Dark Souls 3
The Many Deaths of Yuri Spadeface
Starting Dark Souls 3 as a Thief is inadvisable if you’ve taken something of a hiatus from the series. Of all the classes available at character creation, the Thief is second only to the Deprived in terms of starting weakness, with a soul level of 5 compared to the 8-10 for most other classes. Armed with a dagger and a bow, the Thief has an interesting play style dedicated to head shot sniping and backstabs, but unless you have the timing of dodging down to a fine art they are also extremely squishy, something made all the more apparent by the slightly enhanced combat speed in Dark Souls 3.
Although not as arcadey as Bloodborne, fights in Dark Souls 3 are a little faster and more frenetic than those in the previous Souls games. This is not at all a bad thing, giving what we played, enemies seem to have a more freeform style of combat than the more measured pause and combo style than many of the monsters featured in the earlier games. The combat feels more immediate and reactionary than pattern recognition. Whether or not this is in keeping with the trial and error flow of Dark Souls is up to you to decide.
After a few tutorial hints and fights showing off how to parry, dodge, lock, backstab and the like, the first boss fight of the game looms. A huge statue armed with an equally huge polearm kneels in the centre of an arena, a massive sword skewered through its chest. Remove the sword and it slowly creaks to life as the terrifying Iudex Grunyr, raising the halberd to attack. The resurrection animation is quite long, giving ample opportunity for some backstabs before the boss becomes active, but don’t get too greedy (especially when playing an extremely squishy Thief) or you’ll be on the receiving end of some heavy and deceptively quick attacks and be greeted with the first of what will inevitably be a huge number of deaths.
Of course, if you fail to kill Iudex the first time you can’t take advantage of his slow resurrection animation for some cheap backstabs, making the fight harder from the get go. Taking another leaf from the book of Bloodborne, Iudex has a disturbingly fleshy ace up his virtual sleeve. Get the boss down below half his life and he starts to explode into some kind of hideous Lovecraftian/ Tetsuo (both Tsukamoto and Akira versions) monstrosity with harder hitting, wider ranging attacks. After numerous deaths as a Thief, a restart as a Pyromancer – a melee fighter armed with an axe also capable of throwing fireballs) proved to be a more even match for Iudex. A good thing, as his death is what unlocks the world hub, allowing players to spend souls to level characters, upgrade equipment and progress to other areas of the game.
It’s a hell of an introduction to the revamped Souls universe, and we can’t wait to explore (and die) more when Dark Souls 3 hits shelves on April 12. DANIEL WILKS