By Joey Martinez
Reviewed on PC.
Since its announcement in 2019, “Elden Ring’s” hype has only snowballed more and more as information was released about it. The announcement of an open world similar to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, director Hidetaki Miyazaki stating it’s his “perfect” video game, and the idea of Souls-like with a larger scope than ever contributed to this game attracting all sorts of fans.
So does it live up to the hype?
Well, if you like bad combat, bad level design, bad stories, bad game mechanics, bad characters, bad graphics, bad controls, and love throwing sixty dollars at a brick wall, you’re gonna love this game.
From what I have seen, many people have been completing this game within eighty to around one-hundred hours. I have two hours and thirty-five minutes logged into this game so I am very confident in my judgment of it so far.
First off, this whole time I thought I was going to be on a journey to find a sweet ring but the ring is actually destroyed? How could you call it “Elden Ring” with no Elden Ring? To add salt to the wound, right after learning that the ring isn’t even in the game during the intro, you immediately get thrown into a boss fight that kills you instantly.
But oh wait, you were supposed to die. The game does not shy away from telling you that you’re not good enough and you should give up on yourself and your aspirations. Right after you die to the stupid dumb idiot boss, you get sent through a “tutorial” that basically just tells you, “You can move forward. You can attack like this. Oh and we gave you a roll? We’re so generous!” Didn’t learn a thing. There’s also a big pit that I already know is some trap made by the ghost that’s telling me to go down there and I’m insulted that they would try to pull a fast one on me so early on. They don’t know I’ve played four “Assassin’s Creed” games so my gamer instincts are sharp.
After trudging through the tutorial cave, you move outside to get a view of the game’s Playstation 2 graphics. Seriously, if you put this side by side with the original Dark Souls, you wouldn’t be able to see a difference and if you say you can then you are wrong and you are lying to me and most importantly, yourself. You are also met with a strange looking man who tells you that you are “maidenless” and you need to go get some. This game should know that I am severely afraid of talking to and interacting with women. Thank goodness I didn’t have to interact with one during my time playing otherwise I would have been seriously scared.
I thought I was going to explore the open world but as I was walking around, getting a migraine from the low-texture rock and tree models, a giant knight on a horse ran towards me with a huge spear and took half my health away. It occured to me that I forgot how to roll because the button for it wasn’t on screen, bad UI, so my character was immediately tortured and killed by the Tree Sentinel.
How anyone thinks making a mandatory boss the first thing you do in an “open world” game is beyond me because I spent thirty minutes accomplishing nothing trying to beat the Tree Sentinel. After realizing that maybe how fast I was dying was a glitch, I looked up a guide and found out that using the Wretch class made me considerably weaker than everything else in the game. Why would they make the funny half naked man with a club so bad?
Urgh— that’s the sound I make when I’m mad— this game makes me so mad. There’s no quest line either. You’re just meant to walk around and find things. Why would I want to do that? I’d like to have fun, not explore a big map just to get hit once and watch my character let out horrific screams of anguish constantly.
Overall, Elden Ring shows just how out of touch From Software and their games have become with this bumbling excuse for a video game. Go play a real game like “Assassin’s Creed.” That is unless you’re too scared to. 1/10.
