Dark Souls II

Crowds of enemies draw regular complaints. Reviewers describe rooms where several enemies attack at once, ambushes from behind, group boss fights like the Ruin Sentinels and the Gargoyles, and archers and casters placed out of reach. "Difficulty is not achieved through enemy spamming," one reviewer wrote, and another described "placing 30 enemies between you and the damn fogwall." Shrine of Amana, Black Gulch and the Gutter are among the areas named. Players who like the game tend to accept the ganks as part of the deal, and several fans of this version say it handles them better than Scholar.

Tying dodge invincibility frames and item-use speed to the Agility value, which mainly comes from the Adaptability stat, draws steady criticism. Players say the game never explains it, so new characters feel like their rolls do nothing until they pour levels into it. "Where are my fucking i-frames," one asked. The advice to level Adaptability early shows up in positive reviews too ("Just make sure to level up adaptability"). A minority defend it as a real choice between light and heavy builds, and say leveling is generous enough that it stops mattering after the early game.

Players who stopped within the first two hours write about the controls, the port or getting a controller to work far more than about anything else. Reviewers describe on-screen prompts that only show Xbox buttons, a tutorial that never explains keyboard keys, limited rebinding, a three-key jump, delayed mouse inputs and a double-click setting that resets every launch. "Whoever designed this game DID NOT have mouse and keyboard in mind," one wrote. Others report PlayStation or generic controllers not being detected at all. Some positive reviews give the same advice from the other side: play with an Xbox-style controller and the problems go away.

Players complain about attacks that hit after a clean dodge, weapons that seem to reach far past their visible length, and enemies that spin mid-swing to follow a roll. One player put it bluntly: "I did git gud at the game but the game never got gud." Some fans call the complaints exaggerated and say most hits are fair once Adaptability is leveled, but hitboxes still show up in the cons lists of positive reviews.

This complaint is about which version to own more than about how the game plays. When Scholar of the First Sin came out as a separate purchase, some owners of the original, season pass holders among them, wrote that they had expected the improved version as a free update, that their saves did not carry over, and that the two versions could not play together. "A new "enhanced" DX11 version has been released that should have just been a free patch, but wasn't," one review reads, and another calls the result a "community split for an already dead game." A few negative reviews like the game and vote no only to point buyers toward Scholar. Complaints about paying twice fade after 2016, though reviews telling readers to "buy Scholar instead" kept appearing for years.

Players appreciate the number of bosses and then criticize their quality. Critics describe a long line of armored knights with similar movesets, plus reused fights such as the two Smelter Demons. Several call the base-game bosses easy, and the final boss disappoints several reviewers. The DLC bosses and a few base-game fights like Velstadt are the exceptions they name.

Each death shaves off maximum health until it reaches half, restored only with Human Effigies or offset by the Ring of Binding. Critics say this punishes the trial and error the genre depends on and hits new players hardest. One player noted the fix costs "1 of 4 ring slots to the ring of binding." A few players like the added tension, and several point out how quickly effigies stop being scarce.

Long, enemy-filled walks back to bosses come up repeatedly, with the Blue Smelter Demon, the Ancient Dragon, Frigid Outskirts and the Shrine of Amana among those named. "The runbacks are harder, more lethal, and time-consuming than the actual boss itself," one wrote. Some players get around it by killing enemies until they stop respawning.

Soul memory, which matches players by every soul ever earned instead of by level, is blamed for making co-op and PvP harder to arrange, and summoning a friend is described as fiddly. Players also report that this version's online population is far smaller than Scholar's: "I bought this game thinking I would find a lot of people online, I was wrong." In early 2022 a cluster of reviews protested that the servers were offline and multiplayer was unavailable: "Online play is down and they won't fix it." A few reviewers mention soft bans after using mods or editing saves.

A smaller group reports black screens or crashes on launch, frame drops in fullscreen, and audio desync. Players who lost progress after reinstalling or changing PCs point to the missing Steam Cloud saves: "Turns out it doesn't have cloud save." A few mention corrupted saves or achievements that would not unlock.

Players chasing every achievement warn about long grinds for covenant items such as Sunlight Medals and the rat covenant rewards, and about needing several playthroughs. Several reviewers who earned every achievement still advise against attempting it.