DARK SOULS™ II
Worth it · Multiplayer · 2014
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $39.99.
- Length
- 43h
- Value
- $0.93/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT, ATI Radeon HD 5870, 12 GB of storage. Windows only.
Developed by FROM SOFTWARE, DARK SOULS™ II is the highly anticipated sequel to the gruelling 2011 breakout hit Dark Souls. The unique old-school action RPG experience captivated imaginations of gamers worldwide with incredible challenge and intense emotional reward.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
November 2016 is where it bottomed out, at $6.24. It has been discounted 28 times in the 13 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales.
Value puts it in the top 3 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 95 percent. Among the games that feel like it, DARK SOULS™ III ($59.99, scores 77) beats it on value, while it beats DARK SOULS™ II: Scholar of the First Sin ($39.99, scores 63).
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 11 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written May 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 51 percent of the 1,633 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 43 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 120, 2.8 times as much.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
The drop-off
94% start to 4% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
197 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
It might be better than SOTFS, it feels like there is less ♥♥♥ ganks in this game. Besides that generally a lot has improved from DS:PTDE, lots of good QOL changes and better menus. DS2 has a little bit of sauce that the others don't quite have, it often has these comedic moments that none of the other games have, but it doesn't feel like they were trying to be funny. All this as well as a couple things like...
Haaa, Dark Souls 2, the poor little ugly duckling. Ironically, I spent more time on Dark Souls 2 than on the other two. Look, I know Dark Souls 2 has a whole bunch of problems. I know the gameplay and the hitboxes can get frustrating at times. Some bosses made me piss blood. The level design also feels a bit random. Unlike Dark Souls 1, the map is not beautifully interconnected, but on top of that, some areas...
Japanese trash for insecure Western teenagers and, specifically, female streamers trying to prove to them that they're "true gamers." Like every Soulsborne, really.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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DARK SOULS™ II scores 72/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/236430/dark-souls-iiThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 16, price as of Sep 22.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.