Eldest Souls Review – What a rush

Let’s remove this band-aid now: Eldest Souls is a standalone action game similar to Souls. Before fleeing terrified yelling: “Not one more of these!” You should know that the game offers a nice twist by taking out foraging enemies and shortcut-guided exploration to fully focus on elaborate and nail-hard boss battles. Additionally, Eldest Souls combat and progression offer clever insights that make your challenge not only bearable but strategically rewarding as well. Yes, the game has some of the familiar trappings of the subgenre, but it manages to put the “rush” in the “boss rush.”

You are a lone warrior wielding a huge sword with a simple task: infiltrate a citadel imprisoning the ancient gods who destroyed the world and kill each one of them. That’s. The scattered notes and the occasional NPC provide additional, sometimes exciting, context for this world gone wrong, but I was more concerned with dirtying my sword than pondering the how and why of it all.

Eldest Souls uses its FromSoftware inspirations on its manga, but thankfully it’s not that harsh. For one thing, you’re not collecting money, so you don’t lose anything by dying. Stamina only dictates how often you can dodge, which means you can swing your sword all day without consequences. Armed with a heavy broadsword, his basic attacks are deliberately slow, to the point of feeling slightly numb. It’s not a deal breaker, but I could bear to feel tighter, and it took me a while to get used to the combat.

My favorite aspect of Eldest Souls is that you don’t collect health. Instead, you regain health by landing charged sword strikes. This system does an excellent job of encouraging and rewarding aggression, and it kept my morale from plummeting every time I was stepped on. Did you lose 90 percent of your health during the first few seconds of a fight? A few hard blows can heal you like nothing happened. However, it takes a second for this attack to charge, so there is a risk for the reward. Still, I love how this mechanic encourages me to keep fighting no matter how grim things look and has led to some incredible victories from behind.

The Old Gods offer an entertaining and highly challenging battle gauntlet that pushed me to use all abilities. Every boss is fun, even those that took a dozen tries to topple. Favorites include a wizard who controls gravity and a deer god who is much more than meets the eye. Even the big bad ending made me smile with enthusiasm as he cut down his seemingly bottomless pit of offense. Enemies are multi-trick ponies that throw screen-filling traps, bullet hell-style projectiles, and often switch tactics or take on new forms mid-fight. Surviving his attacks can be infuriating, and I watched the Game Over screen hundreds of times. Sometimes the sheer number of attacks to be reckoned with can be maddening, but I always knew where I went wrong and ultimately succeeded by studying attack patterns while properly managing stamina. Instant respawns also kept me engaged, as did the option to try your luck against other enemies, as there are several available to challenge at once.

Winning the day requires mastering all three Eldest Souls combat styles: Windslash, Berserk, and Counter. In layman’s terms, that’s Speed, Attack, and Defense. You can only equip one class at a time, and each one has a separate skill tree of skills and perks, but you can change respecting skill points whenever you want at no cost. Whether I’m generating homing projectiles with Windslash or unleashing devastating parry attacks under the Counter tree, I found each class to be entertaining in its own way. As someone who rarely respects in a game, Eldest Souls pushed me, with great success, to change my tactics every time I hit a wall. Eldest Souls isn’t about figuring out which class a boss is weaker against, like rock-paper-scissors, but learning which approach works best for your playstyle. The ability to award shards obtained from bosses provides additional customization options for deceptively deep character building.

Between the slaughter of gods, you embark on a light exploration, converse with characters like an omnipresent bard, or oddities like a talking frozen skull. These characters usually ask you to bring them an artifact, so it’s important to dig deep to find well-hidden items. You can completely ignore these quest missions as they are unrelated to the critical path, but you can gain advantages such as increased movement speed. It’s nothing fancy, but it does a good job of completing the adventure without feeling like unnecessary filler.

Strangely, the more Eldest Souls handed me my butt on a bloodstained tray, the more I grew. Hitting walls opened my eyes to the clever nuances in combat and made each gigantic showdown even more exciting. Once the game clicked, I happily loaded into the action, excited to add another monster head to my proverbial wall. A New Game + mode raises the stakes on these titans and keeps you on your toes. Eldest Souls is a no-brainer if you already enjoy punishment games like this, but the lenient health system and perfected challenge can entice newcomers to face its dangers.