I've been playing it recently myself, about 26 hours.
TBH it is a very good game and easily better than Dark Souls 2 just on pure gamefeel alone (the movement and weapon swinging in that game feels kinda gross honestly), but I was hoping it was going to be even better based on what I'd heard.
There are parts of the game that I feel repeat the same mistakes of DS2. Farron Keep is absolutely miserable, those Elder Ghru are honestly worse than those assholes from the Valley of Defilement bc at least those were mostly ignorable. That one room at the bottom of Irythill Dungeon with like over 10 jailers just makes me ask "what the fuck were you THINKING???". Deacons of the Deep also feels like a DS2 boss (i.e "let's put a bunch of enemies clumped together! challenge!"). The sense of progression also feels a lot more like that game because the bonfires are so much closer to one another, unlike the first game where getting to a bonfire felt like a journey (although to be fair with how much stronger the enemies are in this game this may have ultimately been a good decision). Having to go back to the fire keeper to level up also really breaks with the flow IMO, and feels like it was prioritizing another callback to Demon's Souls over good game design, i.e considering how the structure of Demon's Souls is different and has a different flow from the other games and why that wouldn't work as well for DaS3.
Another problem is that a lot of the bigger callbacks/homages to bosses and prior areas just makes me think they were better than this game's. High Wall of Lothric reminds me of Boletaria Castle, but I genuinely prefered that area. Irythill Dungeon is clearly Latria 2.0 but Latria was a lot more memorable and had a better atmosphere. The Storm King fight in Demon's Souls was much better than the fight with Yhorm, which is a huge letdown given how awesome he looks in the trailers and opening cinematic (I messed up Siegward's quest so he didn't fight him with me, that would have probably made it at least a little better).
I can also already tell it has a different issue of its own, which is the linearity. I honestly feel like having a world more similar to DaS1 would have gone a long way with this game, even DaS2 is more open-ended even if its map makes no sense.
Of course I still have quite a lot of the game left (and I won't be able to finish it for a while since I've been playing it on my brother's computer, and he's leaving tomorrow), but so far I'd say I still prefer Dark Souls and Demon's Souls over this game, but it's better than DS2 because the level layouts are more interesting, the combat is much better and the bosses on average have been a lot better so far.
