I feel like this game is trying to emulate all of its predecessors at the same time and as a result it lacks its own personality, and the gameplay feels like it's trying to be bloodborne while still reusing the same gameplay from Demon's Souls/Dark Souls 1 and not giving the player the necessary tools to keep up the aggressiveness like the rally mechanic and quickstep, the only thing allowing the player to keep up with the much faster enemies are a decreased stamina consumption from performing actions and an increased stamina regeneration compared to DeS/DS1 which leads to you just mashing the rolling button. The levels are much shorter and linear in this game which pretty much killed all sense of exploration for me and most of them feel pretty uninspired, levels such as Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, Lothric Castle, Grand Archives, Irithyll Dungeon, and Catacombs of Carthus are ideas that we've seen executed before. The highlight of the game are definitely the bosses which is not surprising since by this point FromSoftware had learned much in terms of boss battle design from their previous games, most notably bloodborne, so in a way it feels like this game is more of a boss rush than anything else.

Fun but repetitive gameplay with not a lot of depth, most minions you encounter are annoying to fight and needlessly spongy, the new bosses are really ugly and forgettable, and have lame boss fights, the overworld is somehow worse than the one in the first game, and the story and characters were very lackluster (except for FU who was a great antagonist). I still enjoyed the game but it's a huge stepdown from NMH 1 which I'm beginning to think was lightning in a bottle. One thing I'll say though was that FU's first phase was absolutely phenomenal and it made me wish the rest of the bosses in the game were just as challenging and mechanically complex as him, a shame that his second phase was just terrible.