5/5 ★ – Dehds's review of Dark Souls: Remastered.

Rewriting part of the review after replaying it, some 12 months later for a challenge. The story is good and told well by the different items you can find or the legendaries you can forge yourself and through the NPCs you encounter. And the decisions you make when interacting with those NPCs also matter and can affect their fate. The art team has done a great job with the diverse environments which look amazing and the different enemies. Most of the bosses are just dodging but some do have mechanics to them that make them more engaging and interesting, the two that were not as good were the Capra Demon and Bed of Chaos (actually quite like the idea behind Bed of Chaos but it's just just poorly executed). The difficulty is definitely overexaggerated though. Most bosses take 0-2 maybe 3 tries to beat and there's just a handful that are more challenging, such as Kalameet. And most of the areas aren't too much of a problem to clear either, and if you're stuck you're probably not meant to be there yet and should try later, and also going for a hybrid between melee and ranged will make your life much easier as some things can be countered by ranged and others melee. During my first playthrough, around half-way through the game I encountered a game breaking bug that extinguished every single fire I had lit up and when I relit them I didn't get my kindle progress back, resulting in losing about 50 humanity since I kindled every fire and was working on getting them to max kindle as well, this bug (I can't say for certain if it was a hacker as there was no indication I had been invaded for at least the past hour and nothing was blocked, and also this happened after exiting and entering the game again) also completely messed up the location drops and I had items that I had previously looted respawn and items that I had never looted in areas I had never been before not be there at all, with lots of empty chests. Also, part of the bug was that I couldn't go hollow anymore (still can't go hollow in NG+), which resulted in me being constantly invaded at times, with up to 6-8 invasions within half an hour sometimes, and I wasn't given the Lordvessel after talking with the NPC and was forced to kill her just to make progress. I do wish the the original version wasn't removed, because I prefer playing original first then remaster/remake as I get to experience what it was initially and also gives me a good base to compare the new to the old, so hopefully the old one is readded, even without the online, for which I don't care much :). Also a side thing, it'd be amazing to be able to rebind all actions, not just a handful of them, separately, so they don't have to be button combos or have several actions bound to the same keys. And the main con of the game is just the targeting system, which is quite scuffed and untargets the enemy very often, completely locks your camera, and often doesn't target the right enemy or can't even target the enemy because there's an open door or something similar in the way. After replaying the game for a challenge, it went a lot lot smoother, and in the meantime they tackled the hacking problem to a degree, so hopefully if my issue was due to a hacker it won't happen again and if it wasn't then thankfully it didn't happen this time. I'd still recommend playing the game for the first time offline, though, because the only downside is not seeing player messages, which just add some lightheartedness to the game, but the big upside is that you'll be able to enjoy the game and not get invaded and have your playthrough interrupted by an unfair fight against high level players.