Daniel Snowington

I’ve played a good number of RPGs such as legend of Zelda TOTK, and from the first time I saw it I really, really, really, wanted to like this game. In fact as I’m writing this I’ve already sunk about 20 hours into the game. But having put that much time in as a casual gamer who only really plays after school and on the weekends for a few hours at most per week, I am getting the bad feeling that the most I’ll experience this game while having fun are those lets plays. Elden ring is not worth the money or the stress in my opinion. Let me start with the good things first GOOD THINGS: The weapon and armor design in this game is killer, I love so many armor sets and weapons I’ve seen from not only playing the game but watching the lets-plays I was talking about as well. The map and graphics are gorgeous and many of the spells are fun to use. I like the music and the scores. If it was just a review based on these, then it would be solid 4.5-5 stars but it’s not so here’s the bad stuff BAD THINGS: It is so, unequivocally difficult to level up in this game. You spend a large amount of the early game fearing for your life every second which makes it basically impossible to unwind after a long day playing this game. Only to accidentally slip off a cliff or run through some trees into an enemy camp and then get slaughtered, leave all of your runes where you died, and have to run all the way back and get them again, heck if you die again while getting your original runes back, all that time you spent getting runes goes right down the drain and your rune count goes back to 0. I had to use a sort of workaround using the dragon in Caelid to even get a decent amount of levels. Speaking of levels, the leveling in this game is the least intuitive system I’ve ever played on. I thought I should spend my points equally across the board but then some 20 levels in I found out it’s better to specialize in something rather than split the levels and, with only a few respecs in the game, this makes any leveling mistake a big one. Aside from just the runes and stats which are my main problems, the fighting and boss fights are nearly impossible with so little breathing room to move or dodge, timing has to be impeccable which makes this the opposite of a game made for people who game for fun. I’m only at Rennala and I’m failing to get past halfway in the second stage, I don’t event want to THINK about Melania or Radahn. Oh yea and all that cool armor I was talking about before? It takes ages to get any of it. And even when you do you might have to spend an ungodly amount of time to scale to whatever weapon you wanted, or the armor you pick up might turn out to be barely better or potentially even worse than what you have on. It might also be in a completely random chest in the middle of nowhere that without a Youtube video, you never would have checked.Then on another level is the stress with this game. The amount of times I’ve slammed my keyboard yelling “I rolled through that!” Or “What the hell I couldn’t even try to dodge that!” Is genuinely infuriating and has caused me to be shaky for upwards of 15 minutes after trying a boss. OVERALL: I’m giving this game a bad review because while I do have massive respect for the work put in to this game and the sheer skill of people who are great at this game, it just is not a beginner friendly game in the slightest. If you want a game that’s maybe a bit less cool for Magic and stuff and has worse graphics but still is fantasy-ish, you could play Skyrim which in my opinion is a lot easier for casual gamers to pick up. And as a bonus, is $20 cheaper than this game.