Gideon’s Perspective
It might be blasphemy to say, but I’ve never played Elden Ring, despite the fact that I loved the Dark Souls games. Something just always got in the way of me finding the right moment to jump into it. Nightreign’s co-op focus, however, grabbed my attention. Full Co-op is the biggest thing I wanted in any Souls game, and the fact that it’s wrapped in a rogue-lite cloak made it an even better fit for me.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
I think I have somewhat of a unique perspective on Nightreign because of the fact that I’ve never played Elden Ring. In fact, I’m not sure I’ll ever actually play Elden Ring now because Nightreign is much better suited to my palette. I chronically start over with new character builds in RPGs, and every time I step foot into Limveld, I can run with a new build. Not to mention, the ever-changing randomness of the game keeps it fresh for me.
It makes sense because another Soulslike game that I heavily favor is Remnant 2, a game with a rogue-lite-inspired procedural nature and plenty of ways to retool your build, even mid-campaign. While I very much enjoy the Dark Souls games, I always felt stuck with a weapon choice for an entire playthrough, and any attempt to alter it was met with a massive time investment.
Nightreign gives me that fantastic soul’s combat, awesome boss fights, and tough challenge. But tops it off with full co-op play and tons of variety. A winning mixture if I’ve ever seen one.
| Gideon’s Bias | Nightreign Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: From Software, Namco Bandai |
| Hours Played: 100+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox Series, PlayStation 5, PS4, Xbox One |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Multiplayer Rogue-lite, Soulsborne |
| Mode Played: N/A | Price: $39.99 |
Nightfaring
In a nutshell, Nightreign is a match or run-based game where every session will probably take around an hour to play. You and up to two other players are dropped into a semi-randomized map where you will run around raiding camps and dungeons in order to level up, find loot, and hopefully get stronger with the overall goal of taking down the Nightlord on day 3. Before that, however, you have to contend with night bosses on days 1 and 2.
As time ticks by, a blue wall of flame and rain will slowly enclose the map, akin to a battle royal game, forcing you into the night boss arena. This means you have to be hasty and strategic through the entire run, picking and choosing where to go and what to fight based on the layout of the map, the needs of your team, and your capabilities at any given moment.
Naturally, this is all centered around an excellent combat system that rewards careful attacks and good positioning while at the same time giving you access to a huge number of weapons, badass spells, and cool skills. If you have played a Souls game, you know what to expect, but in Nightreign it’s dialed up to 11. It’s faster-paced but keeps its core intact.
During the day, you are rewarded for not just winning a fight, but winning it smoothly. The faster you can clear groups of enemies and bosses, the better. Then, when it comes to night bosses and night lords, you are incentivized to take your time, learn the bosses’ moves, and strike carefully. You don’t have a time limit during these fights, so it’s an interesting shifting of gears during each run.
There is a neat duality to a run, because playing too slow or too fast could be a mistake. You need to use your finite time wisely, but simply blowing past potentially useful items, equipment, and XP could be a mistake as well.
I’m late reviewing Nightreign, so I got to see an interesting division take place when it comes to guides, tips, and tricks. There is this constant desire within the media surrounding Nightreign to optimize the best route through Limveld.
However, in my experience, there isn’t one, and that’s the beauty of it. The best evidence of this is the fact that so many guides seem to contradict each other. Some put emphasis on bee-lining to churches for more flasks, while others say they aren’t important. Some say that you should run past small enemies, others insist you need them to gain enough XP.
In my experience, my runs did progressively better when I maintained a plan that was fluid. It was all dependent on my build, the map layout, where I was, and numerous other factors. While I have my own opinions on best practices. I think the true brilliance of this system is the fact that, while there are indeed many, many wrong ways to play, there’s an equal number of right ways to play.
Any attempt I made to follow some kind of META route was nowhere near as effective as staying fluid, and that really made me enjoy the game more.
Randomly Predictable
There is an ingenious balance in Nightreign’s design where it walks a near-perfect line between being predictable and unpredictable. The Nightlord you choose to hunt will have a known weakness and pull from a pool of night bosses, semi-unique to them. For example, the very first Nightlord is weak to Holy, and when it’s the focus of the run, you count on either the Demihuman Queen or Bell Bearing Hunter to be the first night boss you encounter on day 1.
Beyond that, the landscape of Limveld is set in stone. There is always a castle in the middle of the map, and the layouts of the dungeons are largely the same. What changes are what types of encampments that spawn, where they are all laid out, and the actual loot you can find in them. But it’s tempered in a very cool way.
For example, a camp on the map might be a fire camp, which means there is a high likelihood of finding fire weapons. But that camp might be a Fire Chariot Camp or Redmane Camp, which have different approaches to raiding them. Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that you will find a specific type of weapon there. It could be a fire bow, it could be a fire spear, who knows?
There are smaller consistencies like that as well. A backroom chest of a particular fort layout always has an Evergoal Key in addition to random loot, allowing you to plan out prison bosses as part of your run. Great Churches always have seals, so spellcasters know to look there.
This type of tempered randomness leads to two things. It means Nightreign has enough variety to stay fresh. I’ve played for over 100 hours, and I’m not winding down at all. Secondly, it allows you to plan around the randomness to some degree. When you drop into Limveld, you can look at the map layout and form some sort of plan based on your build idea, despite the randomness. You aren’t at the utter mercy of RNG, but there is enough there to constantly keep you on your toes and to make each run feel a bit different every time.
Then there are also random events that spice things up further. Sometimes, a shifting earth occurs, which drops a specific type of map change into a run. Like a volcanic creator, a giant snow-covered mountain, or a rot-filled swamp. Sometimes another boss will invade, a meteor will fall from the sky, or Dark Nightfarers will invade part of the map. These events are somewhat sparse, but that’s to the game’s credit; it means it’s a big deal when they occur, and it makes you excited to explore them.
So Many Ways To Die
There are 8 characters you can play in Nightreign, each one has a very different playstyle and set of character-specific powers. The Recluse is a heavy spellcaster able to mix element essence into exclusive spells. The Executor can parry attacks with his special cursed blade, while the Guardian is a stalwart defender.
As you succeed and fail runs, you will accumulate relics, which allow you to build out each character in a variety of ways. These can be simple stat increases, starting with certain items, and all kinds of other possibilities. But what I really love about Nightreign is that your build isn’t always decided in a menu screen before you enter the game world.
You have 6 weapon slots you can fill as you explore the world, and you can switch between these weapons fluidly, 3 between your primary hand and 3 between your secondary hand. However, the real kicker is that weapons always have a random passive effect, most of which impart bonuses to you just for being in your inventory.
This means you are rewarded for keeping your build plan fluid during each run, and are able to build out with a variety of strengths based on what you find.
Each of the 8 Nightfarers has a different playstyle, but they are also very versatile. Any Nightfarer can use any weapon or spell, they just have varying effectiveness between them. However, even an unoptimized weapon or spell can come in handy during the right situation.
For example, you can revive downed teammates by attacking them. Bows tend to be great for this, and keeping one in your back pocket can be a good idea. Sometimes a spellcaster can get overwhelmed, and a big ol’ bonking stick can be handy in a pinch. Furthermore, while some characters are great with a specific weapon type, they can be very effective with many types.
Ironeye is definitely the best archer in the game. Yet, if he finds a legendary katana or spear that scales with his high dexterity, it’s still worth using. Especially if none of his teammates are high-dexterity characters.
I love finding new ways to play each Nightfarer, looking over my relic list for new ideas, and, more importantly, looking for weapon passives that complement my ideas. This has another advantage for me over standard Souls games.
Once I beat a Souls boss, if you put me in the same fight with the same build, I’ll probably win again. However, due to the random nature of Nightreign, I’m not guaranteed to beat, or even get to the same Nightlord again, just because I won once.
Personal skill is obviously the biggest factor, and I met every boss with the overwhelming sense of dread that the fight was impossible. However, I slowly got better at fighting them for that eventual euphoric victory.
However, meeting a boss I beat once with a new character or a different build can have drastically different results. I’m not guaranteed to win, and this, too, keeps the game fresh. I’m perfectly happy to take on Nightlords over and over again, thanks to the freshness that the randomness and build variety brings.
Solo & Multiplayer
Nightreign was primarily designed for a three-player premade group, and it shows. Playing with randoms is hit or miss, sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes it’s maddening. The only way to communicate in-game is via pings, and it’s woefully inadequate. Oftentimes, each player thinks they have the best idea for how the game is played and scatters to the wind.
The team play with friends is pretty brilliant as you work together to clear the map, divide the bosses’ attention, share items, and revive each other. Once you get to know the game, there is even more nuance to the teamwork.
For example, unless Recluse can get a good crowd-clearing spell, she is very slow at clearing out small enemies due to the time it takes to cast spells. But that’s a lot of XP to miss out on. It’s best for someone like Wylder or Ironeye to clear out the small mobs for her, allowing her to ignore them.
If my friends aren’t available, I’m more than happy to play Nightreign solo. In some ways, it’s actually easier solo. You get a free revive each night, you can buy additional ones, and multiple enemies generally don’t focus fire on you. While I enjoy multiplayer far more, I’d still gladly pay for Nightreign as a single-player experience.
The developers are also working on adding Duos to the game, allowing you to play with just two people without adding a random to the mix, and I’m very much looking forward to that. It is a shame that it wasn’t there at launch.
Verdict
Nightreign is an utterly brilliant experience and one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. It’s not perfect, even if you want to play with randoms, matchmaking is very strange and seems to split the queue into a hundred different subsets based on Nightlord, shifting earth events, and character quests. This means it can be hard to match despite the popularity of the game.
There are times when the lock on camera feels like it’s fighting against you in crowds of enemies, and naturally, in-game information can be pretty obtuse to find. So basically it’s a FromSoft game.
However, I think they have something brilliant here. The game is more than worth the price of admission, and once they add duos, it will be even better. However, I actually hope they keep adding on to Nightreign because it’s the perfect canvas for it, and they have plenty of enemies and bosses they can recycle from their past games if they need them. The term live service might be a dirty word, but if there was ever the perfect candidate for it, it’s Nightreign.
If they don’t go that route, I’ll still be happy. Nightreign isn’t even a full-priced game, and I’ve already put over 100 fun-filled hours into it, with more to come. I’ll take that any day over a full-priced 15 to 20-hour “cinematic experience” the industry seems to be in love with.
The way Nightreign blends the replayability of a rogue-lite game with the skillful nature you come to expect of a FromSoft game is nothing short of amazing.
I’m giving it my Golden Shield Award.
