Recent reviews by troll

This game left me feeling very conflicted by the end of the final boss fight. If you had asked me what rating I'd give the game before reaching the final third of the game, it would have been the easiest 9/10, possibly even 10/10 in my life. Unfortunately the last third of the game has left a somewhat sour note for an otherwise beautiful experience. Without going too much into detail, if you enjoyed any of the Dark Souls games (or possibly even Bloodborne, although I haven't played it) and don't mind open world games, this game is definitely worth getting. It does a lot what Dark Souls did but better, although not all of it is strictly better. If you haven't played any Soulsborne game you should probably look at like an hour or two of gameplay before deciding if it's worth your time. I've seen newcomers to the series enjoy it immensely, but also quite the opposite.
Now to go into some finer details, which I'll keep as spoilerfree as possible:

The Good:

Gameplay (PvE): The gameplay pretty much feels like Dark Souls 3 in terms of design, combat is practically the same but with some new mechanics like guard counters as well as Ashes of War which grant you a variety of weapon skills you can add to your weapons, with most of them being great or at the very least mediocre. There are plenty of weapons and weapon types each suited to different playstyles, though they certainly aren't all equal in terms of strength. Since this game is mainly PvE, the balance doesn't really matter, since you can choose to simply not use something if you think it's too strong. But it's still worth mentioning that there's A LOT of broken weapons, spells and other items that can trivialize the game. Assuming that you don't use any of these, this game is far more difficult than any of the Soulsborne games in my opinion, which isn't an issue until later (which I'll cover later), since the open world allows you to simply go do other stuff if you hit a brick wall in terms of difficulty.

The World: It would be a very large understatement to call the open world of this game to be big. It's about 80 - 120 hours big, depending on how intense you explore and how long you take to kill bosses. Exploring this world in your first playthrough is very magical if you don't spoil yourself about anything, as the game is very beautiful with lots of interesting locations, NPCs and other things I don't intend to spoil to find. I don't think the open world is flawless however, because as is standard with Soulsborne games they are intended to be replayed for alternative play styles, endings, quests, etc. which is where a problem arises: After you've completely explored the world in a playthrough there is no reason to ever do so again in any subsequent playthrough, as about 50% of the dungeons, bosses, chests, etc. do not have good rewards you are likely to use. That's not to say that the world is empty, but in terms of good stuff you can find it feels very diluted. Especially compared to a Soulsborne game, it takes a long time to even find decent looking armor in the early game, as most of it is placed very far into the game. I think this issue not only arises from the large world, but also some new mechanics like ash summons and item crafting diluting the loot table even further.

The Graphics: I've heard people say that this game is very ugly and to that I only have a single question: Did we play the same game? This game is insanely beautiful thanks to it's art direction and EXCELLENT lighting, Limgrave (the earliest area you reach) is astonishing and even the late game areas like Crumbling Farum Azula never fail to be beautiful. This is mostly thanks to the art direction and lighting however, in terms of graphical fidelity this game is just okay, possibly "good". It's not gonna compete with other recently released AAA games in that category, but I just can't repeat enough how much work the art direction, lighting and world building does to make this game beautiful.

The Mixed:

The Bosses: Unfortunately this is a category where I hoped for a little more care from the side of FromSoftware. Don't get me wrong, this game has some of the most INSANELY GOOD bosses from all of FromSoftware's games, but it also has some of the worst too. This game also repeats a lot of bosses with slight redesigns and some varied attacks, which was to be expected as it's a huge game, but the problem is that FromSoftware picked some of the worst bosses this game has to offer to spam repeat them, especially in the later areas. I can't go much into detail for why they suck without spoiling the bosses, but some of them have the most cancerous move sets alongside bad arenas and extremely erratic attacks for GIANT bosses, which makes the camera fling around the place. The difficulty of the bosses in this game is also very... confusing. Some bosses are extremely easy and require almost zero effort, while a lot of them feel extremely overtuned, which leads me to...

The Difficulty: ... the difficulty of Elden Ring. I think the early and mid-game is excellently paced in terms of difficulty, but once you reach the late game it just gets extremely confusing. Some of these late game bosses are so extremely overtuned in terms of difficulty that it feels like the developers INTENDED for you to use some of the more broken strategies in the game, specifically abusing the mimic tear, sorcery and/or bleed spam with weapons like Moonveil which unfortunately makes victories feel somewhat cheap if you actually use these strategies. What's especially mindboggling is how anti-melee so many of the bosses are, with some of them literally offering you almost no room for counterattacks or no room to actually heal up, meaning these fights are gonna be an insane, difficult slog to get through.

The Bad:

The PvP: I'll keep this one short as I'm very casual about PvP in these games, but it's bad. It's always been bad, and it probably always will be bad. That doesn't mean it's not fun, although it certainly isn't fun at times. The balance was atrocious at launch and still somewhat is. Will it get fixed? Probably. Does it make it any better? Not really. Specifically going into invading (which is where you enter another player's world to kill them), it's awful. It is INCREDIBLY unfair. Of course, it's not supposed to be fair as you're trying to hinder another player's progress, but it's worse in this game than any other Soulsborne game yet. The amount of disadvantages invaders get is INSANE. to the point that it's just not worth it. Trying to explain it here would exceed the review size that is allowed, but simply look it up online if you're interested in knowing why it's bad. I can't speak much about dueling, but it seems pretty okay and fun to do.

The Performance/PC port: Before I get flamed, yes, not everyone experienced peformance issues. Unfortunately many did, and so did I. Although it didn't run horribly, it was noticeably worse FPS wise in many of the open world locations and during many bosses, often dipping into the 40s. My PC is not the best gaming PC on the world, but as a comparison I could comfortably run Dying Light 2 with high settings on 2k with pretty much constant 60 FPS and that game definitely is poorly optimized too. A lot of people also experience no issues at all, so there's that.

The Final Third: In terms of quality, this game literally nose dives after you reach the Erdtree. The locations (apart from the very final one) become significantly worse, as well as some bad boss design and noticeably worse open world design as well. I can't go into detail because of Steams review size limitations, but it's a tough slog to get through if you don't use a strong strategy.