3/5 ★ – DarrensTrashBag's review of Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin.

Jesus Christ. It was insane on how much FromSoft messed this one up. It felt like they just decided to include the most infuriating and unfun things within this game. Requiring the player to level adaptability to even have some i-frames when rolling is so idiotic. I had 30 adapt and it still didn't work a lot of the time. The dodge roll is awful. The hitboxes are insanely inaccurate. A bunch of the bosses don't have a tell for when they are doing two attacks or three. The designs of the bosses look very cool, it is just a shame that they only have like 3 moves and are either a joke to fight or require 5 giant souls. The levels are absolutely gorgeous it is just a shame that they are designed by literal children. I don't think I had a good time going through a majority of these levels if not all of them. I have to ask why does it take three times as long to drink a flask in this game compared to the others? This game is just FromSoft thinking that people liked dark souls because it was difficult and just made the whole game the worst parts of Dark Souls 1. This whole game felt like going through one giant continuous poison swamp. Enemy placement was sporadic, every area had like 50 enemies you had to kill before killing a boss. The runbacks were not that bad for the most part except for 2 bosses in the DLC. I do not understand how someone programmed the Frigid Outskirts and then play tested it and thought that it was good enough to ship. Most of the time I had this thought going through my mind "what were they genuinely thinking?" The biggest saving grace is once again the visuals, lore, voice acting, and score. Though I was not as big of a fan of this game's lore compared to the others so far. I think that the problems that Demons Souls had, Dark Souls 2 had on the opposite side of the spectrum. This game made me like Demons Souls more. Maybe if I do another playthrough with a different build then maybe I would like it, but the abundance of poor game design choices just makes me never want to touch this game again. 56/100