Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Grows on you"

I gave Demon Souls an 8.5 when I finished it first. But afterwards, i tried to move on to other games but just bloody couldn't. Because Demon Souls just beats all other games in just about anything. It's one of the best action roleplaying games released, ever, and as far as dungeon crawlers go (I'm not really sure you can call this that) Demon Souls destroys all competition. If you haven't played it, your insane.
The gameplay, graphics and many other things were just great, but two things really made me love this game.
a) The difficulty. By the time I finished the game, I felt like I had evolved as a gamer. I couldn't get passed the bridge on my first try through the game, and later I was doing New Game ++.
b) the atmosphere and setting. No other game's atmosphere compares even slightly to Demon Souls. It even beats Dark Souls in terms of level design and setting. The castle was just bloody brilliant (how you could see the way you traveled from several points in the later levels...) Then there was the tower of latria, which actually scared me to death. Not to mention the depraved ones and maiden astrea. Just a brilliantly imagined world really.. I didn't really mind the hub and linearity when it was all just so awesome.

I have two main complaints though
a) The cheapness. Sometimes the game wanders into cheap territory. This doesn't help your frustration much. Its one thing to die from making a stupid mistake in combat, its another to have to restart the level cause you slipped off a ledge. And then there are the bosses, which are awesome. However, the makers have made some stupid loophole to killing every boss, which is annoying. Why actually fight the tower knight, when you can just soul arrow him to death from the top? 90% of the bosses have some easy strategy.
b) The balance. Faith builds destroy all other builds. Then blueblood. Everyone else just plain sucks. Only 3 weapons are used in PVP too.. so overall it kills the PVP quite a bit.

would be a 10/10 if not for these problems.