Dark Souls worth it to be bought or not?

I have played Demon Souls and I know that Dark Souls is spiritual successor to it. I also liked the trailer of this game and thus I am planning to play this game. From start of the time, I have been PC gamer. I am excited about this game and I think I will try it. But I have read that many people are giving it a bad review. Should I play Dark Souls or not?

It depends on you if you want to play Dark Souls or not. According to me this game is good only when played with Xbox 360 console and not by using keyboard and mouse. The porting of Dark Souls has been done very badly because of this the controls have been badly designed.

The keyboard configuration is the worse part you will find in this game. Though the keys look normally arranged like WASD and so on, as you reach deeper into the game. So if you have an Xbox 360 controller or you are ready to get one for yourself, then only this game is enjoyable.

Not just the bad porting of the game affects the key configuration of keyboard and mouse, but this game also has instruction and labels improperly designed. For example, a game designed dedicatedly for the PC has instructions given with keyboard controls. Like, press ‘G’ to throw grenade and so on. But here in case of Dark Souls, the instructions read as press ‘X’ for running and so on. This X is from the Xbox 360 gamepad. I had to right down the key configuration of Dark Souls’ Xbox 360 control on a paper and then match it with the keyboard keys. Every time, I needed to do something in the game, UI would first read the paper and then do it. It took me three days to get acquainted with keyboard controls for Dark Souls.

The graphics of Dark Souls is another issue that can affect your attitude towards the game. Usually we see that graphics of the games ported from Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 to PC are improved or enhanced. We saw this difference in Max Payne 3 and Alan Wake. But in case of Dark Souls, the graphics have been downgraded by a considerable level. The textures are blocky. At some point the textures have sharpness while some textures look blurry. These indifferences create a lot of problem while playing as you can see the difference between them easily. Also there has been no improvement in level of detailing for the models used in this game.

I found the Dark Souls game very buggy. When I try to play this game with anti-aliasing active, the framerate of the game drops by a very high rate. Also when using features like VSync and motion blur features of this game, it runs very bad. I can disable the Motion blur to enhance the performance of the game. But if I disable the Vsync, I cannot run this game when my graphic cards are attached to each other in SLI mode. The Vsync helps to maintain the framerate of two graphics card at same level. If this is not available in Dark Souls, then it is useless on systems with multiple monitor setup.

The game suffers from acute problem of mouse acceleration and cursor lock. The mouse acceleration problem creates an effect of shaky camera in the game. The camera bounces in weird way when we make the character jump or make it run and suddenly stop. Also because of the weird mouse acceleration, rotating the camera around the character is a very big deal. The camera moves slowly and also gives lags in between. I tried it on my friend’s Playstation 3 and the camera rotation works great. I think this is the bad porting done by the developer that has caused this problem. You can change the settings for the mouse from the control panel for this game, but it will then affect you whole operating system.

If you are using an AMD graphic card, then I’ll recommend you to stay away from this game and to avoid it completely. This game doesn’t work right with AMD graphic cards. My AMD graphic card can run high end games like Battlefield 3, Saints Row the Third and so on. But when running Dark Souls on my computer which is way too of lower quality than these games, it runs at medium quality of graphics. I think that either the game underperforms or the graphic cad cannot handle it properly. You can wait for AMD to bring out new graphic drivers which will give proper support to this game.

Dark Souls is very badly ported because of which it faces many problems like bad graphics, bad controlling system, underperformance and so on. But if you like this game then I think that you can play it despite of these problems. There are no problem or error in this game that will stop you from playing this completely, like crashing issues or freezing in between. But according to me it is better if you wait for few weeks before most of the problems are sorted out.