Elden Ring Nightreign review: A clumsy multiplayer sideshow to the generation’s best RPG

What makes a Souls game? Is it the difficulty? Is it the obtuse storytelling? Is it the spectacular worlds that you inch through, getting better and better each time you play?

For every Souls player, it’s one of, or a mix of all of these. Which is why, despite featuring plenty of the tenets of the Souls series, and fleeting moments of a high-stakes multiplayer romp, it’s disappointing that Elden Ring Nightreign recontextualises them in a way that quickly loses the magic, and pushes the limits of Elden Ring‘s combat system to breaking point.

Elden Ring is sublime. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is even better. My disappointment with Elden Ring Nightreign does not come from a dislike of the genre; on the contrary, the parts I like about the game are the times it feels most like Elden Ring. The issues are numerous, chief among which is that it misunderstands what people flocked to Elden Ring for, and makes puzzling design decisions that result in a rare misstep for FromSoftware.

Watch our Elden Ring Nightreign review video…

Instead of building your own character from scratch, Elden Ring expedites the Souls process by giving players a pre-made character with its own abilities and “ultimate” power. The eight characters offer diversity in playstyles, making for interesting team compositions.

For example, one character can double all damage done to bosses for a certain period of time. Another can spawn a huge obelisk that can be used as cover, or to trap a boss. While there’s a certain sadness at not being able to make your own Tarnished, this compromise makes sense in the context of the 30 to 40 minute matches. The abilities also make the cast of character also makes each of them feel fairly distinct, a distinction that increases based on how you choose to build your character.

Each match begins with three players (or one, but we’ll get to that) dropping into the map, not unlike a battle royal game. From there, players must visit points of interest in order to defeat bosses and acquire runes, which are used for levelling up.

These bosses are returning favourites from the Souls series, and some new faces. When defeated, the bosses also drop weapons, spells, or other abilities for the player. After a while, the map contracts, pushing the team towards a main boss fight. Survive this, and you do it all over again the next day. Survive this, and you’ll face off against the true boss of the run, the Nightlord.

Nightreign’s first issue presents itself the more times you play: the opening 30 to 40 minutes of every run becomes tedious quickly. There are a surprisingly small number of points of interest to visit, and bosses repeat frequently. After a while, I could feel my group becoming frustrated, running directly from point to point, defeating bosses, and picking up items. You optimise your run so quickly, and you’re forced to, which leads to the second issue.

Because the spike in difficulty at the end of each run is so immense, it means that your runs have to be perfect, or they’re not worth continuing. You have to coordinate with a team to make sure you’re running to as many specific points as possible, with little, to no room for deviation. If you’re not high enough level when you reach the final boss of the run, you might as well not bother. Add to that the fact that if the game’s RNG doesn’t reward you with good gear, there’s little you can do about it.

“Because the spike in difficulty at the end of each run is so immense, it means that your runs have to be perfect, or they’re not worth continuing.”

This lack of flexibility, coupled with the time pressure, eliminates another element of Souls games that’s beloved by so many: experimentation. You have no room to pick up strange weapons and get your bearings with them, because death or wasting time guarantees a pointless run. There are parts of the utterly beautiful map that I wanted to explore, but knew full well that I was sacrificing a boss, or an Evergaol, in order to look around. Time is the biggest enemy in Elden Ring: Nightreign.

In comparison to the main bosses, in the overworld, enemies are extremely easy to defeat. Elden Ring’s combat was already somewhat broken when you’d summon one other player to help you out, but with three sentient players, the enemy AI has no idea what to do. The way Nightreign gets around this is by making the Nightlords have so much health and such devastating attacks that it makes pre-patch Promised Consort Radahn look like Patches. These fights are beautiful, and feature a few mechanics that are entirely new to Nightreign, but they feel trapped at the end of a boss run I became sick of doing.

Cheap attacks from bosses in Souls games are nothing new, but there is a certain amount of handwaving you can do about battering your head against a boss when the time between attempts is seconds. When it’s 40 minutes, it’s crushingly unfun.

Another major issue is the game’s technical performance. Playing the game on PlayStation 5 Pro, I experienced countless frame-rate issues, regular slowdown, and one particular point of interest could reliably bring the game to a slideshow. Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree both had performance issues, but they’re aggravated here by the speed of encounters and the fact that you’re usually fighting multiple enemies at once.

There are green shoots in Elden Ring Nightreign. In many ways, the game feels like a rough-and-ready testbed for ideas that could be implemented into future Souls games. The traversal changes are fun, and there’s slightly more overt storytelling than usual in these types of games. This is not a Miyazaki project, nor is it a full-priced game. That doesn’t excuse its more glaring issues, but it should set expectations for players.

Graphically, the game is similar to base Elden Ring, but the Elden Ring art and design is so, so impressive, that even shuffled around, the game looks excellent. Stark vistas, pops of colours, and intricately designed castles and churches are all great to see again, even if by the end of the game, you’ve seen them a lot. The pre-boss Nightlord arena is also stunning.

“There are green shoots in Elden Ring Nightreign. In many ways, the game feels like a rough-and-ready testbed for ideas that could be implemented into future Souls games”

The game’s soundtrack is also a highlight. Elden Ring Nightreign naturally requires fast-paced music to convey the precarious situation of the circle closing in on players, and that need is well met. The boss themes and sound design for the Nightlords are also, as is typical, excellent.

The caveat hanging over all of this is how you’re going to approach Nightreign. If you have a group of friends that is regularly dedicated to playing the game, some of the frustration I have felt will be alleviated, partly because any game of this nature is more fun when you can chat over the monotony, but mainly because the synchronicity required for each run is something that could be further optimised over a mic.

There is a rudimentary ping system, but matching with random players, in my experience, has very rarely led to a successful run. It’s potentially unfair, but it was difficult not to get angry when I’d see another player run off in a different direction from the marked path. There would be no way to revive them if they died, thus they’d lose a level, they wouldn’t have access to the gear we were going for, and they’d likely have fewer flask charges. Having your runs dictated to you like that isn’t fun, but it’s absolutely essential if you want half a chance at beating the Nightlords.

As such, it’s a game that’s virtually impossible to recommend to someone planning to play on their own. You can drop in yourself, and the game scales to that, but it’s an experience that’s clearly designed for multiplayer.

As I sprinted through Limveld for the 30th time, I was saddened by the thought that this exact same map, with its regularly changing geometry and weather conditions, could’ve been the setting for a proper Elden Ring adventure. Sure, that would probably expose that large parts of the furniture have been copied and pasted from the original game, but that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was all of the secrets, nooks, and crannies that I wasn’t able to explore.

The biggest problem with Elden Ring: Nightreign is Elden Ring. The spectre of one of the greatest RPGs of all time hangs over what is an uneven multiplayer experience. This beautiful world and well-designed bosses and architecture fade to a blur as you run as fast as you can from one dot on the map to the next. However, for dedicated groups of three Tarnished, there is some fun to be had, even if you’ll be stuck with the feeling you’d rather be playing a “proper” Souls game.