Cromethus

I want to make perfectly clear that everyone understands this: Do not buy this game if you don't have a gamepad. The mouse/keyboard controls are absolute ****e. Let me give some detail. Unlike every other modern pc game on the entire planet, you *cannot* strafe in DS3, which is extremely, extremely counter-intuitive. To get items, you actually have to be lined up with the camera and go forward/back over it. This makes getting health drops (which disappear after a short amount of time) *extremely* frustrating, as you have to move the entire camera to fact it if your a little off. Furthermore, the ways that you control the forward/back motion of your character are *insane*. In general, there are 4 ways to control the movement/camera. Some sound pretty good, but in the end, NONE MAKE ANY BLOODY SENSE. 1) You can control your motion by right clicking the mouse. Sounds great, except the direction your running doesn't really update as you move the mouse, or at least the *cursor* doesn't update. Once you've clicked, that's it, that's the direction you're going. Now you can move the CAMERA to change directions, but moving the mouse around to change directions is just AWKWARD as the cursor and the direction of the character and the motion of the camera are all at odds with each other. It only gets WORSE in combat when your mouse should be busy pointing and clicking little peons to their doom. 2) You can use the WSAD layout to move the camera/character. However, unlike every other game on the planet where you look with the MOUSE and you move with the KEYS, this game is exactly the OPPOSITE. You look with the KEYS and you move with the MOUSE. It's just bloody weird. However, should you decide to move with the keys (because WS moves you forward/backwards) you will quickly become frustrated with something that boggles my mind: you cannot strafe. Period. Instead of AD being left/right strafe, it moves the bloody camera. Worse, every time you go to MOVE the camera, it bobs in an odd direction as if saying 'no you idiot look that way' before acquiescing, meaning that even in the middle of combat it feels like your camera is trying to bludgeon you in the eyeballs, as if motion sickness is how they decided to add challenge to the game. 3) You can use WS to move forward and backwards and use the mouse on the edges of the screen to move the camera. Kind of cool. Very, very bad in combat as you generally want to be CLICKING on things. See, your character has this notion that he only wants to attack in one direction. If you are say, swinging forward and you want to swing at a guy behind you, your best chance is to CLICK on him, mainly because holding the back button and hitting attack again will simply keep you swinging in the same direction while the guy behind you debates how best to sterilize his sharp pointy instrument before sticking it wholesale up your rectum. 4) By far the most comforting option for playing the game is to hold the alt button down, which binds the mouse into mouselook view, which allows you to control the camera with the mouse. AWESOME! Except who wants to hold the alt button for the entire f***ing game?! On top of that, you can't do that because of the aforementioned combat problem - you have to click on things! However, if you get into the habit of holding alt to control the camera, as soon as you ENTER combat and start using your mouse to dish out high levels of pain, you quickly realize that you've lost ALL OF YOUR CONTROL OVER THE CAMERA, leaving you as helpless as a baby kitten in that flashy outfit. So any time you enter combat you have to rely on one of the OTHER methods for controlling the camera, all of which SUCK. The greatest problem with this game on the PC, however, is that you cannot, in any way shape or form, customize the controls except to set sensitivity settings and invert the mouse (which I don't even know why they included since you can't LOOK up or down). However, throughout the entire game, your camera will get stuck on things and then randomly try to 'catch up' once it is unstuck, meaning that one second your trying to turn your blood character to the right (because you can't strafe remember?) but the camera is stuck, so you back up a little only to have the camera spin wildly out of control once you DO come unstuck. All in all, while I would LOVE to play this game, I wasn't able to stomach more than about an hour of this, which was just long enough to realize that I wasn't going to be able to get use to the camera/movement configuration. It is quite simply comical. Cromethus