Elden Ring, THE long-awaited game for years by FromSoft and George R. R. Martin. Compared to all of the games released this year, none will hit the Metacritic score Elden Ring did, which I believe, it never deserved, thanks to many issues like the frame rate on PC, which is lower than the standards of FromSoftware and their fans with every release and every bit of info they showed.
It’s hard to believe that George R. R. Martin would stop writing for Game of Thrones and instead write for FromSoftware’s newest game, only for the story to not be as great as Bloodborne, Dark Souls 1, or Dark Souls 3. It is a great shame, but still, it is what it is.
Table of Contents
GAMEPLAY
As I mentioned before, this is just Dark Souls 3 but with more mechanics and new things, so the combat alone should make you feel that you just bought Dark Souls 3 again.
It doesn’t add any new things overall, except for the new summons which you get from talking to NPCs or just buying them from merchants, they are good for situations where you might get overwhelmed, and they will take out some enemies on their own so they are useful, and of course you can jump, which makes everything even easier and you can cheese a lot of the enemies with jumping alone by making backstabs easier, the AI is also not that smart which makes it even easier.
But it’s not hard to defeat anything in this game as it is, by far, the easiest souls game in the series, made even more apparent by the fact it doesn’t have any death penalty which means you can fight something, die, come back, take your runes, and teleport out of there, that’s right there is absolutely nothing to fear in this, as I have beaten the tutorial boss myself, which I will get into in a bit, I have never hesitated to fight anything, in fact in my first encounter with Tree Sentinel, which went pretty badly as he proceeded to kill me immediately, I was able to run and get my ruins, go to the nearest Lost Grace and rest, which resets him into his starting location, there really nothing to fear and that is, sadly, very disappointing.
The bosses are the only good thing that goes from each new title; they really can’t go wrong with them, especially bosses like Godfrey and Maliketh; they just keep getting better with every game.
WORLD
The world is beautiful, especially when you leave the cave in the tutorial and set your gaze on the beautiful environment that FromSoft created. Nearly every route is interesting with their own special NPCs that go back to the Roundtable Hold after you finish their quests or simply talk to them a few times and a good example is Rodrika who after finishing her quest will make you able to upgrade your summons, and of course, there are roaming bosses.
Exploration is even better here since it is an open world. It really allows FromSoft to reward players better with Golden Runes and Smith Stones all over. You can even get a couple of +2 Smith Stones and a lot of normal Smith Stones and get a +4 weapon at the start without even beating Tree Sentinel, it really shows what these developers can do with a bigger map to do these type of things,
The Roundtable Hold is also a pretty good hub world. While in my opinion not as good as Majula or Firelink Shrine, it still has a lot of interesting NPCs to talk to and, of course adding the NPCs you find in the world, and you can teleport to it at any time without stopping at a Lost Grace, overall it’s good with many unexplored locations that open up the more you play.
VERDICT
Overall I would say Elden Ring is a good game, but I just wish that they tried something new instead of sticking with the same old formula.
If you are looking for something unique and you have played a souls game before then this game is definitely not for you.
