Hands-on impressions with Demon’s Souls on PS5
The PS5 is now out and the console already has many excellent console exclusives. Aside from Sackboy: A Big Adventure, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Moralesand Astro's Playroom, the other exclusive that you can play is the 2020 remake of Demon's Souls.
Developer FromSoftware made Demon's Soulson PS3 when it released back in 2009. Little did people know at the time was that the game then kick-started a whole new genre. The Souls genre was born when the developer went on to refine its formula with the Dark Souls trilogy.
People seemed to forget that Demon's Souls existed, until now that is. With FromSoftware out developing newer games, Bluepoint Games is responsible for developing 2020's new Demon's Soulsremake on PS5.
You may know Bluepoint Games is the studio that also made the excellent Shadow of the Colossus remake a few years ago. Well the Demon's Souls remake on PS5 also looks excellent. The game truly showcases the power of the PS5 and is arguably the best looking game on the new console thus far.
Even though the game does not have ray-tracing, the graphics look photorealistic most of the time. The huge bosses are also something you should awe at because they look like they've been ripped straight out of a movie.
There are also two graphical settings you can choose from. The first favours resolution and it runs the game at 4K with 30fps. You can choose this setting if you want to see the graphics at its absolute best.
If you're more of a gameplay person, then I suggest you choose the performance setting. Here you can choose to play the game at a very smooth 60fps. The gameplay feels faster and more fluid in my opinion when you play it at 60fps.
No matter what the settings are though, this game looks super gorgeous when compared to the PS3 original. If you have a PS5, you may want to pick this game up just for the graphics alone!
That being said, Demon's Souls is still one of the most difficult games I have ever played. In order to keep the spirit of the original game, Bluepoint Games didn't want to add an easy mode. If you like Dark Souls type games, you will like this way better than casual gamers will.
There are lots of challenges that await you in this game. For one, pretty much any enemy has the power to kill you in seconds. If you manage to survive the hordes of enemies, you'll also have to endure the many large bosses that litter the levels too.
Death is something that you will experience in this game over and over again. If you don't like dying and repeating sections of games, you're better off playing something else. You have to be either really patient or really good at action RPGs if you are to succeed in this lengthy and difficult game.
Another obstacle you have to overcome is that this game also has stamina and weapon degradation. Attacks and evasive rolls all use stamina, so you will have to watch your moves closely when you are facing the bad guys.
You will also have to make sure you don't overuse the same weapon repeatedly. Weapons can lose strength when they break, but you can repair them if you have enough souls to spend on.
You need souls to level up, but you have to make sure you don't die all the time or else you might lose them. If you cannot retrieve your souls back from your dead body, you'll have to earn everything back again.
I didn't get too far in Demon's Souls, but it's shaping up to be a great game if you're skilled enough to play it. If you don't like Dark Souls like games, you may be better off playing something else like Godfall instead.
Sadly, I wasn't able to play as much Demon's Souls as I'd like because I was only allowed to borrow my PS5 unit from PlayStation NZ. However, it's a game I want to revisit once I can finally buy my own PS5 unit when more stock is available early next year.
