This review contains spoilers
This game was one of the biggest disappointments in my gaming life.
With Bloodborne being my uncontested favourite game of all time for many years, I was fully prepared for Elden Ring to dethrone it.
Let's start with the positives; the character creator is fantastic, one of the best i've seen in a video game to date - sure, the options you have aren't too extensive, but the sliders really carry the bulk. I am someone who loves getting immersed with my character. I managed to create a basic identical likeness to myself for my first character, with alot of time spent tweaking it, and it was really fun to do so. It's very cool to be able to achieve something like that. I also used the character creator to make an Orc character and Tauren (World of Warcraft inspired obviously). The fact these things are even possible is a testament to it. Obviously the other Souls games have all had these sliders, but there's something about them that always gives them this uncanny look that just never looks right from all angles? Here they really managed to nail it though.
No shock to anyone, moment to moment combat is fantastic here. We're dealing with a FromSoft game, of course it feels that way - weapons really have some nice fucking weight to them, and the sound design is immersive and well executed. This extends to the major boss fights of the game, at least those I managed to complete! The last boss I defeated was the giant twat with two swords, don't remember his name. (Starscourge Radahn, that was it). Most of them are fun fights that are well presented and satisfying to defeat (especially the first Legacy Dungeon, that was fantastic, long live Godrick).
Unfortunately for me, thats where the praises from me come to an end I think. FromSoft made the ambitious yet unfortunately foolish decision to make this game an open world and it definitely takes away - not because its not possible, but because they were too lazy to see it through.
When you start your adventure you will feel like a kid again - walking out into that vast open world just spoiled for choice and unable to decide where to go first. It feels absolutely fantastic - I was certain this game was going to be my favourite game of all time. Unfortunately, this quickly diminishes by even the second area of the first zone of the game, when you start to realise that every single cave or dungeon is a copy of another with the same enemies and the same bosses - either a boss you already fought x2 with trash balancing and you get ganked, or a regular enemy with its health scaled up higher. It's lazy, par of the course, and ultimately just immersion breaking. It's trash for any game developer and unfortunately FromSoft does not get a pass from this.
I have seen many people make the argument that you can just ignore these and do the main story content, but I disagree - the whole SPECTACLE of a FromSoft game is the joy of discovery, exploring and finding what is around every single corner, feeling it all immaculately hand-crafted. With this being an open world game, that feeling is completely hit or miss. When it's done right it's done fantastically, and when it's done lazily it's just run of the mill, which is unfortunately more often than not. If I am skipping everything I pass because it's generic trash just to get to the good stuff, that to me is not a Game of the Year. The joy of these games for me is doing everything it has to offer, and everything it has to offer is not always fun.
Another major gripe I have with this game and ultimately what brought me to my conclusion to just stop playing altogether, was the terrible balancing. I understand this is a controversial topic, being that yes, the game is entirely completable naked with a caveman club if you want to do it that way and if you're skilled enough to - that's fucking dope, well played to those who have done it. But having completed DS3 and Bloodborne, I know what fair and enjoyable difficulty is meant to feel like. Toward what I presume is the second half of the game, FromSoft realised they had gone way too big with their scope and noticed that stats start diminishing in their usefulness. So what did they do? Go back and tweak things? Maybe adjust the scaling caps? Nah. Fuck that, let's just have everything deal so much damage that even if you're fully stacked on Vitality you die in one hit.
Sure, its a skill issue, I have no trouble admitting that - there are some bosses in Bloodborne I never defeated solo because I am not good enough at the game, and that's fine for me. What the problem is here is that it feels cheap - things hit you with poor telegraphing or you don't even get a chance to heal from a mistake because you were literally oneshot, but it's not even uncommon - toward the back end of this game it's every fight and just regular moves that they spam, not even big notable moves like Ludwig's Moonlight Greatsword blast.
I have heard that magic is more fun in this game than in others, and at some point I hope to revisit and play this game fresh with a mage build instead of my usual fighter melee build, but honestly no matter how many times I respecced every melee build just felt samey. The magic builds would have to be fantastically different to get my attention. I wanted to love this game, I really did - it was good enough to take over 70 hours of my life but unfortunately no longer.
With Bloodborne being my uncontested favourite game of all time for many years, I was fully prepared for Elden Ring to dethrone it.
Let's start with the positives; the character creator is fantastic, one of the best i've seen in a video game to date - sure, the options you have aren't too extensive, but the sliders really carry the bulk. I am someone who loves getting immersed with my character. I managed to create a basic identical likeness to myself for my first character, with alot of time spent tweaking it, and it was really fun to do so. It's very cool to be able to achieve something like that. I also used the character creator to make an Orc character and Tauren (World of Warcraft inspired obviously). The fact these things are even possible is a testament to it. Obviously the other Souls games have all had these sliders, but there's something about them that always gives them this uncanny look that just never looks right from all angles? Here they really managed to nail it though.
No shock to anyone, moment to moment combat is fantastic here. We're dealing with a FromSoft game, of course it feels that way - weapons really have some nice fucking weight to them, and the sound design is immersive and well executed. This extends to the major boss fights of the game, at least those I managed to complete! The last boss I defeated was the giant twat with two swords, don't remember his name. (Starscourge Radahn, that was it). Most of them are fun fights that are well presented and satisfying to defeat (especially the first Legacy Dungeon, that was fantastic, long live Godrick).
Unfortunately for me, thats where the praises from me come to an end I think. FromSoft made the ambitious yet unfortunately foolish decision to make this game an open world and it definitely takes away - not because its not possible, but because they were too lazy to see it through.
When you start your adventure you will feel like a kid again - walking out into that vast open world just spoiled for choice and unable to decide where to go first. It feels absolutely fantastic - I was certain this game was going to be my favourite game of all time. Unfortunately, this quickly diminishes by even the second area of the first zone of the game, when you start to realise that every single cave or dungeon is a copy of another with the same enemies and the same bosses - either a boss you already fought x2 with trash balancing and you get ganked, or a regular enemy with its health scaled up higher. It's lazy, par of the course, and ultimately just immersion breaking. It's trash for any game developer and unfortunately FromSoft does not get a pass from this.
I have seen many people make the argument that you can just ignore these and do the main story content, but I disagree - the whole SPECTACLE of a FromSoft game is the joy of discovery, exploring and finding what is around every single corner, feeling it all immaculately hand-crafted. With this being an open world game, that feeling is completely hit or miss. When it's done right it's done fantastically, and when it's done lazily it's just run of the mill, which is unfortunately more often than not. If I am skipping everything I pass because it's generic trash just to get to the good stuff, that to me is not a Game of the Year. The joy of these games for me is doing everything it has to offer, and everything it has to offer is not always fun.
Another major gripe I have with this game and ultimately what brought me to my conclusion to just stop playing altogether, was the terrible balancing. I understand this is a controversial topic, being that yes, the game is entirely completable naked with a caveman club if you want to do it that way and if you're skilled enough to - that's fucking dope, well played to those who have done it. But having completed DS3 and Bloodborne, I know what fair and enjoyable difficulty is meant to feel like. Toward what I presume is the second half of the game, FromSoft realised they had gone way too big with their scope and noticed that stats start diminishing in their usefulness. So what did they do? Go back and tweak things? Maybe adjust the scaling caps? Nah. Fuck that, let's just have everything deal so much damage that even if you're fully stacked on Vitality you die in one hit.
Sure, its a skill issue, I have no trouble admitting that - there are some bosses in Bloodborne I never defeated solo because I am not good enough at the game, and that's fine for me. What the problem is here is that it feels cheap - things hit you with poor telegraphing or you don't even get a chance to heal from a mistake because you were literally oneshot, but it's not even uncommon - toward the back end of this game it's every fight and just regular moves that they spam, not even big notable moves like Ludwig's Moonlight Greatsword blast.
I have heard that magic is more fun in this game than in others, and at some point I hope to revisit and play this game fresh with a mage build instead of my usual fighter melee build, but honestly no matter how many times I respecced every melee build just felt samey. The magic builds would have to be fantastically different to get my attention. I wanted to love this game, I really did - it was good enough to take over 70 hours of my life but unfortunately no longer.
david_gamer
4 months ago
The only games out of these 7 to share the same combat and gameplay are Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls games, and they all share the name Souls, but Bloodborne and Sekiro didn't, which means nothing would indicate that Elden Ring would break the "tradition" (if you will) of being different from Souls, based on it's new IP like what the case was with both Sekiro and Bloodborne. Now imagine a triangle where the distance between each corner symbolizes all the differences in gameplay, and imagine Dark Souls and Sekiro each being alone in two of the three corners, and then imagine Elden Ring in the third corner... that's a nice way I think to explain how I wanted the game to be different without going extremely in-depth. I didn't want Elden Ring to be very similar to either Dark Souls nor Sekiro, unfortunately the game ended up right beside Dark Souls on the triangle spectrum.