Elden Ring: Nightreign Review

Update 2025/06/05 : So, the game has been out now for a couple of weeks, the multiplayer is relatively busy (I only have to wait between 5-10 minutes to get into a game) and I have tackled the first boss about 20-30 times.

I stand by my critiques below – that this is a game that is at war with itself with conflicting game design that makes it not fun to play. You are seeing this in the community that are begging for implementation of a 2 player team up mode, a way to practice bosses (it sucks to take 45 minutes to get to a boss that has a massive health bar and bodies your whole team in seconds). The people who love it are the same people I expected to, as they are already releasing videos of them soloing the hardest bosses without levelling up. As an add-on to Elden Ring I think I would be a lot more sympathetic to this game, but as a standalone purchase? I have a new wrinkle to complain about: the matchmaking settings.

Right now, there is no way to bring a single friend into a party and then matchmake with a random. This is a zero sum game, either you roll the dice on who you are partying up with, or you find friends or a community to help you through. Risking it with randoms means dealing with a communication system that is not built for nuance.

There are also numerous little multiplayer bugs – I’ve had crashes, disconnects, failed joins etc. I even had a moment where I successfully revived a person (with the utterly janky revive system), died, and the game treated it as GAME OVER while I watched my bewildered teammate try and fight the boss.

Original review below:

As I sat down with Nightreign and tried to figure out how to start a single player game (it’s in the matchmaking options near the bottom) there was one piece of recent commentary that was stuck in my head.

The most recent commentary seems to have been sparked by the review for a Soulslike called Blades of Fire (keep an eye on the site for our review soon). The gist of it – for those already eager to find out what I think of Fromsoftware’s attempt at a looter/slasher and not read this long winded intro – you should meet a game on its own terms, and not try and imagine what you would change about it to be the kind of game you want to play.

Nightreign is not a Souls game in a traditional sense; it still has the same move set with emphasis on animations over responsiveness, Estus flasks, and bonfires, but now it finds itself sidling up with the kind sweaty gameplay of PUBG.

First off, it starts by playing the hits – a confusing and largely unhelpful series of prompts that explains that you are sort of playing Elden Ring. There are the standard attacks, heavy attacks, blocks, parries, and a stamina bar to manage while using them. The wrinkles are that you can now wall jump, and the player should be fighting mobs quickly and trying to pick up new weapons.

This ‘best of’ tutorial ends with the now mandatory boss that is incredibly hard and that kills you – and then the real game starts.

The objective is to go on expeditions; these are set on small maps that go through three phases, each phase culminating in a boss fight. Before that the player must run around leveling up by fighting monsters and being mindful of the ever-shrinking circle that funnels them towards said boss. Their healing items, health, and magic meter are replenished just by running past bonfires, stopping at the bonfire is only required to actually level up. This is convenient because the game plays at a breakneck pace.

In solo, dying will respawn the player, with their level reduced by one, and they will then do the corpse run to pick up their souls. Dying on one of the end-phase bosses means game over and back to the hub with some meta-currency and some runes to slot into one of the character classes. Right now, there are 6 classes that cover broad templates, all rounder, shield and spear, heavy, archer, magic user and… samurai. The further one gets, the better the quality the runes, but expect to get a lot of ‘you can throw rocks better’ upgrades that can be sold for more meta-currency.

In multiplayer there is a revive mechanic, which gets increasingly harder to activate the more times a player is dropped. If the team wipes during one of the phase bosses – it is game over.

What Nightreign seems to be expecting is that players enter this game with a lot of inherited knowledge from Elden Ring while introducing a whole lot of mechanics that are antithetical to what made that game good, and, well, playable.

For example, a number of fights expect pattern memorisation while there is time pressure, but also no way for me to customise my build. Several fights have had to be cut short because I took too long. It meant that I was often resigned to just tackling mobs and ignoring any of the bigger challenges because the rewards never felt substantial enough.

The bigger phase bosses then suffer because of stamina management as I spent more time dodging and rolling than actually hitting the enemy and so these would drag out into wars of attrition. This is similar to Elden Ring, but there is no sense of elation, or relief, because sprinting to the new destinations then kicks off.

In multiplayer, these same phase boss fights turn into the scene from Shaun of the Dead with the players standing around the boss and hitting it, desperately trying to kill it – it was just missing Queen on the soundtrack. It was definitely funnier to me that taking on creatures called ‘Vomiting Drake of Loneliness’ and combat quickly descending into Benny Hill farce, but I am not sure I was ever having fun.

True to all the Souls franchise is that the real spark of hope in Nightreign is its community. Shout outs to Jose at SomosXbox and Paul at Xboxhub who stuck with me/guided me through the highlights of my time with this game. Likewise, the discord community that discussed tactics and tips, as well as words of encouragement kept me going. It made me imagine what will happen when certain types of sicko get their hands on the retail release. The types of people that are the stars of a video called ‘hardest boss, beaten with just my foot and a guitar hero peripheral’ are going to absolutely love some of the sadism.

So, coming to Nightreign on its terms – terrible solo play geared very much towards 3 player, verbs that expect preciseness, and deliberation, mixed with a time mechanic that screams at you to keep moving. I found it to be a joyless experience that I kept thinking about all the “fixes” I would want to make it tolerable. Maybe shorter play sessions, or at least, proper downtime between encounters, more customisation, better meta progression… There is a litany of issues addressed that I would want here and that is unfair on the game itself. It isn’t broken, there is a vision, it is just a vision that makes me miserable.

Nightreign clearly has a sense of its own goals, I just don’t really get it. I won’t be providing a score at this point, partly because I want to see what it is like when it hits the wider internet, partly because I am mildly terrified by what the wider internet would say if I gave it the score that is in my head right now.

Conclusion

There is a certain type of player who is going to love this game. That person is not me. I’ve not been this disappointed by a Fromsoftware game in a long time. And I’ve played Murakumo: Renegade Mech Pursuit.