Elden Ring Brings Us All Into A World We Want To Explore – Game Review
Elden Ring is a masterpiece and I don’t use that word lightly. Quite simply it’s a game that’ll have the player addicted for hours. Either exploring it’s impossibly vast world or fighting enemies to farm runes and level up. Making the game not only as accessible as possible when it comes to play choice but open to change. Encouraging players to constantly be re-thinking their strategies.
A New Open World
The newest game by FromSoftware, the company responsible for Sekiro, Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Making the world more open and free to explore. This may seem like a relatively small change as FromSoftware games were never fully linear to begin with but it makes such a huge difference. The world is huge and I mean huge. There are people like myself who have been playing for more than 60 hours and still haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s explorable. Hidden pathways, secret bosses. This game has everything that a good open world game should have.
The map itself has no markers or anything to guide you. Making the game far more immersive. You seriously need to think about what you’re doing here even if it’s just taking a stroll because this game won’t do any hand holding for you. Which leads me to my favourite part of the game and why I feel this is open world done right: you are never safe. The player can decide to take a short stroll from a grace point and immediately get jumped by mutant dragonflies. Running is a perfectly acceptable tactic here if you know you’re in over your head. Like I said you are free to play as you wish.
Making Things A Little Easier
One thing that is noticeable though is that Elden Ring has many mechanics that make it much easier than most FromSoftware games. You can crouch and sneak up on enemies to sneak kill them, depending on your stats and the enemy this could kill them in one go. But even if it doesn’t it’ll do enough damage to ensure you only need to hit them again to end them. Needless to say. This makes taking out groups much easier as it’s not a great idea to get swarmed.
The new horse that you can ride around on, Torrent, makes some fights easier as you can use him to escape quickly. Or use his speed to avoid enemy attacks that would usually be too wide sweeping for a dodge roll. The fact that you can go wherever you want before advancing the main story gives new options to farm runes as early as possible. If you so wish.
Review
Like I said. Elden Ring knows what it wants to be and succeeds on every level. It’s battle system is largely unchanged but as they say “if it ain’t broke…” it explores a grand world which will challenge the player at almost all times. Giving the player a chance to decide exactly what way of playing is best for them and their choice of class. Open world games usually frustrate me. I usually can’t stand them. But Elden Ring knows what it’s doing. Building a beautiful but deadly environment that makes the player want to jump in and explore themselves.
This is how open world RPGs are meant to be done. An absolute masterpiece.
