Dark Souls is an outstanding game with really hard difficult but extremely rewarding and addictive.
Dark Souls is the kind of game that you will love if you like for example play God of war in titan difficult I know I'm that kind of person but really is not for everyone, this is not a game you will start playing and you will just pass it through like most of the games, it takes time and some skills too not to much but definitely is not the kind of game you will beat it just hitting the buttons (skyrim?)not that those kind of games are bad just different thats all, they focus in some other things.
Dark Souls focus on the combat and damn it does an excellent job, the controls at first are a bit strange (target with the button of the right analog stick?) but with the time you get used to it, they are very accurate and response is very good too, I've read some reviews saying that they have some kind of delay, thats not true at all.
About the combat, maybe at first you will find the game a little bit too hard but is not, every enemy can be defeated in some way you just have to find it.
For example the first boss you encounter will be hard to beat but then you climb to a higher place so you can make an attack that takes like half of his health in one hit(you can kill it anyway the first time but it will be much harder) so this is one of the hundreds of examples you will find, first you think is too hard but then you realize there is always a way around to make it more easy, but again is not an easy game, you will die and a lot, trust me but thats the fun, beat a boss after he beat the crap out of you 5 times is priceless (see not everyone find this fun)
You can use the weapons in the two hand at once and you will do much more damage but this will make you have less defense when the enemies attack you, or you can use a shield in one hand and in the other a sword.
You have magic, bows, and everything works well. I've seen some games where if you pick a character that use a bow it really suck well this is not the case, you can actually beat a hard enemies with a bow!
Everything is just perfectly balanced even in the little aspects.
The graphics are just gorgeous. At times you will just stop and start looking the landscape because is just surprisingly well done.
Sometimes with a dark mood and other not that much but always with and amazing amount of details put into it
The sound is amazing too, the story is... well not that good but you don't play it for the story really, they could really focus a little more on the story.
You will face a lot of different types of enemies i mean they are so many types maybe 100 kind of enemies?Yes that much!and all of them have a lot of details in it and don't attack the same way, it just stunning to see so much detail in this kind of things!
The same with armor/weapon/rings/bows/magic/items etc etc there are hundreds of things to get and try it just seems endless.
The graphics are just awesome, with a very dark ambiance make it more enjoyable.
The npcs have some great dialogs, some of the very creepy (most of them :P) other not that much but all of the touches you in some way, one of the flaws demons souls had was this but here they just improve 100%
There are some many things that i could talk about, the online feature, the forge of weapons, the hundreds of secrets etc etc but i just want to give you a little glance of what dark souls is and do well but like i said there is more much more!
Now lets see what is bad in this game:
No map, the world is big and in the first part of the game you are going to get lost a lot, you don't know where are you going and if you can go to that place, in my first 10 hours of gameplay i was completely lost.
No direction at all, at the start you get some clues (very very few) of what to do, not that someones really tells you where to go so you are lost from the start of the game.
The game tends to not letting you go some places by putting difficult enemies that you are just not ready to face them yet but is not the best way to do it specially in this game where you cant tell if it just difficult or you really cant be in that place yet.
The npc progress, i really hate to not know where to go or do next to progress in the game with some npc and for worst sometimes you have to do some specific stuff to progress or they will die!!!!!!! Is trial and error but in this game you cant fail in this kind of stuff once some npc died its done for good, or you start again or you keep going and i really hate this aspect of the game, its not logic and you dont have even a clue of what to do so failing for this its just lame. Worst aspect of the game in my opinion.
The comparison of the weapons/armors you have with others is really bad, you cant see what is the set of what you are wearing to compare it to another thing, for example you have a helmet that protects you 21 % from physical damage and you found a new one that protects 33% well you can see one vs one the game only puts a different color if its better (blue) and red if it bad, and the armors have a lot of stats to look at so this is a really bad system.
The camera sometimes is really really bad, when you are in narrow places walking or running the camera tends to go crazy and this will get you kill for sure!
Some framerate are really bad in the game, like in blightown its seems the game in that part runs at 15 frames per seconds all the time, its really annoying and the game is full with part like this a really shame :( maybe is the engine or maybe its the hardware that it is on the limit i don't know but its very annoying.
Finally some part are hard but not in a good way, when the game puts you walking in a very tight path( if you move 1 square you fall and die) and puts an enemy that makes an attack that with one blow it will make you fall and you dont have any other route to go this is cheap not hard, this and the bad camera makes some parts of the game very tedious to pass.
Even with all thats flaws I cant put a 9 to this game because what it does good it does it admirably well.
This with out any doubt is a 10/10 game!