This is a review for people like me, who are intimidated by the reputation for difficulty but are still willing to consider it because of all those stellar ratings.
OVERVIEW
The plot, such as it is, is Lord of the Rings, except you want to seize the One Ring for yourself so you can conquer Middle-EarthTheLands Between. In typical video game fashion, the ring has been split into multiple pieces and you have to find and murder the owners of each piece.
From a gameplay perspective, this means you explore ruins and dungeons, kill enemies, get better equipment and magic, level up, and repeat many times. There’s no other plot to speak of. NPC’s exist, but they mostly spout obscure and unintelligible gibberish.
Developer From Software is infamous for offering only Hard Mode with no lower difficulty or accessibility options, and they did the same here. If you like to play on Story Mode, find Normal Mode in other games very challenging, or need accessibility settings beyond controller remapping, From Software doesn’t want your business and you can stop reading now.
THE INTRO
This is not a noob-friendly game, starting with character creation. You start with a class selector, with eight different class options. Each class has a bunch of numbers and symbols, but there’s no explanation of what any of those symbols mean or what abilities that class has.
Then you pick a starting “boon”, from about fifteen options. What does this do? Is it important? Also no explanation.
The combat tutorial is a brazen “fuck you” to noobs, because they stick it off the side where you can easily just walk right past it, and even when you go through it it barely explains how any of the systems work.
After the tutorial, same story. As you gain power, you pick stats to level up and pick weapons and equipment. When you do this, Elden Ring’s developers give you a stats screen full of tiny, barely-legible numbers.
Fortunately, my husband is a Dark Souls fan who had already played the game. He helped me pick a class, pointed out the tutorial that I wandered past, explained how blocking works, pointed out more stuff when it was clear I didn’t understand some system, and gave me pointers on how to pick stats to level up.
Having someone to help was absolutely essential. Without my husband’s advice, I would have given up in frustration within the first two hours.
THE GOOD PARTS. THEY’RE REALLY GOOD
Once past that initial hurdle, things got a lot better.
The world design is S-tier. You walk (or ride) around, and look at the environment, and you can be sure that no matter which direction you go you will find something. Quest markers and checklists are nonexistent. Points of interest are common and clearly telegraphed, while the path to get there is not always obvious, so you have to look around and figure out what to do.
No matter what the point of interest is, what you find there will almost always be combat.
Combat being the only objective sounds like it would be repetitive, but it isn’t. By varying the size and shape of battle arenas and the types of enemy groupings, Elden Ring makes encounters become completely different even when facing enemies you’ve seen many times before.
Elden Ring keeps this variety up for the whole game, which is truly remarkable for how big it is.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have much to find that’s not combat. You’d expect that in a hundred-hour game they would liven things up a bit, but there are no towns, no puzzle shrines, no suspiciously placed rocks that hide collectibles, few platforming challenges, and no hidden paths to jawdropping views. Even so, the content that does exist is pretty great.
BUT IS IT TOO HARD?
Well, no and yes. And ultimately, yes.
It took a few hours to get the basics down, including some advice from my husband. After that, I would characterize it as “challenging but fair”. Even regular mobs deal a lot of damage and you have a very limited supply of healing potions. Traps and ambushes are common.
But it will normally not take you more than a few tries to take out a group of regular enemies, and if it’s too hard you can just move on and come back to slaughter them later. At least for a while.
The bosses are a different story. The boss difficulty is not reliably matched to the difficulty of the dungeon it’s in. Sometimes the bosses are easily dispatched, but often they are absurdly, unfairly difficult. The game seems to be expecting you to try bosses dozens of times before you win.
Many games have implemented this sort of challenge design well, but Elden Ring isn’t one of them. Instead of instantly respawning you near where you failed, the game routinely sticks respawn points several rooms away from the boss chamber, the battles are long with no mid-battle checkpoints, and the death animations and load times are glacial.
I started timing one these battles, and found that for every twenty seconds of fighting the boss, I spent twenty-eight seconds on death animations and loading screens, and another fifty on walking from the respawn point back to the boss chamber. What a waste of time.
Eventually, I gave up on even trying to fight the bosses. Instead, I would clear the rest of the dungeon, unlock the boss chamber, and come back fifteen or twenty hours later to fight the boss. Occasionally, this resulted in a truly epic battle where I survived with a sliver of health. Sometimes, it was a tough but fair challenge. But it most often resulted in a pushover.
Then I got near the endgame (I think), and the game collapsed. I had done every bit of content I could find, and no matter where I went everything was too hard. The five headed dragon guarding the fourth shard? The remaining optional overworld bosses I had skipped?. The optional minidungeon I had skipped? The next legacy dungeon blocking the critical path? Everything was too hard, in every direction.
That was when I gave up, over a hundred hours in.
I probably *could* have cleared it by playing the game’s way, trying each challenge dozens of times, spending the majority of my playtime on loading screens and walking from respawn points to bosses and tough enemies. Or I could have embraced the fact that this is technically a JRPG and ground mobs for hours until I got another twenty levels. But why? That’s not fun.
BUY OR NO BUY?
Overall, Elden Ring was a bizarre mix of really spectacular top-tier content and frustrating bullshit. This world design is everything I’ve wanted from an open world, so much better than other titles, and the combat is often fair and well-designed.
But the hostility to players who don’t already understand the systems and a terribly implemented “try over and over until you get it right” approach to boss design are really bad.
So should you play it? Well, if
you can mitigate the atrocious load times because you have a current-gen console or high-specs PC. Statistically, you probably don’t, but maybe you do.
You have a friend who already played the game and is willing to advise you.
You’re ok with giving up and not finishing the game.
like shit
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