There’s Gotta Be More To It Than That…Right? The final boss, and potentially the most frustrating to fight in the entire game. This kind of imbalance made most of the fights feel like I was just scraping by on random luck, frustrated to no end until that final, lucky blow. My success in those fights and thus most of the game was determined more by how the boss AI decided to act rather than my own skill and game knowledge. This would be fine if you had a way to avoid them, but a countless number of my deaths were unavoidable as I would just get hit with a string of attacks that cover the entire boss arena. There’s no protective armour or shields, and being able to refill your health bar in perpetuity does sound like a fair balance but rarely did it feel like that even mattered.Įvery boss has multiple area-of-effect attacks, which they like to stack one on top of another. If you’re careful, you can continuously gain back any health you lose by spamming your charge attack and of course, not getting hit.
While you can die very quickly if you allow yourself to be hit two or three times in a row, that health can be gained back with a charge up attack. It’s here where the balance issues start to come into play. The other fights, however, felt very different.
It’s immensely rewarding, and is comparable to how it feels when you overcome a difficult boss in any challenging game, though in this case especially Dark Souls. These encounters weren’t easy but each failure felt like it was my fault, and with every fight my awareness and skill at combating their attacks improved until I overcame them. Even the aforementioned Guardian Knight was a fun and challenging fight. I particularly enjoyed fighting Azikel, the God of Light and Eos, the God of Unity. Some fights however worked really well, and felt very intense. In a game already trying to partially copy something else, having the attacks I faced not be unique seemed like a step too far. As a veteran Souls player it is definitely nice to be able to notice these references, though I do think that designing some of the attacks and cadence of the bosses based on the fights that inspired them was a mistake. Many of the bosses were clearly inspired by those faced in Souls games, such as the Guardian Knight, inspired by the Tower Knight in Demon’s Souls. You won’t have the same variety you do in a game that has you fighting weaker enemies and a boss at the end of each level or section, so the fights you do have need to be very well designed and executed.Įldest Souls has a total of eight boss fights across nine bosses (one fight is two back-to-back), and while I wouldn’t say they’re all poorly designed, some are very clearly better than others. Game development isn’t easy to begin with, and though I know nothing about it, a part of me figures a boss rush game is a special kind of challenge. This opening image of you on a lone boat approaching the beginning of your journey works very well to set up the mystery of the narrative and the world ahead. It was in those moments that I truly found myself enjoying the game the most, intrigued by the lore of the world and trying to fit the narrative together. Overall, the setting and visual design of Eldest Souls is a welcome relief from the intense boss battles, since I thankfully didn’t have to worry about any enemies on my way back to the boss each time I died. The NPC’s you meet are also wonderful additions to the world, further grounding the setting and also bringing some of the classic Souls NPC quirkiness into the mix.
Your characters’ slow pace isn’t at all welcome in combat, but calmly walking through the desolated Citadel, discovering hordes of citizens frozen in place, or finding soldiers scattered and bloody across an abandoned battlefield made everything around me sink in to greater effect. It felt familiar and totally new at the same time, which is exactly how I want to feel when I’m playing something inspired by another game or franchise I love. Exploring the world in between the boss fights was always intriguing, and felt very Soulslike as the environmental storytelling is well executed. The pixel art on display in the world of Eldest Souls is one of my favourite aspects of this game.
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