Elden Ring is one of the greatest RPG games ever made, and the best souls-like genre of RPGs we have ever seen. This game is without a doubt a generational masterpiece that I would recommend to every single person who enjoys the RPG genre of video games.

If there is something Elden Ring does best, and something you need to grasp to fully understand and enjoy this game, it would be its main principle of “Less is More”. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is given to you. They apply this philosophy to every single part of this game right down to its fundamentals and I hope to showcase that in this review.


–UI Design is Masterful.–

Elden Ring nailed the UI. The HUD and GUI is perfect for the game's style. Take everything you think you know about Open-World UI and throw it out the window. Objective Markers, Quest Journal, Minimap, Text or Character Dialogue Hints, none of these exist in Elden Ring. Instead, you have your essentials: your HP/FP/ST bars, equipped items, and a basic compass. This lack of information given is essential to Elden Ring’s exploratory style, improving the games immersion tenfold. The lack of ease of access tools makes the satisfaction this game gives that much stronger.


–Elden Ring’s world is nearing absolute perfection.–

Elden Ring comes out of the gate careening like Radahn entering his second phase; they drop you off in the gorgeous dark fantasy world of ‘The Lands Between’, and In these first few hours of gameplay, you begin to realise what is meant by “Less is More”.

The game sends you out into the world with little to no information beyond how to attack and move. you're not spoon fed information either, you’re just chucked into the world with your goal of becoming Elden Lord, with zero clues on how to do that. You might be thinking “that sounds like poor game design, who wants to run around blind in a game trying to figure out what to do?” which would be a valid concern if this wasn't Elden Ring. This open ended game design is intentionally and masterfully implemented, fluidly complimenting the game's style. This style is made viable due to Elden Ring housing one of the most breathtaking and immersive open-worlds you will ever experience.

Elden Ring rejects AAA open world design, instead consisting of a world where personal freedom is held above all else, immediately setting Elden Ring apart. The Lands Between is filled with captivating and highly detailed locations, densely packed all over the gigantic map. Exploring in this game is vital to progression, but it's also incredibly fun discovering these locations of absolutely magnificent caliber, quality, and frequency and facing their challenge. The amount of content this game has is insane, I kid you not, opening an interactive map of Elden Ring crashes my web browser. The world is so magical and entrancing that you will find yourself constantly scouring the map to try and find new areas to go discover, not that you need to. You can't run for more than 20 seconds without finding something that you might spend the next hour of gameplay going through, whether it be an enormous winding mine or a gigantic castle.

The teleport/respawn locations “Sites of Grace” are the only guidance system the game gives you, with specific sites that are close to major boss fights emitting a faint light beaming in the direction you should head. It should also be noted that in order to access these Sites of grace, you must first discover them through simply exploring the world. This navigation system works astoundingly well. Because of the lack of direction, preparation, or streamlining, every single new location you stumble across feels exciting. Even if it's something as insignificant as a shack, oftentimes you can find a NPC with a whole questline to complete inside.

This Leads to the next Topic, NPCs. To sum up NPC Interactions and questlines in one word, they feel “Organic”. There is no quest journal to keep track of things. The NPC tells you something or asks a favour, and most of the time you complete it naturally while playing the game. Quest design is incredible, they stretch from boss fights or revealing hidden locations to solving multistep puzzles throughout the natural progression of the game that unlock enormous Legacy Dungeons. NPCs make the world seem interconnected and alive, Completing certain quests can lock you out of other ones with no warning, they will recognise you based on other characters you've met, etc. NPC encounters feel like you are interacting with a real person, and for this reason they feel nearly indistinguishable from the main questline. Most aren't even really sidequests, as many of these questlines can massively impact the ending of the game.


–Difficulty: PREPARE TO DIE–

They teach you this the hard way multiple times in the first 30 minutes of gameplay, but this game is not easy. Difficulty in the Souls-Like genre should be seen as a feature, and directly affects user experience to make the game more tailored to what the developer tries to convey. Do not expect a difficulty slider or built-in ways to make the game inherently “easier”. That said, if a boss or area is giving you trouble, Elden Ring’s open world lets you leave, continue levelling up your character and then come back when your stats are better.

Combat is polished, complex, and seamless; It falls under the category of “Easy to Learn, Hard to Master''. While easy to understand its fundamentals, mastery will raise your character's power to herculean levels, while not using controls effectively can lead to even the weakest enemies easily slaughtering you. Enemies have a vast arsenal of complex attack patterns, where timing, charge duration, damage type, resistances and weaknesses, range, equipment, stance and stamina all need to be considered when engaging an enemy. The number of weapons and builds in this game is absurd. You can complete the game without touching a sword. Defeating enemies rewards runes (levelling materials). Dying in this game, which will happen a lot, will cause you to drop all your runes. If you die again without picking up your dropped runes, you lose them permanently. This constant risk of losing progress when you die keeps you on your toes. The combat system in this game requires you to think as every single encounter is different. It's addicting.

If this is your first souls game, expect to spend multiple hours trying to understand the combat system and its mechanics. After this becomes muscle memory, combat begins to become much more rewarding and downright fun. Suffice to say, by the end of the game you will feel like an absolute badass.


–Issues With Elden Ring’s Performance and gameplay:–

The forefront issue I have with Elden Ring would be sections towards the endgame. Towards the end, it's clear that they ran out of time to refine and balance sections. At times, the game begins to tip from challenging but exhilarating to flashbacks of dark souls 2, where they throw brutal and uninspired challenges at the player. While I sincerely hope they rebalance these sections in future patches, they were sparse enough to not ruin anything for me.

I also highly recommend you use a controller for this game. Unfortunately, The amount of buttons required will most likely overwhelm you on KB&M. I have a mouse with 18 spare buttons and it was still too impractical for me to use with tons of macros.

For the absolute size this game has, it's staggering how few bugs exist, except for the one you’ve likely heard of. “Elden ring? More like Elden Stutter-ring” For context, I have hardware on the lower end of high tier specs, and I experienced very mild yet annoying stuttering on high graphics, and zero stutter on medium. From reports of friends, I have noticed that Elden Ring seems to have a prejudice against RTX cards, which seem to stutter significantly more and often at worse levels. Once this is patched, I can't say Elden Ring has any noticeable bugs.

9.5/10

Elden Ring is one of the greatest RPG games ever made, and the best souls-like genre of RPGs we have ever seen. This game is without a doubt a generational masterpiece that I would recommend to every single person who enjoys the RPG genre of video games. If there is something Elden Ring does best, and something you need to grasp to fully understand and enjoy this game, it would be its main principle of “Less is More”. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is given to you. They apply this philosophy to every single part of this game right down to its fundamentals and I hope to showcase that in this review. –UI Design is Masterful.– Elden Ring nailed the UI. The HUD and GUI is perfect for the game's style. Take everything you think you know about Open-World UI and throw it out the window. Objective Markers, Quest Journal, Minimap, Text or Character Dialogue Hints, none of these exist in Elden Ring. Instead, you have your essentials: your HP/FP/ST bars, equipped items, and a basic compass. This lack of information given is essential to Elden Ring’s exploratory style, improving the games immersion tenfold. The lack of ease of access tools makes the satisfaction this game gives that much stronger. –Elden Ring’s world is nearing absolute perfection.– Elden Ring comes out of the gate careening like Radahn entering his second phase; they drop you off in the gorgeous dark fantasy world of ‘The Lands Between’, and In these first few hours of gameplay, you begin to realise what is meant by “Less is More”. The game sends you out into the world with little to no information beyond how to attack and move. you're not spoon fed information either, you’re just chucked into the world with your goal of becoming Elden Lord, with zero clues on how to do that. You might be thinking “that sounds like poor game design, who wants to run around blind in a game trying to figure out what to do?” which would be a valid concern if this wasn't Elden Ring. This open ended game design is intentionally and masterfully implemented, fluidly complimenting the game's style. This style is made viable due to Elden Ring housing one of the most breathtaking and immersive open-worlds you will ever experience. Elden Ring rejects AAA open world design, instead consisting of a world where personal freedom is held above all else, immediately setting Elden Ring apart. The Lands Between is filled with captivating and highly detailed locations, densely packed all over the gigantic map. Exploring in this game is vital to progression, but it's also incredibly fun discovering these locations of absolutely magnificent caliber, quality, and frequency and facing their challenge. The amount of content this game has is insane, I kid you not, opening an interactive map of Elden Ring crashes my web browser. The world is so magical and entrancing that you will find yourself constantly scouring the map to try and find new areas to go discover, not that you need to. You can't run for more than 20 seconds without finding something that you might spend the next hour of gameplay going through, whether it be an enormous winding mine or a gigantic castle. The teleport/respawn locations “Sites of Grace” are the only guidance system the game gives you, with specific sites that are close to major boss fights emitting a faint light beaming in the direction you should head. It should also be noted that in order to access these Sites of grace, you must first discover them through simply exploring the world. This navigation system works astoundingly well. Because of the lack of direction, preparation, or streamlining, every single new location you stumble across feels exciting. Even if it's something as insignificant as a shack, oftentimes you can find a NPC with a whole questline to complete inside. This Leads to the next Topic, NPCs. To sum up NPC Interactions and questlines in one word, they feel “Organic”. There is no quest journal to keep track of things. The NPC tells you something or asks a favour, and most of the time you complete it naturally while playing the game. Quest design is incredible, they stretch from boss fights or revealing hidden locations to solving multistep puzzles throughout the natural progression of the game that unlock enormous Legacy Dungeons. NPCs make the world seem interconnected and alive, Completing certain quests can lock you out of other ones with no warning, they will recognise you based on other characters you've met, etc. NPC encounters feel like you are interacting with a real person, and for this reason they feel nearly indistinguishable from the main questline. Most aren't even really sidequests, as many of these questlines can massively impact the ending of the game. –Difficulty: PREPARE TO DIE– They teach you this the hard way multiple times in the first 30 minutes of gameplay, but this game is not easy. Difficulty in the Souls-Like genre should be seen as a feature, and directly affects user experience to make the game more tailored to what the developer tries to convey. Do not expect a difficulty slider or built-in ways to make the game inherently “easier”. That said, if a boss or area is giving you trouble, Elden Ring’s open world lets you leave, continue levelling up your character and then come back when your stats are better. Combat is polished, complex, and seamless; It falls under the category of “Easy to Learn, Hard to Master''. While easy to understand its fundamentals, mastery will raise your character's power to herculean levels, while not using controls effectively can lead to even the weakest enemies easily slaughtering you. Enemies have a vast arsenal of complex attack patterns, where timing, charge duration, damage type, resistances and weaknesses, range, equipment, stance and stamina all need to be considered when engaging an enemy. The number of weapons and builds in this game is absurd. You can complete the game without touching a sword. Defeating enemies rewards runes (levelling materials). Dying in this game, which will happen a lot, will cause you to drop all your runes. If you die again without picking up your dropped runes, you lose them permanently. This constant risk of losing progress when you die keeps you on your toes. The combat system in this game requires you to think as every single encounter is different. It's addicting. If this is your first souls game, expect to spend multiple hours trying to understand the combat system and its mechanics. After this becomes muscle memory, combat begins to become much more rewarding and downright fun. Suffice to say, by the end of the game you will feel like an absolute badass. –Issues With Elden Ring’s Performance and gameplay:– The forefront issue I have with Elden Ring would be sections towards the endgame. Towards the end, it's clear that they ran out of time to refine and balance sections. At times, the game begins to tip from challenging but exhilarating to flashbacks of dark souls 2, where they throw brutal and uninspired challenges at the player. While I sincerely hope they rebalance these sections in future patches, they were sparse enough to not ruin anything for me. I also highly recommend you use a controller for this game. Unfortunately, The amount of buttons required will most likely overwhelm you on KB&M. I have a mouse with 18 spare buttons and it was still too impractical for me to use with tons of macros. For the absolute size this game has, it's staggering how few bugs exist, except for the one you’ve likely heard of. “Elden ring? More like Elden Stutter-ring” For context, I have hardware on the lower end of high tier specs, and I experienced very mild yet annoying stuttering on high graphics, and zero stutter on medium. From reports of friends, I have noticed that Elden Ring seems to have a prejudice against RTX cards, which seem to stutter significantly more and often at worse levels. Once this is patched, I can't say Elden Ring has any noticeable bugs. 9.5/10