For reference, the only other Souls game I've played is Dark Souls 1. Anyway, very good game. If I would give DS a 8/10, Bloodborne would probably be an 8.5/10. I should say that my experience of Dark Souls is a little biased because I didn't upgrade any weapons until around Anor Londo (I can't remember if I did it to beat Ornstein and Smough or not) out of paranoia of wasting weapon resources and going down garbage weapon upgrade paths. Eventually I spent an hour or two on the wiki and immediately upgraded my Claymore to like +7 or +8 lol.
Pluses:
The faster pace of combat (and the game in general) made exploration and traversing environments less of a slog.
It doesn't overstay its welcome. As much as I liked Dark Souls, everything after Anor Londo was kind of like "we're still doing this, eh?" Bloodborne ends just before it would start losing appeal/steam imo.
I like the simplified weapon upgrade system, as well as the weapon transformation gimmick. By investing into two weapons (Hunter's Axe and Ludwig's Holy Blade), I effectively had four weapons to choose from depending on the enemy/situation. And I was switching between the four modes actively until the end of the game.
More shortcuts for immediate runbacks to almost all bosses was greatly appreciated, and losing to a boss felt way less discouraging.
I don't really like the Lovecraft aesthetic generally, but I actually dug it in this game. I am usually not a fan of disgusting horror type things, but the tone, the aesthetic, and the fact that I had power to stand up to them in this game made this something of an exception for me. It just came together in an engrossing, but not disgusting or horrifying way.
All the humanoid bosses are an absolute highlight.
Minuses:
My biggest pet peeve is how loud the enemies are screaming all the fucking time in this game. If I pick it up again, I'll probably mess with the volume sliders so I don't have to hear all this shrieking every time I kill an enemy.
Fucking winter lanterns.
Fucking paralyzing brain suckers.
Those god damn anchor sharks. I honestly believe these enemies are harder to beat than most bosses in this game (largely because of the environments you fight them in, though).
This game has been on my backlog for years and I'm glad I finally played in. My next venture will most likely be Dark Souls 2 (unless you count Jedi Fallen Order as a Souls type game), but I need to take a break from dark/depressing aesthetics for a little before I do it.