Recent reviews by Volt

sumpner shomtgun

This game is amazing. An awesome experience with friends, with a satisfying and refreshing gameplay loop. Stratagems are ingenious, and the weapons are all fun to use. Arrowhead has CLEARLY spent the years of development with passion and thought.

There is no concept of balance in this game. If there ever was, it's been lost. The game is so heavily survivor-sided, God help you if you even dare to try killer. By that I mean, naturally it's going to be a little balanced in the survivors' favor given there are 4 of them. But on top of that, survivors have MANY things that give them an advantage. Gen repair speed modifiers, second-chance perks, terribly unbalanced map design... Matchmaking is nonexistent, despite claims of their being MMR, so it is likely you'll get matched against 1,000 hour or more survivors every game. I wish they made the devs play the game more.

broke my paladin oath by commanding a mind-controlled gnoll to dance. stayed an oathbreaker the rest of the game.

After playing for over 200 hours and getting 100% of the achievements, I'd say Elden Ring is simultaneously one of Fromsoft's best games, and also an example of a steep decline in Fromsoft's quality. The world? Amazing. The visuals? Stunning, even. The lore? Pretty cool. The gameplay... the gameplay is arguably the best Souls gameplay ever. You could boil it down to just being Dark Souls combat in 2023 (and yeah, thats what it is, really), but it turns out Dark Souls combat in 2023 is really, really good.

My problems with ER have to do with some design choices in how Fromsoft decided to make their game "hard." The Souls series is obviously known for being quite challenging- this, of course, is not a problem. The problem that a lot of the bosses on ER are hard for pretty silly reasons. I could count on my fingers the amount of times I fought a boss and at least one attack didn't have an AOE needlessly larger than the actual attack itself. On some bosses, this didn't really matter to me as I felt the core moveset was still so fun to engage with that the extra AOE only caught me if I messed up in a way that I would've gotten hit anyway (see Godfrey). However, some bosses (Radagon, Draconic Tree Sentinel) have AOEs on such a substantial amount of their moveset that it feels like you're getting punished for not being frame-perfect. That's the primary design flaw I felt the most with bosses in ER (I think everyone knows how Malenia quite literally breaks the rules, or how Elden Beast's Elden Stars attack can make it nearly impossible to dodge any other attacks he throws out during its duration, so I'm not going to bother mentioning those).

The only other thing I can say is beware of input dropping. ER has this weird thing where if you move the left stick after pressing the dodge button, but before the dodge is performed, ER will drop the dodge input (resulting in you not moving, or moving where you adjusted the stick after the dodge input). This got me killed quite a few times, even after I discovered it (you can try it yourself ingame). Just... beware of this. I haven't noticed this in the other games by Fromsoft I've played (DS1 on Steam and Bloodborne on PS4) so I'm not sure why Elden Ring is like this but who knows.

The last thing I think I'll comment is that while I agree with the idea that Elden Ring's story is actually one of the most hopeful and "happy" stories Fromsoft has put out, I feel like its... impersonal. I don't feel anything when fighting Radabeast. As annoying of a fight Gideon is, I at least feel a connection to the character.

All in all, I guess I would recommend Elden Ring. But be aware what you're getting into. It will have high highs and low lows, like most Fromsoft games.

cowboy

Just get Terraria

lightning orbs go brrrrrr