Dark Souls III is an engaging, somber and atmospheric, intense combat driven experience.
At its core it is a 3D Action RPG with limited hand holding by design.
Rough terrain, ambushes lying in wait, overwhelming groups of enemies, and death pits. Dark Souls III challenges players not to die, over and over again. As intensely frustrating as it is rewarding to overcome.
Gameplay Summary:You control a character from a 3rd person perspective
There are 3 core stats: HP, FP, & Stamina
Running, attacking, blocking, & casting spells uses Stamina
Stamina naturally regenerates at a rate based on your attributes
Using skills, spells, and special abilities reduces FP
If you run out of HP you die
Gameplay Details:Kill enemies to gain Souls
Spend Souls on gear, items, weapon upgrades/augments, and stats for your character
When you die you lose the souls you have collected and leave behind a vaporous verdant glow which when interacted with retrieves your Souls which you had at the time of death
Only one death vapor can exist for any given player at any time
All players can invade to kill and also come to aid in their and your world
Overall Impression:This is the most linear Souls game so far, but also the most accessible to new players- taking roughly 8 hours straight to complete the first time for someone comfortable with the combat system.
The story is somewhat of an extension of the previous titles. You'll find a lot of references to all of the previous Souls games in the details.
Compared to the previous titles in the series- Dark Souls III is much of the same thing with some refinements, cuts, and additions.
The standard sword arts have been refined drastically and "power stance" dual wielding of weapons is no longer available to players. Weapons have abilities which can be activated for an amount of FP which have various effects, such as a special attack or temporary increase to a stat/attribute among other modifiers.
There are checkpoints scattered around the game worlds various zones which you can teleport between much like in the previous titles. They appear much more often in this release of Dark Souls, than in previous titles, making the overall difficulty somewhat paltry. NG+ and onward is a sad increase in difficulty by merely increasing the amount of health enemies have and an increase in damage dealt.
The major improvements to the core gameplay of the Souls series are especially apparent in the boss fights, they've been improved from the previous Souls titles by leaps and bounds with transitions that drastically change the bosses attack patterns requiring players to change up their approach from aggressive to defensive and vice versa on the fly.
Sound design leaves nothing to be desired at all.
The soundtrack and the atmosphere are absolutely perfect.
Dark Souls III runs excellent on all last gen video cards and it looks beautiful though
it is fairly CPU demanding in order to run above 30fps consistently.
Online play can be frustrating due to the connections being Peer to Peer. The worse a players internet connection is the more likely there will be desyncs which will cause all kinds of issues and drastically alter interactions between other players as well as players interactions with other players world's enemies.
Recommendation:I recommend Dark Souls III over the previous Souls games to players new to the series for its ease of control.
I recommend it to Hardcore fans of the series for the story and the combat.
3.5