As for the first time playing souls games, the game itself is pretty decent and fun to play. My issue with this game is the controls and when taking a hit vs enemies.
The dodge command listens on the release and not on press, meaning when you release your thumb off the "o" button in ps the character dodges. which makes the character response way slower and this programming feature really sucks and slobby.
The other terrible thing while playing against enemies you may keep hitting them and they still do their damage and hit while when you get hit you lay in the ground forever and when you about to get up another blow comes to kill you. Too slow graphics for recovery.
If this is software's way of making the game hard well it sucks. My rating here is after playing 246 hours of the game so I gave it pretty decent time to judge and yes I enjoy the game but these aspects makes the game less than average because we are in the era of digital and high processors and not ancient ones where I give the command and shall wait until the processor processes this command