An Elden Ring review in the year of our Elden Lord, 2024? Yes! Because it took me a while to play it.
While I only have limited experience in the “Soul’s” genre, that being ‘Dark Souls 3’ and now ‘Elden Ring’, they have cemented themselves as some of my favourite gaming experiences. Mastering a video game’s mechanics is a very satisfying feeling and whilst I have certainly not mastered Elden Ring, I felt myself getting better as I progressed and continued playing. This to me is the quintessential experience of a video game.
Elden Ring drops you almost immediately into the open world and at that point go nuts. The open world is definitely the strong aspect of this game and that itself is enough to sink hours upon hours with multiple playthroughs. Every nook and cranny could be hiding a secret item or enemy, the world even has different encounters depending on the time of day. The world is teeming with things to do and, more importantly, things to kill.
There is a correct path to follow, but I found myself exploring as much as I could and going to whatever destination I could find. If it’s your first time playing, this is the way to play. I was discovering side missions and NPCs that gave me great rewards for doing certain things or clearing particular locations. Or you could just kill the NPCs and take their loot and then go and clear the location, this game doesn’t penalise you for the choices you make. It fully embraces them. Kill that merchant? They drop a “ball bearing” that you can give to another NPC to access their wares. Kill someone you meet, sure you lock out their questline but you get a dope weapon for it.
Build diversity is a huge part of this game too, one that I plan on taking advantage of and currently I am planning my second playthrough. There are a wide variety of weapons and spells to choose from, each requiring certain stat distributions, meaning the combat in your next run could be entirely different from your last. The enemies themselves do not change but the vast different in playstyles given to the player can make them feel brand new each time.
Weapon skills play a role in the combat of this game and I found myself collecting as many different weapons as I could, not to use them, just to see what their skills were. For example there is a sword that you lift in the air and smash in the ground to summon a wave of fire that heals you! Another is a Great Axe that you smash into the ground and cause the earth to shatter twice.
Now I’ve had my nerd-out about how much I loved the game, I have to now talk about the Elephant sized negatives I found about the game. While these do not take away how much I enjoyed my experience they were aspects I kept thinking needed improvement. Starting with some magics you could acquire throughout the course of the game.
Now, I didn’t dabble too much into magic during my playthrough as beating my enemies with a massive Greatsword seemed more appealing to me at the time. However, I did use some of the draconic spells and found them very underwhelming, which was a disappointment especially considering how you get them. If you couldn’t guess, draconic spells come from defeating dragons throughout the game and collecting their hearts to then unlock the spells.
They had very limited range and a very long wind-up time and with how fast paced the game plays I found them more of a hinderance than a boon. Bare in mind, this could be a skill issue. The animations for them are amazing, you summon the dragon above your head and breath fire in an arc around you as an example. I hope for my later playthrough that not all magic feels like that, but I doubt it does.
Dungeons were a little disappointing. I got very bored of the repetitiveness of them pretty quickly and felt like they could of use much more love. The layouts were all very “samey” and the bosses were reused A LOT. Particularly these statues of Dog/Cat’s that I saw way too often. I know the gameplay of Dark Soul’s 3 and Elden Ring are very different, but I couldn’t help but compare the two.
In Dark Souls every boss was memorable and felt like an obstacle you had to overcome through skill and learning their moves. In Elden Ring the open world bosses felt very re-used and exhausting at times. This does not count for any of the story/unique bosses which were all phenomenal and I can’t wait to experience them again. Especially Malekith, he must suffer as he made me suffer.
I just feel in a game where the open world is so important to how the game feels and plays, the open world bosses and dungeons should of reflected that and each one should of been unique.
Dragons were also incredibly disappointing in Elden Ring, except for two particular lightning dragons which were unbelievable. The arenas, the animations, the bosses themselves all were stunning. However, I remember in Dark Souls dragons being a pain in the ass. In Elden Ring though, I simply stood by their feet and slashed and it was over.
Questing is my main pain point, while no other Souls games had quest logs or a way to keep tabs on what NPCs have tasked you with, they also didn’t have a vast open world with so much to do and keep track of. There are many NPC quests through the game and a lot of them task you with going to various places across the map. Some of them very late into the game, with no way of keeping track of that.
This wouldn’t of been much of an issue for me if it was a simple matter of exploration and completing the quests that way, but you can be completely locked out of finishing some quests if you progress to certain points in the story or complete certain actions. In order to make sure I got the full experience and finish as many questlines as I could, a lot of my playtime involved looking into the wiki.
Finally, the story of Elden Ring may be there for the hardcore fans who delve deep into the lore but as a casual player it felt very disconnected and scrambled. The basic story was there though, become the Elden Lord, but I had a lot of questions and not many answers throughout playing. This aspect doesn’t take away from my enjoyment as I simply played for the gameplay and not for a full-on story experience.
I enjoyed my time in this game, from the bad to the good and I look forward to future playthroughs and I especially look forward to future titles from this developer. I think they will have a permanent slot in my library from now on. Well played From Software, well played.
9 Elden Lords out of 10.
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