While the web continues to complain about how some games offer too much difficulty for the public, 2022 marks the thirteenth year since birth of a new genus: if in fact cataloging an Action RPG or a Beat ’em up may seem simple, over time subgenres such as the soulslikei roguelike and even those who are called metroidvania. Basically everything starts with the name of the game, which becomes the progenitor of a subgenre. All this to say that, in 2022, we could have ahead the new King of one of these: it is Elden Ringwhich does not bear the word in its name Souls but which – as we will discover in the review – repeatedly embodies the various spirits proposed over time by Miyazaki’s mind, and why not also by those who tried to copy it.
Warning: the game code unfortunately came to us very soon and we do not feel comfortable in giving a definitive judgment to the product without first having analyzed it even better. For this, the review will come out “in progress”: it will tell you my first impressions and what I have discovered so far, but for a complete review with a rating you will have to give us a few more days.
In the beginning it was death
There plot Of Elden Ring, as has already happened in the past, offers a very interesting incipit at first glance it could be a pretext, but which in reality hides under dozens of documents, secrets and details to be discovered, a decidedly well-structured intertwining. The story, however, places us in a sort of devastated world – as usual – where pain and devastation are perceptible from every feature of the design, starting from the colors to the sounds that surround the player.
As before Elden Ring proposes a choice between various classes which, to be fair, will only serve as a starting point since enhancing the character you can open any type of customization. Certainly in this new game the character editor will welcome in a warmer way – thanks to a decidedly more advanced graphics than the previous soulslike ones – the choices of the player, who will be able to create his own avatar in the best way.
If with Dark Souls And Demon’s Souls the choice of the trip was in any case related to a hub where to choose the world to visit or from roads that, in the end, led anyway to the same side, in this case instead the opening of the game world proposes a feeling of greater dispersion: from the beginning you will be able to know only where you need to go – since the bosses will often force you to close the choices towards a single road – but otherwise the other areas will be fully explorableand you will often have to do it in somewhat bizarre ways as well.
Freedom to make mistakes
Elden Ring in fact it offers various cutscene and various dialogues that may appear within areas already visited, perhaps after having performed certain actions, and will push the player to travel around the map a bit in bulk: the order of “collateral” missions and dungeons will not be in fact arranged as in the most comfortable open world, but you will have to travel and experience in order to understand what to do. Also expect tricks ready to make your life hell, and even unexpected situations where you will have to figure out how to save yourself and avoid losing all the souls you have.
Before proceeding with the review let’s explain one thing better: Elden Ring is a soulslike, and as such it proposes a game system made up of a currency to be collected in order to buy items and equipment or to upgrade the character, which once you die you will lose in the place where you lost the fight. In the event of a subsequent death before taking back this currency, it will be totally lost. In this case, the currency responds to the name of Runewhile in Dark Souls they were called Anime.
For this reason, those already familiar with the genre will surely find themselves at home – at least as far as gameplay is concerned. Because basically Elden Ring is a exercise in styleknowing how to take something that works in itself, proposing it with some additional dynamics (such as jump, we’ll talk about it later in the review) and all expertly mixed. Because if the classic open worlds have taught us that, opening the world piece by piece, the side missions arrive, Elden Ring throws everything up by putting dungeons to recover that are close to the starting point, but with high difficulty levels (what which in some ways also recalls the first Dark Souls). This is why Elden Ring succeeds – at a very high risk – a make the player lost in thin aira true Without light shrouded in the darkness of not knowing what to do.
The gamble
The fact that Elden Ring manages to cope with these two really risky dynamics already, makes the game a must have: any other production would have fallen into the trap of the “dispersive” or that of the “confusing”, but these two words being directly related to the difficulty of the game , it must be said that perhaps the title background helpsand not a little.
For the rest there is no doubt: we are ahead of the perfect synthesis of a series of mechanics that, since 2009, color the afternoons of challenge (and curses). In all likelihood the game at a superficial glance may seem just another soulslike, but the way in which the open space and the verticality of the jump are diligently exploited (capable of ruining the balance of the enemies) is something special.
In terms of content and balance game, for now everything seems to be normal: the material proposed in the open world makes everything that can be explored also pleasant and fun. Obviously the architectural barrier of the difficulty of some dungeons, combined with the mixture used to make them scattered and create a system of backtracking very marked, it will push you to clash against enemies that you will surely have to set aside to return to them at a later time (or spend dozens of hours to knock them down from sub-levels).
Technicallythe game manages to make up for one slightly lower quality to the exclusive PS5 of Demon’s Souls with a superlative art design and style of the settings: every glimpse will look like a hand-painted canvas that comes to life on your TV. However, this cannot be said of closed places, which on the contrary remain slightly bare as tradition dictates in the genre.
In short, Elden Ring it is the end of a journey, but not in the bad sense of the term, but in the beautiful one: it is the total synthesis of each soulslike released until today, but mostly also contaminated by the best Action RPGs of recent years. As such, she undoubtedly manages to propose a wide-ranging game, which paradoxically will take your breath away in fear of choosing where to go. The sense of loneliness and dispersion is well replicated to the point of leaving you at the mercy of the game world several times.
For now we close our ongoing review of Elden Ring here, but we will return to talk about the variety of the map, the various boss fights, how the balance of the game manages to keep the player’s character on the hinges of “normalcy”, or if at end – like all games of this genre – there are some breaks that may not be fixed immediately (but which could be filed with patches).
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