Elden Ring Review
The game itself:
Elden Ring is a fantastic, immersive and expansive game. One of the greatest games of our time, made to be a one time purchase not plagued with micro- or macro- transactions. Although it is a very difficult game, it is rewarding and nevertheless worthwhile; an experience that truly respects your time.
The possibilities
There are limitless combinations and ways of playing the game. There are 309 weapons in the game spread out over 32 weapon classes and 171 magic spells divided into 70 sorceries and 101 incantations. The game is non-linear meaning you do not have to play in any specific order, you can reach the mid-game areas of the game from the very beginning. The game is meant to be explored at your own pace, with around 10 major areas and many sub-areas, dungeons and secrets to be discovered. It is a game that truly allows the player to play into their explorative side, with many large areas and bosses that you simply would miss if you didn’t explore.
The design
It has a really well crafted story, written by the one and only George R.R. Martin. It sports world and character design that grants awe at sight, and equally great soundtrack and voice acting. The writing for this game has inspired me to pursue writing myself even and has gotten me into other works of George R.R. Martin, such as Game of Thrones.
The Graphics
As many have written about the game before me, it is raw graphical fidelity is not impressive compared to newer games. This does not mean it is by any means bad, but it is nothing revolutionary. But the area it excels is art style, it looks great despite it’s graphics and manages to shine in a sea of graphically impressive games.
The difficulty
The learning curve is steep but most that play through it till the end do not regret it. Due to its nonlinear nature, if something is too difficult you can come back to it later. It also has a leveling system that allows you to get progressively better stat-wise, although you still can’t beat the game truly through stats at least in most cases.
PC optimization
The keyboard controls featured in elden ring are awful and are such a bad translation from the controller layout, and the pc optimization is just as awful as FromSoftware is known for. Although MUCH better than on launch, it is still fairly choppy at times and will struggle on weaker computers. For context I am running a rtx 3080 and the performance varies a lot at times. Some bigger areas and more densely packed and resource intensive areas such as Leyndell is a big problem when it comes to this.
Do I recommend it?
I can only recommend purchasing the game to anyone and everyone. FromSoftware is a great company that knows what to do and how to do it, they never over or under sell their products, no false advertisements and they avoid spoilers at all costs. They respect the player and the fandom and have no cases (not that i am aware of at least) of bad, deceptive or manipulative market practices. Although this kind of game is one that will both appeal to many, and drive many off, with respect to the genre it’s a part of it and it’s more difficult nature. If this or the many other reviews, text or video, aren’t enough then you must simply trust your own judgement. I myself have had over 450 hours (481.2 hours at writing) of game time and am currently planning a longer play session with 5 of my friends, a longer journey with hand written notes and quest log and a customized map we fill out ourselves with location names, dungeons, bosses, etc. over time (a sort of dnd styled co-op playthrough). I cannot stress how good this game is, and FromSoftware deserves every piece of praise they have gotten for their games and I am looking forward to their new DLC; Shadow of The Erdtree.
Elden Ring is the closest you get to the dark souls formula being perfected, that works great as a nonlinear open world game.
