Okay, I'm usually not leaving reviews on games, but not this time. First of all, I want to say that this game is like a mentally ill bastard, you need to treat it condescendingly, and that's how you'd probably enjoy it. I am a person who decided to beat the souls series with early games, so my hands didn't touch ds3 and Elden Ring yet (the only games I completed are ds1 and platinumed Bloodborne, also want to mention that I haven't played the original ds2 release, so you won't see me comparing one to another). Well, let's begin with the cons, which you may already hear somewhere: humanity is now a resource that is now more useful than it was in the first game, since you can restore your maximum HP. You are getting rid of 5% of your health bar after every dead, until you get a cut of 50% of it (there's a ring which lets you save 75% instead of 50%, so that's not really a problem for me). Many people will find this annoying, but let's remember demon's souls where you could restore maximum HP only after defeating boss, and after one death they instantly cut a half of your HP until you defeat another one (there was also a ring called cling ring, which lets you play with 75% of your heath bar), and I think they were inspired by this idea, which I think isn't really bad, since you can find the humanity in almost every place in this game (by the end of the game I reached the max amount of 99 units). What I think is kind of wrong is that when you are turning hollow, you look like a zombie, and not like a hollow from the first game, which I think is a little downgrade from the art direction that I liked on previous game. Also want to mention that in this game you will see the weakest bosses in the series, so if you play souls games only to challenge yourself by playing against bosses... Well, you'd better to try out Bloodborne. Almost all bosses in the game are very forgettable and the OST is not something you'd listen apart from this game (there are exceptions. Despite Aldia is a very weak boss, he has an interesting lore and theme song, at least in my opinion). Some people can complain about having two methods of healing, but I think that's how the game wants you to play it, it lets you do more experiments and don't be really afraid of them, because even if you have 99 units of lifegems and 12 estuses, they are restoring your hp very slowly, so you need to know in which moments it is safe to restore your HP. And I think it is a very interesting concept. You need to manage your stamina, you need to manage all the fights and play them like a real strategist (artistic exaggeration of course, but I think it's true in some way). DLC bosses are very fun (despite some lazy copypasta ones and I don't really want to talk about them here, just know that they exist, unfortunately), Sir Alonne is probably the best boss you can meet in this game, he reminded me of Bloodborne bosses and Artorias from the first game's DLC "Prepare To Die Edition". His theme is wonderful too, it's very memorable. What I think is fun in this game is the PVP. People can invade you whether you have humanity or not. I think it's wonderful, since in the first game you could just become hollow to not let anyone invade your world, and here you most likely will experience being invaded, fighting against a person and understand who really is stronger here. The PVP is better than in the first game by a lot, since all the gameplay in PVP you had there before was about either parrying the opponent, or spin around him in hope to backstab. In this game you have much more sorceries, really huge amount of weapons, and you can use two different weapons in both your hands! None of their games I played had this! You can play around these mechanics for a very, very long time! Also, parrying and backstabbing is way harder than in the first game, which is making the gameplay more interesting. I also want to mention that the world is not connected like in ds1. World connection in ds1 is phenomenal, all locations in there are very, very memorable and most of them (yeah, I'm looking at you, Lost Izalith) are wonderful gameplay-wise too. In this game, the world is not connected, and locations became less memorable than before, which is very sad, but it's still interesting to explore the areas. While I find this game weaker than ds1 and bloodborne in some aspects, I want to say that I indeed enjoyed playing it, and want to recommend it for people who are afraid to take a bite of it.
