Nathaniel Allen

As of now I am only just under ten hours into Elden Ring (I'll update the review as I play more) and I'm already absolutely obsessed with it. Despite being the first soulsborne game that I have played, I find the combat to be just the right difficulty for me, never (and I mean NEVER) being too easy, but manageable enough to keep me motivated, all the while being hard enough to make me need to prepare and take my time before taking on a big fight. This game has a similar open-world feeling to Breath of the Wild, which just happens to be my favorite game of all time, however despite loving BOTW I still found it to be rather easy, so this game's difficulty keeps me engaged and constantly wanting to play more and get better. The beauty and scale of Elden Ring's open world is truly and utterly staggering, and I've only discovered a small fraction of the map. If you are looking to play a good open world game with challenging combat then I cannot recommend Elden Ring to you. Because elden ring is not "good" and "challenging"; it's truly one of, of not, the best open world games ever made and it is absolutely brutal in it's difficulty, which personally I find to make it extremely immersive and addictive. I would like to again give a few disclaimers: As I mentioned I am not very far into the game, however I will update this review as I progress through the game and once I finish it (spoiler free of course) I have also come across some minor performance issues (mainly on PC which is where I play), where the frames will dip very slow and then speed up to compensate for the lost time. While this is annoying, by no means does it make the game significantly less enjoyable. In addition I am sure that a number of patches will be implemented to help performance. Thank you for considering my review of Elden Ring, and again I HIGHLY recommend this game.