Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition Reviews
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Forbes, 8/10.
Though it pains me to say it, the port is at best a 6/10. The game itself, fortunately, is a solid 10. So I'll give it the average of those two scores, bearing in mind all the aforementioned caveats.
IGN, 9/10.
The need for a pad mires an otherwise perfect port. This is Dark Souls, coming at us larger and more intimidating than ever. A dungeon crawler that understands that the crawling, the exploration, is as important as the combat. An action game that dares to teach us patience, and caution. A video game with respect for the player, that dares us to be an actual hero. Not once when you die does Dark Souls help you back up, not once does it let up in its astonishing quality or turn to padding, and not once do the ideas stop coming. Buy it.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, scoreless.
Of course I wish the port was strong rather than perfunctory, in fact I wish the game had been developed on PC from the start, but with the current speed of customer-built fixes hopefully there's more to come. I played with a 360 controller, which works as well as expected, but the mouse doesn't seem particularly well implemented, the view swinging somewhat sluggishly and the cursor always managing to litter the screen for no good reason. And, yes, Games For Windows Live is an interruption I find hard to ignore, particularly since it took me two or three hours to break through its barriers when I first installed the game.
All has been fine since then but I'd much rather a game this good didn't have to come with any excuses or apologies. The fact that it does is frustrating but doesn't alter the fact that this is, even on a second appraisal, one of the freshest and most astonishing games I've ever had the pleasure to encounter.
