Welcome to my latest review, this time I had the absolute pleasure of playing Elden Ring which is brought to us by developers FromSoftware (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls franchise, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice) and publishers Bandai Namco (Time Crisis franchise, Tales franchise, and many many more). George R.R Martin (A Song of Fire and Ice) also helped with the setting of Elden Ring alongside Hidetaka Miyazaki (Bloodborne, Dark Souls franchise).
Elden Ring is not connected to Dark Souls in any way other than they play very similar, and both are rather hard games. At the time of writing, this game is being reviewed as one of the highest reviewed games of all time. It has also had over 750,000 concurrent players on Steam.
Be Prepared To Die In Elden Ring
For the purpose of my review, I played the PlayStation 5 version of Elden Ring. It is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One/Series X|S, and PC.
So how did I find Elden Ring? Did I enjoy it as much as previous Action RPG games that FromSoftware have brought to us? Continue reading to find out. You can also check out my previous review where I played Martha is Dead also on the PS5.
The Game
Here we are, tarnished. The Elden Ring was destroyed some time ago. We’re on a quest to fight through the lands between to end the tyranny of the demigods who rule over the game’s six main areas. The player must recover a shard of the ring from these demigods, the shard is what corrupts them and gives them their huge amount of power.
As one of the Tarnished, you are an individual who has been exiled from the Lands Between and has lost the grace of the Erdtree. The Tarnished were summoned back after the shattering of the ring to recover the aforementioned shards.
Of course, before we start playing the game properly we have our character creation. As expected, there are loads of options to make your character literally “your own”. We have several classes to choose from which is very promising as it means players can come back again and again and it will feel like a different game each time, even though you’re in the same game world.
The classes are as follows, we have a total of ten to choose from:
- Hero – High in strength and Vigor with some arcane. Starts at level 7 with a battle axe and a leather shield.
- Bandit – The bandit Starts at level 5 and has high arcane and dexterity. Begins the game with a dagger, parrying shield, bow, and arrows.
- Astrologer – has high Intelligence and Mind, with some dexterity. Choosing this will start you at game level 6 and will have a staff, a sword, and a small shield.
- Warrior – high Dexterity and medium physical stats. You’ll start at level 8 with two scimitars and a light shield.
- Prisoner – starts with high Intelligence and Dexterity, and medium physical stats. Begins at level 9, with an estoc, a staff, and a shield.
- Confessor – this class has high Faith, medium physical stats and starts at level 10 and has a broadsword, kite shield, and a finger seal.
- Wretch – Dark Souls players will know this class as the “deprived”. Starts at level 1 with 10 all around and just a club.
- Vagabond – The Vagabond has high Vigor, Strength, and Dexterity. Level 9 is where this class starts, with a sword, shield, and a halberd.
- Prophet – Starts at level 7 with high Faith and Mind, with some Arcane and Strength. Level 7 is the starting level alongside starting weapons of a spear, a finger seal, and a small shield.
- Samurai – The samurai starts with high Dexterity, Medium strength, endurance, mind, and vigor. This class also starts with a katana, a bow, arrows, and a shield.
For my first character, I choose to be a bandit. The game starts off as a linear game. You can only go one way and must follow the instructions to continue further into the game. Think of it as a mini-tutorial if you will. Once you’ve progressed past this, you are then free to roam the game world set in the Lands Between, and my god, what a world it is. The Lands Between is huge, and, beautiful.
As expected with a FromSoftware game, we start off with the game appearing to be very hard. However, with time and patience, you will level up your character and feel a lot more confident in battle. Just remember to not get too cocky and manage your stamina during combat.
Players of some of the “Souls” games will be familiar with the leveling up technique in this game. You kill enemies which give you runes (as opposed to souls in the Souls games) and you can then level your character up at a site of grace. The site of grace is where you can do all sorts of things such as assigning how many charges your flasks will have, as well as assigning ashes of war to your weapons. Think of these as power-ups for your weapons. These let you assign different traits to your weapons, depending on what the selected ash of war offers it may give you fire damage, or magic damage, or add the possibility of your weapon causing poison. You get the idea.
Whilst traversing the open world you will come across random pick-ups, you use these for crafting. Whilst out in the wild you can craft things such as arrows, pots such as firepots, and much more. Some sites of grace will also have an NPC nearby who will sell/buy items to/from you. Keep an eye out for these NPCs as they will offer you recipes for crafting. These are very useful and allow you to craft more power items such as fire arrows.
One feature that I absolutely love about Elden Ring is the ability to summon our Spectral Steed, Torrent. Not only does Torrent help with navigating the rather huge world of the Lands Between, but Torrent is also a huge help when it comes to some fights whilst out in the open. Use him to your advantage. Whilst I think of navigating the world, you can also fast travel to any previously visited sites of grace by going into the game map.
After a few hours, I found that this game appeared to play a bit easier than Demon’s Souls or the Dark Souls franchise. Yes, the first main boss you come across is an absolute twat to beat, but when you do beat it, it feels so rewarding.
Another thing I really like about this game is the design of the character models. The enemies look fantastic, and not just the big bosses, even the smallest of the critters look very good. That’s another thing you need to look out for is wild animals. Take these down whilst you get the chance, be it a deer, sheep, random rabbit-looking thing, or a boar. Chop them down in your stride and farm those items they drop as you’ll need the bones and such for your crafting.
Look & Sound
Elden Ring looks pretty damn good on the PS5. Now, there is an elephant in the room in that people aren’t happy that it doesn’t look as good as the Demon’s Souls remake does. However, it really does look beautiful. Yes, it is not as good-looking as Demon’s Souls remake, but it was never going to be. In fact, I might even say it’s one of the better-looking open-world games on the aforementioned console. I think that award still goes to Miles Morales for me though.
I did experience some occasional frame rate drops and stuttering at times whilst playing on the PS5. Please note that I have the game installed on the internal PS5 SSD and not my secondary M.2 drive that I have purchased. One might add that I was playing it in the “prefer framerate” mode and not the higher resolution mode. It wasn’t a huge frustration when framerates dropped. I kind of just took it in my stride and continued playing the game. It was more of a disappointment than a bother.
The audio, as expected, is phenomenal. The sound effects in the game are absolutely brilliant, especially when using the 3D Pulse headset. The musical score in the game has had some input from Yuka Kitamura who is known for her work on Dark Souls, and of course, it sounds incredible.
In short, Elden Ring delivers very well on both the look and sound of the game and you will not be disappointed.
Length & Replayability
Being an Action RPG game that FromSoftware has released, Elden Ring can literally last as long as you want it to. People will possibly want to build more characters and try out different methods of beating the game. Others might want to hit it in a one-and-done style playthrough.
As expected, the game does have trophies (or achievements on the other platforms) for those who wish to hunt them down. On the PlayStation, there are a total of 42 trophies including the platinum. After approx 18 hours of play, I have only unlocked 3 bronze trophies. So there’s still plenty to do even after that amount of gameplay.
Conclusions
Elden Ring deserves a solid 9/10. I do believe a bit more work could have been done before release to alleviate some of the problematic issues people are having though. Such issues are saving bugs where rest mode on PlayStation can corrupt people’s saves, poor framerate on all platforms from what I’ve seen, and also other small issues. Thankfully the developers are actively working on fixing these with updates, which is a good sign of intent on FromSoftware’s part.
Please don’t let those issues I’ve mentioned deter you from playing the game though. It really is a fantastic game. If it wasn’t for those small issues, Elden Ring could have easily scored a solid 10 out of 10. If you wish to find out more about the game, please visit the official Elden Ring website.
