Martin Siow

All vibes and fightslop with no coherent narrative whatsoever. Terrible immersion: - You'll never know if you've finished talking to an NPC until you've repeated their last dialogue twice. Profoundly immersion-breaking. - NPCs have no daily routines unlike games such as Skyrim, they just stand there. - The world is profoundly lifeless and predictable (compare, for example, Skyrim's random encounters mechanic). There is no attempt to simulate any living society of any sort, including agriculture and just plain old everyday life and culture, and with that comes the corresponding lack of complex social narrative. - Who the hell learns about their world by reading item descriptions. Unrealistic and unimmersive. - You will kill students in Raya Lucaria without any option to negotiate safe passage, because this game is just about fighting and little else. Balancing and Combat: - This is my first soulslike game, and most definitely my last. Enemies are either too easy, or too difficult. I also unsurprisingly have better things to do than lose to bosses for several hours. - Bosses with high attack prevent you from actually enjoying the fight because you die too soon to get the hang of things, or at the bare minimum to just enjoy the experience of fighting. If, on the other hand, you've levelled enough to resist their damage, your attack would correspondingly be too high instead, making the fight unfun as well. - The lock on camera is horrendous. It either phases into the surrounding objects (see the fight with the Banished Knight in Stormveil Castle) or spins around erratically when confronting tall enemies (e.g., giants), or is overall just a terrible way of focusing at enemies because of where the lock on point is located (e.g., deathbirds and dragons). Gameplay: - It's just unending fightslop. You won't find any richness of things to do ingame compared to other open world RPGs like Skyrim or the Witcher 3. It gets incredibly boring. - Now people often claim that Elden Ring is a massive game. I say that it is only so large because of how so much of it is mere repetitive experience. If you have a lot of the same thing, of course you'll end up with a large open world. Visual Realism, Environment, and Soundtrack: - Visual realism is only thing the game is good at, apart from its architecture and soundtrack. Unfortunately, too many games are already good at that in the contemporary gaming scene, and so Elden Ring barely stands out in this respect. - The architecture is good. That's literally the only reason why I'm still playing this thing. Just to experience the visual richness of Leyndell, Nokron, and such. There is frankly no good reason for Elden Ring to be rated so well apart from the probable fact that most who contribute to its high rating are already familiar with the genre and are either blind or indifferent to its deficiencies.