Elden Ring Nightreign

Elden Ring Nightreign blends Soulslike combat with roguelike mechanics, resulting in a mostly dynamic cooperative adventure. However, the game’s lack of crossplay and duo support makes grouping inconvenient, and reuses too many assets while offering somewhat shallow progression.

When I finally completed the main Expeditions in Nightreign, I felt equal parts exhausted and relieved. Exhausted because you’ll never escape that paralyzing feeling of having so many different things onscreen vying for your attention, and relieved because I never have to go through that experience again.

Elden Ring: Nightreign swaps the expansive and striking world of Lands Between for a shorter, more intense experience designed with multiplayer in mind. While the combat remains as incredible as you'd expect, the roguelike nature upsets the balance of Elden Ring, not always in the best way, thanks to an underwhelming meta progression. Some performance problems affect the PC version, but when you're in the company of friends, it's hard to resist the Limveld's appeal, even when you taste defeat.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is undoubtedly an interesting experiment that could bring a much-needed breath of fresh air to the soulslike genre. Its gameplay loop, built around relatively short matches, offers an intriguing alternative to the traditional, hours-long campaigns FromSoftware is known for. However, as the studio’s first foray into multiplayer-focused gameplay, it suffers from some early growing pains - issues unlikely to be fully resolved through patches alone. The lack of built-in voice chat is a major drawback, and I wouldn't recommend the game to players who don’t have at least one reliable teammate and access to an external communication tool. Playing with randoms can be a frustrating experience.

When Elden Ring Nightreign is played exactly as it was designed to be played, it’s one of the finest examples of a three-player co-op game around. The eight character classes are each fun to use and feature a surprising amount of depth despite their limited movesets, the new Nightlord boss battles are among the best FromSoft has ever crafted and make the most of the three-player dynamic, and the fast-paced, race-against-the-clock nature of each run leads to exciting moments of split-second decision making and frantic rushes to try and finish up a fight before the circle closes in. But a lack of crossplay, duo matchmaking, and built-in communication tools makes it hard to create the conditions needed to have this kind of experience unless you’re bringing two real-life friends on every run, and if you want to just play by yourself, I can’t recommend it because of the poor solo mode balancing. All of this amounts to an ambitious spin-off that’s exhilarating when you’re able to create the proper conditions, and one that quickly flips to incredibly frustrating when you’re not.

There's no denying it — Elden Ring Nightreign is a somewhat broken and bizarre concept that won’t appeal to everyone. But if this unusual mix manages to win you over, it quickly becomes hard to resist the urge to keep playing for hours on end, even when it demands a significant mental investment. The boss fights are satisfying, the various characters each bring something unique to the table, and there’s a genuine sense of progression and reward as your playstyle evolves over time. As a first attempt focused on multiplayer, it may not be a masterpiece, but it’s still a bold and intriguing proposition.

Nightreign is, in my opinion, a highly successful experiment at a fair price, and while there are some obvious kinks to iron out - the lack of new enemies and maps other than Limveld being the most acute - the gameplay foundation is rock solid, and that's what matters most.

From Software's newest game is a surprisingly kick-ass experiment that suffers greatly from balancing issues. Nightreign delivers a brutally hard team-building exercise full of breakneck action that plays fabulously. Unfortunately, it fails to duly reward you for your efforts - be it with worthwhile permanent upgrades or final bosses where your hard-earned builds actually make a difference. It’s far from unfixable, but you should probably wait for a balancing patch or two.

Elden Ring Nightreign is a fun multiplayer offshoot, but it also doesn't come close to the dizzying heights we're used to seeing from FromSoftware. It's an interesting experiment, and I am glad it exists despite my mixed feelings, but it's a shallow happiness when I expect far more profound experiences from this company.

Elden Ring Nightreign is an interesting attempt to build a “session-based” game in the Elden Ring universe. But some things just don't work together.

Elden Ring Nightreign is not the most unusual game FromSoftware has released in its modern era, but it might be the most dense in terms of experimentation. In the spots where the team got to push at the boundaries of what its games are capable of, it’s easy to spot the new, exciting ideas at play. As a roguelike, it can’t quite support the variety expected of the genre. And yet, the core of FromSoftware’s combat is still strong enough that the game is still a blast with friends and so is still somewhat successful at what it sets out to achieve — just don’t expect it to be a big RPG.

Nightreign is a mediocre experience that I can only recommend to groups of friends who are hardcore Elden Ring fans looking for something to play together.

Elden Ring Nightreign shoots for the stars with a clean retrofit of familiar assets into a roguelike format, but it’s dragged back down to earth with repetitive encounters, overtuned bosses, and lacklustre meta-progression. Random chance and an urgent pace rewards blind haste over careful buildcraft, but I'm confident its biggest issues can still be fixed.