It's alright

If you played and enjoyed the first Dark Souls, there's a huge chance you will not like this one. I suffered through the whole game 2.5 times to get 100% achievements and my final thoughts on the game is that the level designers played up until Lower Undead Burg in the first game, where you get swarmed by theifs, and decided that the difficulty in Dark Souls is obviously being in constant 1v5 fights. The enemies are not challenging on their own like Dark Souls 1, the game relies on sending you into unfair fights, often getting swarmed or surrounded by enemies, resulting in BS deaths.

The bosses are actually fun to fight and might be the only redeeming quality of this game. Just getting to the boss is the challenge since almost every area in the game is at least 1v3 fights. The whole ordeal is just tedious and if you get swarmed after spending 20 minutes clearing 3 rooms of the 30 enemies, you get to redo all that, with less health this time, because it wasn't already punishing enough. Did I also mention that you can be invaded when you aren't even human? Even when hollow you will be invaded just as you finished clearing all the rooms leading up to the boss, and you already know it's gonna be some dude using dial up and lag-backstabbing you. Time to kill the 6 clusters of 1v4 fights again!

I would definitely NOT recommend this game. It is a slog and just more frustrating and tedious than fun in the end. Dark Souls 1 was fair, fun, and had more enemy variety than 80 reskinned big men with 3 different kinds of weapons. Just skip right to Dark Souls 3, you're not gonna miss out on much, especially on the lore front.