Elden Ring Review: Spirit Ashes Save Everyone
This Elden Ring review comes from someone who bounced off two FromSoftware games before this one and still ended up calling the Lands Between the finest Elden Ring open world anyone has built. I picked it up, went in expecting to be beaten up and sent home, and I keep going back. It released on 25 February 2022 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One and PC.
I am not a grinder, and I had never finished a Souls game unaided. I have had a go at everything this one offers anyway: the main path, catacombs, invasions, Colosseum duels and the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. If you play on PC, our walkthrough on how to download and install Elden Ring handles the setup part.
Below, you'll find how it plays now, which parts have aged badly, and who should start it.
Elden Ring Review Summary
Elden Ring released on 25 February 2022 and has passed 30 million units sold, with Elden Ring Tarnished Edition arriving on Nintendo Switch 2 on 28 August 2026.
The Elden Ring open world works on trust. No quest log, no waypoints, one compass and a map you fill in by finding stelae.
Elden Ring Spirit Ashes are the difficulty slider the options menu never had, and they make this the most welcoming game FromSoftware has made.
The last third recycles its Elden Ring bosses, and the quest chains still need a wiki open on a second screen.
Shadow of the Erdtree launched on 21 June 2024, gates entry behind Radahn and Mohg, and runs on its own Scadutree Blessing curve.
Limgrave Sold Me In One Ride
Elden Ring is arguably one of the best open-world games. My first hour went badly and I loved it anyway. I walked out of the tutorial cave, saw a knight on a golden horse patrolling the road south, and decided he was the next step. The Tree Sentinel flattened me in two swings, then six more times, and at no point did the game suggest I was doing something stupid. I rode around him instead, and by the end of the evening I had a map fragment, a spirit summon and a weapon I could actually swing.
There is no quest log, no objective marker and no minimap, only a compass and a map that shows nothing until you find the stele in each region. Sites of Grace point a faint golden thread toward the critical path, and you are free to ignore it for thirty hours. I did ignore it, and the game kept paying me for it. A catacomb under a graveyard, a dragon dropping out of the sky over Agheel Lake, a pumpkin-headed brute in a ruined cellar guarding a helm I wore for the next twenty hours.
Limgrave sells all of this in about ninety minutes, gentle enough to survive in and dense enough that every ridge hides something. Torrent does the rest of the work, since double jumps and spirit springs make hostile ground crossable on your own terms. Next door sits Caelid, a rotted red region that kills a new character in seconds, and nobody stops you riding there. I went at level 20, got mauled by a giant dog, and came back at level 60 to take the place apart. Earning a region back like that is a feeling almost no other open world gives me.
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Combat Rewards Patience Over Reflexes
Margit, the Fell Omen is where most players learn what kind of game this is. He guards the road to Stormveil Castle and his windups pause just long enough to bait a roll out of you. A Steam discussion thread opened by a player called Nonomori argued that the delay at the top of his animations is unreadable and that he reads your inputs as well. I ended up disagreeing after roughly the fifteenth attempt. He is slow on purpose, and once I stopped rolling early he became the fight that taught me everything after it.
The combat itself is the most generous FromSoftware has built. Jump attacks break poise, guard counters after a block punish anything with a wind-up, and stance damage lets a heavy weapon stun a boss into a critical hit. My Confessor ended up swinging a bleed greatsword with two incantations I never changed, and the game never asked me to play faster than I could handle.
Builds are also reversible. Rennala at Raya Lucaria Academy rebirths your character for a Larval Tear, so a stat spread you regret at level 90 costs an item and ten minutes. I respecced twice, once out of a failed mage experiment, and kept every hour I had already put in.
Spirit Ashes Are The Difficulty Slider
Spirit Ashes decide whether a new player finishes this game. Summon a set at a boss fog and you get an ally who pulls aggro and splits the boss's attention. The Mimic Tear copies your own character, gear included, and it carried me through three fights I had no business winning.
Nothing about that reads as cheating to me, and the community mostly agrees. In a Steam thread about beating Malenia, a player called AarkNoa posted a win after days of attempts. The replies spent more time arguing about summons than celebrating, before landing on the obvious answer, which is that a win counts either way. The game hands you these tools and balances its late bosses around the assumption that you might use them.
What the game still refuses to offer is a difficulty setting or a pause button. Stopping mid-dungeon means finding a safe corner or quitting to the menu, which is hard to defend in a sixty-hour RPG. Spirit Ashes, over-levelling and a co-op summon cover most of that gap, so the real difficulty is whatever you decide it is. The reputation for brutality belongs to Dark Souls more than it belongs here.
The Late Game Loses Its Discipline
The back half is where my score stops being a 10. Around the Mountaintops of the Giants the density drops away, the map empties out, and the bosses start repeating. Erdtree Avatars, Ulcerated Tree Spirits and Crucible Knights turned up so often that their movesets became chores with health bars. The Consecrated Snowfield looks incredible and holds almost nothing worth the ride.
Some of the marquee fights also went past challenging into unfair. Malenia heals on every hit she lands, blocked hits included, and her Waterfowl Dance is a three-part flurry most builds cannot escape at close range. I beat her with a Mimic Tear and a lot of luck. The Godskin Duo puts two bosses in one arena on a shared health pool, which is a fight in the same way a traffic jam is a road trip.
Quest design never got fixed either. Ranni, Millicent and Blaidd all move between regions after invisible triggers, with no journal entry and no marker, so one missed conversation can silently end a chain you have followed for twenty hours. I finished Ranni's line on my first playthrough only after a friend told me where she goes next. A simple list of who I have met and where would cost the game nothing.
Shadow Of The Erdtree Demands More
The expansion arrived on 21 June 2024 and it is close to a second game. Getting in takes work. You need Starscourge Radahn dead at Redmane Castle and Mohg, Lord of Blood dead at Mohgwyn Palace, then you touch the arm in his cocoon to reach the Land of Shadow. That gate keeps a mid-game character out, which I think is the right call.
Inside, your levels matter far less than the new system. Scadutree Fragments raise a Scadutree Blessing that adds damage negation and Attack Power, Revered Spirit Ashes do the same for your summons, and both apply only inside the expansion. Skip the fragments and a level 150 character gets deleted by ordinary soldiers. FromSoftware later patched the early blessing tiers upward after players said the curve started too harsh, and the opening hours feel noticeably fairer for it.
Environment art is where the expansion pulls ahead of the base game, with a shattered cliff face hiding a whole second layer underneath it. The Cerulean Coast is full of ghostly flowers and has almost nothing to fight, and the Shadow Keep folds back on itself again and again. Miquella's story finally gets told properly, and the final boss is the hardest thing FromSoftware has shipped. I needed a week of evenings and a summon to put it down.
Is Elden Ring Worth Buying Right Now?
Yes, with one condition: buy it if you want a game that refuses to waste your time on filler, and skip it if you need a difficulty setting to enjoy yourself. Sixty hours gets you through the main path, and a hundred and twenty gets you the DLC plus the side regions. It goes on sale often, so waiting for one costs you nothing, if you get the best deal.
The game is finished and stable. The PC build stuttered badly at release and patches smoothed most of it out. A free update added the Colosseum arenas, and the expansion has passed 10 million units of its own alongside the spin-off Nightreign. There is a handheld option too, since Tarnished Edition landed on Nintendo Switch 2 on 28 August 2026.
If the opening hours are the part that puts you off, that is what we are for. Elden Ring accounts with a levelled character skip the stretch where every enemy is a wall, and Elden Ring items cover the weapon or talisman a build needs without twelve more dungeon runs. For a long weekend that needs filling, it sits near the top of the best video games to cure boredom.
FAQs About Elden Ring
Final Words
What keeps pulling me back is the confidence behind it all: the willingness to put a cave entrance behind a waterfall, tell nobody, and trust that somebody will find it. Every open world I played afterwards felt like it was reading me a checklist.
The flaws are real and I stand by both cons. Recycled bosses in the last third and quest chains that need a browser open are exactly what a 10 out of 10 does not get to carry. They cost the game a point and they come nowhere near costing it the recommendation.
If you start it, do one thing for me. Pick a direction on the horizon that looks interesting and ride at it before you touch the golden thread. That habit is the game.
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