4/5 ★ – WoahItsFlug's review of ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN.

I'm so sick of people slandering Nightreign... This game rules. I played Elden Ring for ~60 hours (never beat it though, skill issue) and I loved it. My two biggest issues, though, were the long stretches of travel with very little direction given, and in particular the archaic multiplayer system, as I enjoyed the game the most in co-op. I know that's not how everyone felt, but that's what held the game back for me. Flash forward a couple years, and Neightreign was practically made for me. Neightreign takes the thrill of Elden Ring's bosses and expands upon it with new advanced movement options and combat abilities. It's still very challenging (sometimes almost unfairly so) but it somehow feels like a power fantasy game at the same time. The bosses are incredibly difficult, but the game doesn't make you feel weak. If anything, I feel like a force of nature going up against the smaller enemies and mini bosses. The new ultimate art abilities courtesy of the game's focus on character classes have crazy cool animations and are all super useful in battle, making it fun to experiment with team loadouts and how you can build off of your teammates to rain maximum destruction. The pacing of the game is streamlined, with a hub world where you select missions before being dropped into a shrunk-down version of the Elden Ring map. Between the smaller map size and the new traversal abilities, the game strikes a good balance between exploration and cool environmental setpieces while still always having a new objective to do. If I had to dock points for anything, the RNG can be punishing sometimes. The map is procedurally generated, and thus sometimes the game won't give you a lot to work with in terms of loot. The multiplayer system is still flawed (no crossplay and no 2-player option, as of this review), but it's still a huge improvement over the first game. I commented many times playing Elden Ring with friends that I wished the game had a seamless co-op mode, and this game is literally entirely based on that setup. It could use some more quality-of-life features and some better balancing, but it gave me exactly what I had been asking for. Elden Ring: Nightreign has its issues with balancing and a lack of some features, but it's still an incredibly fun spinoff that takes the winning formula of the original and turns it into a thrilling, streamlined co-op experience.