Elden Ring, while imperfect, is the best implementation of an open-world action RPG that I've ever played. It feels like the culmination of every iteration of FromSoft's 'Souls' games into one truly amazing experience filled with intrigue, struggle, and eventual triumph.

Fantasy, third-person, open world, action RPG, 'Souls' game

Elden Ring is basically Dark Souls 4, or Dark Souls but now you can sneak, jump, and ride a steed around the open world areas. You start by creating a character and choosing a class to determine your starting gear and stats (e.g. Astrologer to be a spellcasting sorcerer, or Samurai to be a katana-weilding DEX melee build). You progress through the game by traveling around the map and finding items/gear to upgrade your equipment setup and defeating enemies to gain 'runes" that you can spend to level up or buy items from shops.

'Sites of grace' are the bonfire equivalents in Elden Ring, and most of the time they visually display a path of light that indicate the direction you need to head in to progress the main story through locations of major bosses. There are plenty of these grace sites littered everywhere in the open world and within dungeons so it is easy to fast travel to where you want to go immediately.

Elden Ring is an open world game and there are various minidungeons/secrets hidden away in every corner of the map. It is to your advantage to seek out these locations to find rare materials and unique weaponry that may or may not change your play style altogether. The open world feels like there is always something waiting for you to discover, such as powerful enemies that drop unique weapon arts (ashes of war) or an NPC standing around waiting to offer you a quest. With the introduction of a day/night cycle, there are even some bosses that only spawn at nighttime in specific locations waiting to ambush you, but offer unique drops as well.

Elden Ring, at launch, was pretty shaky in terms of PC performance. I personally played this game to completion with below minimum specs (AMD FX 6300, RX 480) averaging 40-50 FPS at High settings. I encountered no game-breaking bugs/detrimental FPS hiccups in any playthrough, though the only issue I encountered was that enemies would sometimes become invisible on my screen whenever a large group of enemies were in an area, but they were still lock-on-able and would render again when I got closer/killed some of the group (this is probably just because my CPU is ancient).

In terms of graphics, Elden Ring doesn't break new ground when it comes to overall presentation, but it is a very colorful game compared to previous Souls games. You can really tell when you enter a new region when all the colors transition from one palette to another and the sky/landscape dramatically changes as well. Dark areas are also pretty spooky as you can only see far enough from the light of your torch or lantern and enemies hide in the shadows very well.

The long story short is: the Elden Ring was shattered into fragments and various demigods took the pieces to gain the fragmented powers within them. You are a 'Tarnished' which is basically a pseudo-undead human who is guided by grace to seek out the pieces of the Elden Ring, put them back together, and become Elden Lord in order to bring the world back to "order". (All of the details in between for NPC's and items is basically found in NPC dialogue and item descriptions for you to piece together, or until a genius puts all of the information together in a YouTube lore video)

•Combat feels the best it has ever been for 'Souls' games. Sneak attacks, jump attacks, ashes of war, NPC summons, mounted combat, guard counters, power-stancing, and everything else feels very, very good.

•Touching more on ashes of war, they basically allow you to add (and remove later) a unique skill to most non-unique weapons in the game. They also allow you to change the scaling of a weapon to a different one of your choice (if you also have the right whetstone) so you can make a weapon scale with INT or FTH even if it originally didn't.

•Boss encounters are exciting and challenging. If you feel underprepared, you can always to back to the open world and look for missed locations and items to better prepare yourself. (Also, feel free to use your ash summons whenever possible; it is a game mechanic after all)

•You can build a character however you desire, whether it be dual-weilding greatswords, holy knight, melee-spell-casting wizard, or pure archery.

•There are lots and lots of weapons to try, leading to more replayability as you try a new one in a future playthrough

•The crafting system is interesting as you can create consumables and throwable items when out of combat. You can even create bow/crossbow ammo which is very neat.

•Just when you think you're near the end, the map expands further and there is even more to discover.

•Compared to the other Dark Souls stories, Elden Ring's story feels the most digestible at face value without feeling completely puzzled from the outset.

•PC performance isn't stellar if you are bothered by occasional FPS spikes or the rare game crash on loading screens.

•Not game-relevant, but the game doesn't fully "exit" when you quit out until a while later.

•Early game bosses reappear as 'mini-bosses' or just wandering around later game areas leading to some feelings of reused content.

•There is a massive spike in game difficulty from the mid-game to the late-game. It feels weirdly balanced when enemies all of a sudden go from doing 1/5 of your HP in damage to 1/2 of your HP in damage.

•UI could use a feature to compare stats of shop items with currently equipped items

•Online connectivity can be hit-or-miss. Sometimes when you are summoned to another world, you get a "connection error" and the game boots you back to single player.

•Be wary of hackers when playing co-op/PVP. Previous exploits have occurred where upon death, you would return to single player but be instantly dying forever because the hacker put you in an endless death loop. That exploit was patched, but we all know how hackers don't just give up.

•(Not a negative for me, but maybe if you like PvP): You can only invade other players if they are participating in co-op. Basically, unless a host uses a specific item, invasions usually lead to 1v2 or 1v3 scenarios (note: AFAIK fight clubs are only affected in that # of summonable participants is limited). I don't invade, but I've seen many people whining about this change when it makes sense why it is this way.

•So many important names sound very similar to each other that it could be difficult to remember who is who (e.g. Godwyn vs Godfrey vs Godrick).

•'Great Runes' are pretty underwhelming in terms of power.

•Although I enjoy the game design of not having a dedicated questlog ingame, it is still to your benefit to just read an NPC's quest guide off the wiki to keep yourself on track.

9.9/10; easy recommend

Elden Ring has set my bar for 'open-world RPG' standards. The added gameplay features like jumping, horse-riding, sneaking, etc. make the game's action much more interesting and fun than previous FromSoft games. The game kicks my ass at every step of the way, but the struggle and eventual triumph is worth all of it. Though it is not without fault, I love this game and can't wait for future DLC.

Checkbox reviews are lazy copy & paste bullsh*t. ASCII art reviews tell you nothing. "Let's be honest, I only wrote this review for awards" is a waste of everyone's time. If you are interested in genuine & detailed game reviews, feel free to check out my others here (or don't, I don't tell you what to do).