Recent reviews by Jean Claude Vandale

Let me start with the good
- The open world is filled with content and hidden treasures. Discovering new areas can sometimes be breathtaking. You can explore zones in the order that you like.
- The bosses are epic and their themes are great!
- The artistic direction is fantastic.
- Combat is great, when the game mechanics work...
- Game doesn't hold your hand, which is refreshing.

Now the bad
- The hitboxes are stupidly bad... You often get hit by an AOE though you're 3 metres away from it! Oh and also the AI can slash you through walls that are 4m thick like it's nothing but as soon as your blade hits the tiniest of obstacles you get staggered :D
- The camera is some of the worst I've seen in years (feels like a PS2 era camera)! Often times it seems to be having a seizure and so you lose track of your enemy for a split second which can make you lose fights. Very frustrating! Also the camera simply does not work for enemies that are more than 4x your height (it will focus the legs when you need to see the arms, etc).
- Optimisation is a joke! Framerate is locked at 60 fps on PC! This game doesn't look next gen at all and yet it performs worst than any other game on my beast PC. Framerate is much lower than many games that look truly next gen, but the worst is the constant stutters that, again, don't appear in any other game though they look much better from a technical standpoint. The game also has weird moments when it slows down then suddenly speeds up, ruining the timing in a fight. All these technical issues were never fixed by the devs which is really unacceptable for a game that was so commercially successful.
- The handling of your character is awful. Rolling and running are bound to the same input so it happens a lot that you want to roll but the game doesn't understand that and you take a hit. A lot of times your character will miss the enemy though you're right next to it and facing it. Overall it plays like playing an old game where the character wasn't very responsive to your inputs.
- The story is not great. It is too vague and lacks real depth, character development, plot twists. Actually the plot is barely more complex than that of Super Mario Bros. And I'm talking about real plot, not background or lore. When NPC's speak to you (they never speak WITH you) they all talk with a monotonous voice which makes it hard to even care. And there's no fancy dialogue camera, probably because the NPC's stand there blandly like in a PS2 era dialogue scene, so why even make it look prettier with a nice dialogue camera, right? :D
- The characters you meet and hear stories about practically all have the same name which makes it painfully hard to follow who did what... Godrick, Godfrey, Godwyn... Ranni, Renna, Rennala... Radagon, Radahn... You get the point.
- Online play on PC is at your own risk because hackers can ruin your save and the devs don't seem to care as that same issue was already present in their other games! Coop seems worthless anyway since you're disconnected from the host each time they use a checkpoint or a boss is defeated, etc.

Long story short, this game would have been amazing if they had polished it and put more budget into the storytelling, but instead it feels super outdated and frustrating and is filled with technical problems. Making a game challenging is great, but here most of the difficulty comes from the bad camera, bad handling, frame drops, unfair hitboxes etc.

Most of this game's faults would be unacceptable if any other game studio was guilty of them, but From Software games seem to be untouchable.

Thus, I would not recommend buying unless there's a big discount.

Ces nazis empêchent le modding de leur jeu. Une façon de plus de faire chier les joueurs PC, à croire qu'ils font tout pour nous dissuader d'acheter leurs jeux. Mais bon on a l'habitude avec Rockstar.