Elden Ring Nightreign

An intriguing experiment—perfect for multiplayer fans who don’t shy away from a tough challenge. But whether the Souls niche was really craving this? We’re not so sure.

Provided you have a couple of friends to play with, Nightreign can easily become the perfect trap — a fun gauntlet of trials where you endlessly chase that ideal winning run right before going to bed. And then you do it again. And again. And again. But if you lack the necessary company, perhaps there are better ways to spend your time — maybe even with the original Elden Ring. After all, that game had plenty of great boss battles too.

Elden Ring: Nightreign ends up being a roguelike spin-off variation on FromSoftware’s usual Soulslike formula. It's certainly weighed down by excessive repetition and a persistent sense of déjà vu after just a few hours. However, the action comes alive when a proper three-person team enters the map, with co-op play creating memorably tense battles driven by collaboration.

FromSoftware have tried their hand at an entirely different style of game in Elden Ring Nightreign. The stripped-down, condensed and multiplayer-orientated focus leave a title that has many thrilling moments, but feels devoid of the life and soul that made the original Elden Ring such a special experience. Entering this fog alone is folly, but with a couple of like-minded Souls vets, there's plenty of great moments to be had amongst the repetition.

Elden Ring Nightreign is best described as beautiful chaos. While it brings a sense of challenge and wild fun with its energetic pace, its inherent balance issue will surely bother Souls players who are used to skill being the decisive factor in victory, not chance.

Multiplayer being central to Elden Ring Nightreign, which takes a page from battle royale games like Fortnite, is both a blessing and a curse. It is an uneven entry full of frustrations and limitations that doesn’t stand up to its long line of popular predecessors.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is the most fast-paced take on FromSoftware’s formula, but the truth is it didn’t need to be faster or lean so heavily into an arcade-style gameplay, especially when its last installment was so special. It raises the question—if even the masters of the genre no longer want to keep making “soulslikes,” and with their upcoming title The Duskbloods seemingly following the same path, is there really anything left to uncover?

More than anything, Nightreign feels like a sandbox for FromSoftware to try something new, implement ideas, and see how they land. In the grand scheme of things, it makes me far more interested to see what the studio can cook up with the Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods, which is also multiplayer-focused. In that regard, Nightreign feels more like a stepping-stone for the studio, and as long as you go in with tempered expectations, there’s still a healthy dose of fun to be had.

During my time with Elden Ring Nightreign, I was waiting for something to jump out and amaze me like the original game and Erdtree had, but that sensation never came. Nightreign delivers glimpses of what I love about the previous games, but the jump to this new format just never quite landed as well as I had hoped. When I played with my friends or when I finally tackled that Nightlord I had been stuck on, it hit with that same exhilarating sense of accomplishment that I love, but so much else left me wanting. With so many reused enemies and guest bosses, Nightreign feels more like an impressive expansion than a whole new release, and perhaps that is a better way to look at it: an experiment in something new. This first drop into the roguelike genre with the Souls series is intriguing enough to make me consider exploring future explorations into it, but beyond that, I will happily stick with my exploration-heavy and deep character customization options instead.

Elden Ring Nightreign has a lot of good ideas on its side, a lot of quality, and I'm sure it will blossom during the coming months; however, at the moment the ratio of fun to frustration seems a bit problematic.

Elden Ring Nightreign is a game that's likely going to split FromSoftware players in a way we haven't seen before. In addition to being a clear departure from what fans expect from the studio, it's also a title that 100% hinges on the team you experience it with. Play with Elden Ring pros, and it can be a blast. Play with average Nightfarers or casual matchmakers, and it can turn into a slog. This leaves the game in a little bit of a No Man's Land, too punishing and brutally tuned for the mass audience the new genre format wants to attract, and perhaps too much of a departure for some of the longtime fanbase. Nightreign can be really fun once you adjust to it, when everything clicks, when you have the perfect team of three, when the RNG is friendly, and when you have a lot of time on your hands to chip away at final bosses with ridiculous amounts of HP. Sadly, the repetitive nature and balancing issues also can make it feel like a series of the world's longest Soulslike runbacks ever—over, and over, and over.

There's fun to be had with Elden Ring Nightreign, especially if you're a skilled Elden Ring player who loves a challenge or can get a good team together, but it does have a range of issues. The fact that there's only one map means repetition quickly creeps in, for example, and the Relic system simply doesn't feel as impactful as it should. Being a multiplayer-focused game, the lack of cross-play is also egregious.

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.

Elden Ring Nightreign departs a lot from the usual FromSoftware formula, which doesn’t always work out. From a hasty experience to boss fights you can’t learn from, it can often be frustrating. The mechanics are solid however and it might tap into a whole new audience.

While playing alone is a disaster, the multiplayer-portion of the game is surprisingly fun and diverse. Nightreign is an experiment that not always succeeds, but definitely a bold endeavor and if FromSoftware decides to tweak the balance a little, we might get a game that is eventually good no matter how you play.

Built as a way to capitalize on the success of 2022’s Elden Ring without committing to a full sequel, Nightreign puts a clever co-op spin on the open-world game by turning it into a roguelike. It’s a smart remix that gets more use out of existing assets while inventing a replayable multiplayer game with unexpected strategic depth despite its RPG hooks being much more streamlined than a standard Soulslike. Fully finding that hook takes a lot of effort, but it pays off for those patient enough to push through its most obvious flaws.

Elden Ring Nightreign is a surprisingly well-executed roguelike that melds well with the core of Elden Ring and even builds on it with a refreshingly rapid pace and spectacular new bosses. It's also excellent with friends, making for a superb co-op experience, but limited matchmaking options and mixed bosses mean it can be as frustrating as it is fun.

Shrouded in the magic and oppressiveness of the Elden Ring world, Nightreign is a good addition to the franchise, but it's no more than an empty, superficial spectacle that relies on nostalgia for bosses and references to Dark Souls. Fun can be found in the rushed exploration of Limveld and in the battles that are only big in size and have lost their epic factor due to the lifeless arenas. The game, however, could be a new way for new players to enter the soulslike universe thanks to its greater accessibility and less punishing challenge.

A pretty smart (re)use of Elden Ring’s world and mechanics, one perhaps suited more for a subset of series fans than newcomers, and one that maybe reuses too much and doesn’t improve enough, though. While it might not necessarily appeal to all ER fans, this is a pretty well-thought-out utilization of that game's rich world, bringing with it a new experience, one that might not feel so new in enough aspects, though.

Nightreign is a thrilling co-op adrenaline rush. However, poor balancing and technical problems cause many moments of frustration.

FromSoftware struggle to force the square peg of Elden Ring into the round hole of a co-op roguelite, and while they just about manage to make it work the whole game feels like only a half-successful experiment.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is an odd follow-up to one of the most beloved games of recent years. Instead of a vast open-world adventure that can be mastered with time, Nightreign throws you from one intense boss battle to another. FromSoftware designed it as a three-player co-op experience and haven’t bothered with cross-play or a two-player mode, adding more barriers to an already intimidating game. Making something for Elden Ring’s existing community rather than trying to improve brand awareness should be celebrated, but it’s a hard game to love.

FromSoftware’s experiment in upending its established gameplay formula is admirable, and taking down gargantuan foes alongside friends really adds to the joy you feel at finally besting what at first felt like an insurmountable task. It’s just a shame that the game’s skewed pacing and overreliance on Elden Ring’s pool of assets so greatly mars the experience.