Dark Souls -- Prepare to Die Edition [2012 -- FromSoftware]

[Starfox]

Originally published on October 17, 2013

I know that bobdog already reviewed this game in his own mini-review section and not only do I fully agree to what he said back then but I will even go further. In all my years of gaming, I had my share of bad apples but never have I seen a PC port of a console game so badly done, badly optimized, badly programmed in all respects. One has to be completely shameless, have no self-respect and no sense of what is ridiculous to release such a "game" (and I use the word very loosely). I thought that the PC port of Dark Sector was bad but there it's a whole other dimension of bad; we'd need a new word for it; when I designed the smiley system for the Quickviews section, I had no idea that I could need one day something worse than the reddish smiley meaning "horrible game". Truly Dark Souls is in a category of its own, at least for all things technical. This port should have gone to the trash can even before being born.

So what's to say. Clunky and sometimes completely illogical controls, barely usable (and non modifiable) controller scheme -- which is hilarious for a game that comes from consoles in the first place -- graphics from 8 years ago that however manage to suck up a dozen times more resources than Skyrim (when you play Skyrim with all the bells and whistles, and the HD texture pack installed). A mouse cursor that appears even when the game is in full screen, with no menu displayed... and that follows the mouse movements (that is if you decide to not use a controller and believe me, using a keyboard/mouse combo rather than a controller makes absolutely no difference; I tried both and in both cases the controls stick, glitch and the very poor framerate doesn't help)

So yeah, they were right to subtitle this edition "Prepare to Die" because chances are you'll be dead of annoyance or boredom (probably both) even before you start a new game. And if you're still alive by then, the first few minutes will definitely kill you.

So what about the story? I don't really know and I don't really care. When you have an engine that badly programmed it doesn't matter if your story is brilliant (and I don't say it is... once again, I have no idea).  Maybe the console version is worth playing somehow but do yourself a favor and avoid the PC version like the plague... even 50 cents would be a price too steep for this ... thing.