Game Review | Elden Ring
Over one hundred and twenty hours of play later, I’m ready to bring you my spoiler-free review of Elden Ring. I have been excited for Elden Ring for so freaking long, it’s unbelievable. I’m going to cut the chase and just say that this is my favorite Soulsborne game to date, just barely beating out Bloodborne. It had everything I wanted, though I do have a few small complaints that I want to mention in this review. Everything’s going to be spoiler-free, so you can read this review and make a decision without worrying about having the story ruined for you!
Some Classic Souls Stuff
Elden Ring is essentially the result of FromSoftware’s many years of creating Souls games to great success (other than the diseased Souls child we don’t really talk about all that much). They took all of the best parts of the Souls games, improved on them, and then populated a massive open world with the resulting content. As per usual, there are tough enemies and bosses, punishments for failure, and unique areas to explore. You have the usual weapon scaling, you have rings, though they’re now talismans, and there are even some returning souls weapons that many people should recognize if they’ve played the previous games (including an old favorite of mine). If you’ve played and enjoyed the Souls titles, then you’re going to find a comfortable familiarity in Elden Ring, with several improvements.
So Much Content
Seriously, there is an insane amount of content in this game. After about a hundred hours, I beat the game and then went back to clean up any content I’d missed, only to discover entire areas I had completely missed. It was like discovering Ash Lake on my second playthrough of Dark Souls but multiplied by a thousand. I still feel like I may well be missing something big, even though I’m confident I’ve searched every nook and cranny of the world. It’s crazy because a huge complaint I have with open-world games is that they tend to be big simply for the sake of being big. With Elden Ring, the world is big because it has to be in order to fit all of its content in there. Every square inch of the map has something, and some of those somethings are entire dungeons.
I don’t want to use this review to take a dump on another game, but I want to mention that I’m one of the people who did not enjoy Breath of the Wild. It had nothing that I was looking for in a Zelda game and the world truly felt big for the sake of being big. Much of it felt empty, the four “dungeons” were unenjoyable and trivial, and the main bosses were uninteresting. It didn’t have anything that I wanted from a Zelda title, with the DLC being the only part of the game that I truly enjoyed. Cut to the content in Elden Ring and it’s the complete opposite: they knew what players loved about the Souls games and just gave us more of that! The world is filled with areas that are reminiscent of my first time playing Dark Souls. It doesn’t feel like a diversion from the Soulsborne genre, it just feels like a bigger Dark Souls game, and that’s exactly what I wanted.
Easy Mode
I want to point out that there is an easy mode for this game. I think that they did it in a way that’s not going to be too controversial among avid fans. Essentially, you’re able to summon spirits with ashes that you can upgrade. The spirits are cool—I tried out a few and found some that I really enjoyed—but they definitely make the experience a lot easier. They’re great for new players, but veterans will find that the game is considerably less challenging when you use spirit summoning. I’m hoping that newer players will try out spirits for their first run if they really need to, but will eventually dive into the full Souls experience and take out the bosses all on their own for a real challenge.
That said, though, I did find the bosses to be somewhat easy even without spirit summoning. Only a couple of them took me more than a handful of tries, and many of them I took down on my first try. This is hard to gauge, though—have I just gotten really good at Souls games from beating Dark Souls 1 and Dark Souls 3 north of a hundred times, or were the bosses in this game truly just really easy? I even tried a build that isn’t typical for me, hoping to try something new, and still found the bosses to be fairly simple to tackle. Their designs were really cool, but I only felt genuinely challenged a handful of times. I’m not sure if this is technically a complaint or not—it’s hard to tell because I don’t know if the bosses are actually easier or if I’m just more skilled than I used to be.
I’m not trying to make this sound like a shady brag—I genuinely think that the bosses in this game were less challenging than they were in the previous titles, save maybe Dark Souls 2 where everything’s a pushover.
Minor Complaints
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I do have some minor complaints to discuss. The first thing I want to mention is that a couple of the bosses are kinda janky. I found this to be especially true for duo bosses, where the camera really works against you. This stood out to me because Dark Souls 3 had an awesome duo boss in its Ringed City DLC where everything was handled really well. It’s one of my favorite boss fights in Dark Souls 3, in fact. So when I fight duo bosses in Elden Ring and feel like the game is working against me, it’s really just frustrating. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does, it’s more annoying than fun or challenging. This might be something that gets fixed, as I’ve seen others making the same complaints as well, though I’m not sure exactly how they’d fix it since it seems like there’d need to be boss, camera, and even boss arena overhauls for some of these duo bosses.
Another complaint I want to mention is with the mount. I liked mounted combat, for the most part—you have to treat it like jousting and you’ll have quite a bit of fun. However, Torrent’s stats seem pretty static. If the steed does upgrade as you level up or progress, the upgrades are really negligible. This can be really frustrating in the later parts of the game—especially for bosses where horseback is practically required—because while you can take hits and dodge out of the way with speed and grace, your steed still feels like it has one hit point. Getting thrown from your horse because it didn’t dodge in the right direction or is easily one-shotted just isn’t a lot of fun. I’d like to see some upgrades for Torrent in the future, or some additional moves added to the steed, at least. I’d love to be able to shoulder check with Torrent like you see the Night’s Cavalry enemies do.
Legacy Dungeons
There are areas in Elden Ring that are known as Legacy Dungeons. These Legacy Dungeons are absolutely my favorite part of the game because they feel the most like classic Dark Souls. They’re exactly what I want when I pick up a Souls title. You move through areas, on foot, and strive to get from Point A to Point B. You fight enemies along the way and, if you die, you’ve gotta do it all again. Sometimes you unlock shortcuts that make the run-through a little easier.
There are enough Legacy Dungeons in this game to constitute a typical Souls title, so when you add the fact that they’re spread out across a vast, explorable world that is rich with content, it becomes obvious why a typical playthrough will take you more than one hundred hours to complete.
Parkour!
One last thing I want to compliment for this game before I get to my overall rating: platforming. The platforming controls are a little janky, but that’s only annoying for a couple of specific areas that remind me of the well in Dark Souls 2. The beauty of the parkour aspects of this game lies in the fact that you can and should go anywhere. Do you see a roof below that railing? Jump over it and see what’s down there. You might find a whole other area you haven’t touched, yet! Some really powerful items and important locations are hidden behind parts of the map you’d never think to go to. Sometimes it feels like you’re platforming in a place you aren’t supposed to, but then you find a boss room on the other side and you realize that you weren’t breaking the game in an unintended way; no, you were doing exactly what the developers wanted you to do.
It was so much fun to discover many of these areas on my own. Once I realized that every nook and cranny of the map could hold a secret, I took that to heart and tried everything. There’s a lot of cool stuff if you just take a risk and jump off that edge.
Overall Rating
I think it’s going to come as no surprise when I say that Elden Ring is getting five stars from me. This game was just excellent. Much of it reminded me of my first playthrough of Dark Souls; there’s so much to do and discover! I had a ton of fun with this game and I cannot wait to see what’s out there for me in my second journey through The Lands Between. I also, of course, can’t wait for someone to come out with a six-hour-long lore video that explains what the heck just happened.
Conclusion
After years of waiting, Elden Ring is finally here; I couldn’t be more ecstatic to have this game available to me, now. I replay Souls titles constantly, so having another one that I can replay in my repertoire (and one that is so huge) is exciting. I’m excited to work through my second journey and to try out another ending, so I’m going to go ahead and get this review wrapped up. Time to get back to The Lands Between!