Last weekend saw the first round of network tests for Elden Ring Nightreign, the upcoming standalone multiplayer game based on FromSoftware’s masterpiece.
The Blix team is ready to share a review of the game and tell you how the new installment will differ from the original.
Contents
Highlights
- Elden Ring Nightreign game review: comparison with other games and features
Similarities with Other Games
Nightreign resembles Elden Ring only in name and appearance. The game completely changes the open-world structure of its ancestors to an optimized survival format. Teams of three players must land on progressively smaller maps to fight groups of enemies and increasingly tricky bosses.
You can’t help but be reminded of Fortnite. Well, it reminded us of it, too. Most likely, the developers were inspired by this popular game. Nightreign, like Fortnite, offers a cocktail of randomized loot, resource management, and environmental hazards that damage the player’s health and limit their range of motion, making runs more challenging as they progress.
Nightreign shares many similarities with God of War: Ascension from 2013. Both Nightreign and Ascension’s “Trial of the Gods” mode are cooperative games in which teams of two or more face increasingly powerful opponents. Both give players an unexpected but welcome opportunity to battle bosses from previous games.
Speaking of bosses. The Centipede Demon, the creep-crawly mass of heads and appendages from Dark Souls, makes a triumphant return in Elden Ring Nightreign with a slightly updated move set. The most significant change to the Centipede Demon is that its severed head arms will wriggle and bite more aggressively.
Nightreign’s similarities to Ascension are a bit blown out of proportion because the Soulslike genre, of which Elden Ring is a part, essentially started as the opposite of God of War.
While one lets you pretend to be a mighty warrior who can kill gods, the other turns you into a nameless, cursed undead for whom even ordinary enemies pose a serious problem.
Elden Ring Nightreign Gameplay
Elden Ring: Nightreign is a session project – three companions are sent to a specific location from Elden Ring, where they have to pump their character to the max and survive three game days. In this respect, souls-like changes the prefix “souls” to “rogue”. You clear camps, kill bosses, find resources and equipment, and prepare for the battle with the final enemy. At the same time, because it is a session project, you will have to start again every time.
Everything on the location is randomized: enemies, bosses, loot, drop points, and everything else. The process of pumping the character is built in a specific way. During sorties, the map will be narrowed by a fire circle, and players must fight a boss at the end of each day.
Defeating him means repeating everything you did on the first day. The second day lasts considerably longer because after defeating the key boss, players don’t have time to pump up for the final enemy – they must follow the portal that will take them to the final arena.
Such time constraints mean that players have to be incredibly mobile. The developers have skillfully worked on this aspect: characters move much faster than in Elden Ring, while stamina is not wasted on running, damage from falling is disabled, and trampolines are installed in the location, allowing you to climb higher elevations.
Constant deaths characterize souls games, and Nightreign is no exception. If you’re killed, your companions will have time to raise you. And if you don’t die in a key or final boss battle, you’ll be resurrected nearby, losing some of your character progression.
Elden Ring Nightreign Features
The cooperative game lacks a basic thing like chat—neither voice nor text. The lack of a wheel with a set of commands can be added to the same list, for example, “Help!” or “I need this.” Although you can put tags on the mini-map, doing it from the gamepad is extremely inconvenient.
Another drawback to Nightreign’s networking code is the lack of full-fledged crossplay. Xbox, PlayStation, and PC players will never meet each other.
Conclusion
As a result, the game leaves extremely mixed impressions, and not entirely positive ones at that. The community’s reaction will only be understood after the game’s official release. Elden Ring: Nightreign will be released on May 30 on PC (Steam), PlayStation, and Xbox.
