Recent reviews by darkness

Do I even need to write anything here?

Thin man got some thicc damage

Get into the beat or get beaten

Don't make the painter to wait for that dark soul

If you're denounced, prepare for war.

EDIT: The game now started crashing ... Well done Rockstar, well done.
Controlling Arthur, on horse or not, feels like moving a tank. Sometimes game thinks it knows better where I should go, adding a jump there or flipping left and right whenever it thinks it knows better. Except the game doesn't know that. Shooting is okay.
Story is awesome, immersion is amazing. The open world is somewhat weird. It tries to pretend it is open world, but much like GTA it has shadow banned areas.

Unfortunately you cannot end putler in this game

Disable festering skies and corruption DLCs. Those are unplayable without serious understanding of the game first.

The core campaign is well balanced and there is reasonable variety in enemies. Paid DLCs however have not heard of balancing, much like elden ring didn't. Don't buy the DLCs.

Elden ring is the worst FromSoftware game ever made. It has tons of problems. This is Dark Souls 2 all over again. I have played through DS 1-3, Nioh 1-2, Sekiro, but I have never experienced the game worse than this. It feels like Miyazaki hates you so much and you're not allowed to have fun. Even if your attacks hit and you will somehow defeat enemies, the game will crash because it overheats the GPU. As if Miyazaki himself comes to you to ruin your experience.

Let me start from the good. It has breadth, a lot of it. The world is big and there is greater variety in enemies. The artistic direction is amazing. If the engine would be efficient it would be amazingly looking game. There is no need to improve the graphics further, just make it so that I don't need NASA computer to run in 4K. Sounds are great. Horse is great addition and allows for some fun engagements when you have higher or equal mobility than your enemies.

The first problem is the pacing. There is sharp difficulty increase after first region and it feels like it has never been play tested. You'll be thrown into a castle with enemies that are much more mobile than you are, have much faster attack animation and chain stun you to death. This is not including their insane attack damage. Did you think dogs were annoying? Now there are like 7 of them at a time. Even if there is only one enemy, they will have 20 hit combo wombos that will stunlock you to death. Corners do not provide cover. Enemies will teleport around them and hit you in twice the speed. Given low framerate you cannot dodge the attack because there are no frames where the animation happens. Flying creatures have horrible path finding and birds are worse than dogs, imagine that being possible.

Everything and their dogs do roll catching. You'll have to remember all the timings. Or you know, just get vigor and endurance to 50 and make this casual game. Not enjoyable fighting. The ones where you can just whack 'em and interrupt are fine, but the bigger ones and random hyperarmor is disaster in terms of experience.

The dungeons are repetitive and some parts are copy pasted multiple times within the same dungeon! Bosses are either too weak or too strong. All of the points in previous paragraph applies to them as well. There are some BS teleporter traps. There is very slow increase in rune count as a reward for defeating enemies. This means the progress will plateau very quickly and you will end up underlevelled for most of the game.

Weapons either deal no damage or have insane stat requirements that you will never reach. As said previously, most mobs will have faster attack animation than you do. Combined with stagnating rune rewards your damage will stagnate as well. The armor is pretty much non existent. In Dark Sous 2 SotFS and 3 I could get through first NG with 20 vitality. Here I need at least 25 for comfortable playthrough, because armor does absolutely nothing.

Great runes ... Are useless. Just forget about them. Crafting is useful if you have an idea of what to do with the items. Horse is good, but useful weapons that have long range have about 1 seconds attack delay after you press the button. The delay between last attack in the chain and next attack is about 2 seconds. If you'll get unsaddled you're dead.

The platforming is a nightmare. There needs to be some mechanism to know if the player will survive the drop. Perhaps the controlled character needs to show some sort of hesitation before falling. Most enemies cannot fall, while you can. So watch out for being thrown off of a cliff or a bridge.

A toxic cesspool we all deserve