online mode offers. As you wander through the barren lands of Boletaria, you’ll witness ghostly silhouettes wandering around the levels. These are in fact other players fighting their way through the level in real-time. It may not sound like much at first, but it adds a strange and endearing sense of community in what is otherwise a very bleak and grim atmosphere.

None shall pass!

There’s more to the online than that, though. When a player dies in body form, they change to spirit form which opens up a few possibilities of what to do next. First of all, they can lay a soul sign on the grown, which allows other players to summon them into their game as a blue phantom for assistance. Help them defeat the end boss, and you will

be revived back to body form. Secondly, they can invade another player’s game as a black phantom and killing the player revives you back into body form. A few other online features include player deaths being recorded as blood stains on the ground (deaths can be witnessed by selecting the bloodstain) and the ability to leave glowing messages on the ground from a list of presets.

Demon’s Souls covers a range of genres. It plays like an action RPG with a combat system based on balancing attack and defence with limited stamina. It has hints of rogue-likes with death resulting thrown back to the start of the level and losing all the souls (which double as currency and experience points) you’ve collected up to that point, although these can be recovered once you find your place of death again.

Unlike any other game you’ve played, Demon Soul’s innovative online system, unparallelled atmosphere and strict, yet rewarding, gameplay easily puts it amongst the best games on PS3, and up there with the best games of the generation so far.

9/10