Forums > Submission Feedback > overdrive's Elden Ring review

Repeated enemies have been, are, and always will be a part of the gaming experience. I think you've mentioned them in something like 3/4 of the reviews you've ever written. I don't remember the Capra Demon from Dark Souls being nearly as difficult as, well, everything else. Otherwise, I agree with pretty much everything you wrote here... as far as I played the game. Which was pretty far, since people kept paying me to write about it elsewhere and I was hardly likely to complain about that. Elden Ring is definitely the game I've played most this year on console (and mobile games I've spent hours fooling around with don't really count). I'm glad you enjoyed it as much as I did. It's such a great game, basically offering everything I've liked about the medium since I first discovered it decades ago. Game of the year? For me, probably so!

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

I agree with you on the repeated enemies thing, but to me, in comparison to other FROM games, there was a bit more of that, likely because the game was a good bit larger due to its open-world setting. To me, a few more original bosses would have been a great fix-it. At least so stuff like Astel, which in the lore is something way out there, doesn't have a duplicate. Or when you establish that Erdtree Avatars guard Erdtrees and then start using them as degraded bosses in random locations -- that is weird. That might just be me being bitter, though, due to all the damn Crucible Knights. Those things are pure hate and death to my playing style of BIG MELEE POWER. Think I killed one of the Farum Azala ones by pure cheese. Shoot with arrow, run far away until he goes back to position and do that about 30-40 times over about that many minutes.

And you didn't have trouble with the Capra Demon? I might have had more deaths to it than all the other bosses in that game put together! It just felt luck-based at the beginning with trying to avoid his battle-opening "mess you up" jumping chop AND also not getting hung up on the dogs.

Speaking of luck-based, some of those final bosses in Elden Ring kind of feel that way when you play BIG MELEE POWER. Took a few (several/a lot) times to beat the final duo. With the deciding factor being that when I won, the second of the two was pretty stationary. Had one run where I got through the first one without much trouble and then got slowly decimated by the second because it kept moving around and blasting me with magic from long range. When I won, it did that once, but was primarily stationary.

But that was part of the fun of the game. Bosses had a lot of options, so you couldn't "program" yourself to only be good if they did this or that, because they might bust out stuff you weren't expecting. A lot of them got me at least once with stuff I wasn't expecting.

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
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