ELDEN RING

bosses are satisfying to deal with even though early ones get recycled

Pretty good game so far, if you are a fan of the souls series, there's pretty high chances you'll enjoy this game. Combat and gameplay mechanics are all very similar do DSIII in particular, with a few additions such as mounts and mounted combat, open world, etc.

If you like any of the Dark Souls games, you will love this game. I understand why some people might have issues with this game due to sub-optimal optimization on the PC and the game having some obvious bugs. However, as someone who is just playing to game to enjoy it (in medium settings at 1080p), I have found this game to be fun. I don't particularly care about the graphics, I only care that this game offers something that very few if any open world action rpg on the PC offers.

Really good fun. First time playing a souls like game and I really enjoy the exploration. The dopamine hit you get after killing a boss is second to none!

It's an amazing game. So dark souls made me cry and rage quit and I had respect for people who are masters at this kind of games that From Software makes. But this, I'm a Skyrim addict like most of us so going into the game I was so afraid of lot of comments and videos of people saying this is a brutal game but in all honesty this is more of a classic rpg type game if you grind enough you can get to a nice level to beat the bosses yeah it might take a few tries but it's not what people say. It's not Skyrim or any other rpg like it so don't play it like that just play it like well I need to level up get to a nice rune farm and make a boring loop in a couple of hours ( just played around for 25 hrs) and I'm level 90 choose careful the stats you want the most and if not sure what just level that vigor (HP). Also if you are like me and can't remember things to do just use google and get the locations of weapons you want for a first playthrough. I mostly play 1 to 2 hrs a day cause I don't have that much time but it is an addictive game so make sure you have time. Also it's ok if you die in the game that is part of it just try to spend the runes either on leveling up or buying from the merchants since it's not the same to die while holding 100k runes than to die and have like 10.

This is almost a perfect Dark Souls game. The combat is great; building on Dark Souls III and Sekiro. The exploration is good fun, when you're in a legacy dungeon, as they call them. And the length is very worth the money. The only downsides, for me, are the balance issues that come with open world games. I really love the great, linear, controlled, curated creations of From Software. There are some here and there, within Elden Ring; but they are stitched together with an open world between them. But... whether you like the addition of open world exploration or not; this is still very Souls and if you love the others, you will no doubt love this. You may find it a little easier at times, though. Balancing an open world game is hard.

Another explosive entry into the 'Souls-borne' series of games from From Software: Elden Ring pits the player against an immense open world filled with many foes to fell and friends to aid you in your quest to discover the cryptic past of the lands you roam and become more powerful. The world is massive. Every time you feel you've covered a good amount of ground and begin to think "damn, this is big", you'll discover more lands to trek across and dungeons to delve. Gameplay will be largely familiar to people returning from other From Soft titles but with some Quality of Life improvements and intricacies to keep things fresh. Enemies are numerous and threatening but will at times reward the player with replenishing their healing items so one needn't rest so often while busy exploring. Bosses are, as would be expected, exceptionally well designed. Things will hit like a truck and the game will not hold your hand but the payoff for overcoming each obstacle becomes all the more rewarding. That all said, I want to love this game but the unfortunate programming holding it in the shambled state that it's in (as of writing) holds me back greatly from recommending it more. Many players, myself included, experience a tremendous amount of crashes/lag/stuttering that makes playing the game a very frustrating experience and not just from the difficulty. In my own experience, I can have instances of being able to play for a few hours without much issue, but other times I may only be able to walk about for 5 or so minutes before experiencing a crash. No error code or any help for troubleshooting the cause. Many are quick to point the finger at the unforunate use of Easy Anticheat as the DRM but it seems inconclusive where the real fault of these many issues lies. If you're lucky enough to find few problems with the game in the current state, all the more power to you, but consider yourself lucky as there are many who have been vocal about the poor programming that makes even keeping the game running a bigger challenge than actually playing it. If in future these issues subside with patches addressing them, I'd be happy to rate the game higher and recommend it more. In the meantime, however, I still plan to enjoy the game when I can, it's just a matter of how much the game will work with me on that.

The game was amazing, maybe the best game I've played in a while; however, I'm still not sure if I would recommend purchasing it at this point in time. The optimization is extremely poor on PC and I had to suffer through frequent stuttering and freezing, which, in a Souls game like this, just doesn't work since a split second of inaction can and likely will lead to death. My PC is decently powerful (12th gen i7, 3080 Ti, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, 4th gen NVMe), yet my experience was almost ruined countless times because of the game's performance. And this was all on the latest patch as of the time of writing this review (4/6/22). I often felt like I was fighting enemies and the game simultaneously, which was beyond frustrating and not how the game was meant to be played. I tried all the workarounds and fixes I could find, like setting my shader cache size to unlimited and tinkering with whatever other options the internet told me to try. None of it made any difference. Even reducing all of my settings to Low didn't fix the performance issues. Others will tell you that the game runs just fine for them on less powerful machines, so really I suppose it's a crapshoot as to whether your experience will be good or bad. If you're willing to take the risk, it's a great game, I just wish the developers would have optimized it better for PC.