Play Your Heart Out: “Elden Ring” Review

This is a very impressive game with some minor flaws and one major flaw—I give it a 9/10.

Let’s start with the graphics. They’re decent with some frame rate issues. I would compare this game’s play style to “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.”  

Currently, in my opinion, “Assassin’s CV” is one of the best-looking games on the Xbox Series X.  However, “Elden Ring” is significantly less graphical on a visual standpoint, but only in comparison. “Elden Ring” still looks good.

Much of the game, at least in the first few hours, centers around traveling the world and combating various creatures. There are enemies that are human, animal, beast, monster, and dragon. Combat with these, for me, has a 50% success rate for small creatures and humans, and about a 5% success rate with larger bosses until you level your character.

There is a wide assortment of characters to choose from for your player. This method of choosing a character to use is perfect. Each character has a different combat style, which is nice. If you find one enemy more difficult, you can always start the game over from the beginning with a new character to take another crack at it.

The game’s problems are twofold.

One, since the game map is huge, you do a lot of traveling and avoiding or seeking combat with various creatures. This is the meat of the game. 

The problem is that you can spend dozens and dozens of hours doing so and feel no sense of progression and possibly get bored. However, you can still level your character, but this can get boring, frustrating, and very time consuming.

The second problem is that there are no towns or clusters of people to talk to. This is a major flaw. 

Imagine a game like “Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim” with only a handful of people to talk to in the entire world and no quest givers or other significant people. It almost feels like traversing a large, uninhabited desert with various structures.

This game is still a great game, a fun game, and a challenging game that rewards you for your intelligent decisions. It is worth playing despite its flaws.