I was playing Scholar of the First Sin today, and for like the 10th time, I quit out of disappointment. This actually made me realize how not fun this game had become. It compelled me to write a review on Steam because of the realization of how I've reacted to finishing the games:

Dark Souls 1 : "Wow. That was one of the greatest games I've ever played"

Dark Souls 2: "Man, they kinda messed this up pretty badly"

DS - SoTFS : "Wow, they actually made it WORSE…"

So, here's what I wrote on Steam:

Before I start, I just want to say that I LOVE the orginal Dark Souls. I bought that game like 6 times already on Xbox and on PC. I actually even bought Dark Souls II for Xbox and PC as well. (I couldn't wait till the PC launch)

Dark Souls II didn't even hold a candle to the first one. Sure, it had a lot of improvements, but overall it went a lot of steps backwards. So like a dummy, I bought this version as well.

Now that that's out of the way, hear me when I say that everything that was wrong with Dark Souls II was amplified like 3 times in Scholar of the First Sin. It's just a badly designed game. Smple as that.

Example:

Rember that Bonfire in Brightcove with the spiders next to the bonfire? I had just gotten near it when I started thinking "Hmm. Maybe they finally removed those unnecissary spiders.". What did they do? They didn't remove those two spiders… They added like 6 more! WHAT? Those two spiders were a terrible design choise in Dark Souls II. Bonfires are suppsed to be something that your heart leaps at the thought of seeing, and Dark Souls 1 gets that right. Whoever was making the decisions for Dark Souls II and Scholar of the First Sin just didn't know how to make a good game.

Is Scholar of the First sin harder? Yep.

Is it fun? No.

You know what made the orignial Dark Souls so amazing? Rushing into monsters would make them mob you, so you had to plan your attacks and only try to fight them one at a time. Single combat was amazing in the fist game. What did they do in the second one? When one enemy notices you, ALL of them notice you. Fighting multiple enemies is unavoidable and not what Dark Souls was about. Especially since the mechanics focus on single combat. THATS WHY THE LOCK ON WAS PUT IN THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! Iron Keep Alone has like 3x more enemies than it did previously. And they ALL want to fight you at once.

You thought the archers were annoying? Now there's MORE! And they're facing each other as well.

Don't even get me started on the phantoms. Phantoms in Dark Souls 1 were something rare. They were there to add to the lore and a way to get a player to expereince some of the multiplayer mechanics at the same time. Dark souls took that idea and misunderstood the entire purpose. They're used pretty much like extra enemies. What does Scholar of the first sin do? THEY ADD MORE. It's like whoever was working on this game had the thought process that adding more stuff meant the game would get better, even though the stuff they were adding more of was terrible in the first place. Adding more terrible stuff to the already terrible stuff doesn't magically turn it good.

Did they fix the durability bug that happens at 60 fps? No

Did they fix enemies having terrible hitboxes that hit you even though they barely started swinging? No

Did they fix enemies having pretty much instant attacks that are impossible to predict? No

Diid they fix certain enemis having pretty much unlimited stamina so you pretty much HAVE to sacrifice health to attack? Nope

If you actually liked the things I think are wrong in Dark Souls II and thought more of that would be good, then you'll probably LOVE this game. If not, it's actually much worse.

I don NOT recommend this game and this is the game that made me vow to never buy a game before it's out again. No more preorders for me…