Elden Ring Nightreign Review - Conquering the Night

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Elden Ring Nightreign Platform Publisher Developer WCCFTECH RATING Elden Ring Nightreign Pros Cons

Elden Ring Nightreign

May 30th, 2025

Platform

PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S

Publisher

Bandai Namco

Developer

FromSoftware

The announcement of Elden Ring Nightreign last year was a surprise for most players. Following the release of what has become FromSoftware’s most celebrated action RPG to date and its expansion, it has been reiterated multiple times that a sequel was not in development, suggesting that it would be a while until Tarnished could return to the Lands Between, counting teased IP expansions that most thought were a few years away. The doors of the Roundtable Hold, however, could not stay shut for long, and the iconic location is about to be opened up to welcome the Nighfarers and aid them in their difficult battle against the Nightlords to repel the Night Tide and possibly restore the fractured reality of Limveld to the former splendor of its older days.

While every entry in the Souls series featured a multiplayer component, the co-op nature of the Elden Ring Nightreign experience, and its extremely close resemblance to the original game, made more than a few players skeptical at the game’s reveal. FromSoftware’s games are known for their relatively slow pace that allows players to meticulously explore big, intricately designed locations, study enemy patterns, and develop their character build to be able to overcome the many challenges they have to face. I shared this skepticism myself.

While I could see the gameplay formula lend itself to a roguelike spin, the focus on co-op felt, on paper, maybe a little forced, considering the studio never implemented proper co-op in their games, allowing it only for short segments. Playing the Closed Network Test, my opinion of the game changed for the better, and spending 30+ hours with the launch version made me realize how wrong I was. Though some things could be improved, Elden Ring Nightreign shows once again why FromSoftware is the best at what they do, tweaking their formula slightly to make it work as an engaging high-speed co-op experience where individual player knowledge and skill still matter a lot.

Though Limveld looks very similar to The Lands Between’s Limgrave region, Elden Ring Nightreign’s setting is very different from that of the base game. This new region is a parallel version of Limgrave, created after the cataclysmic event called the Shattering. Being a fractured version of the first regions players explore in Elden Ring isn’t the only thing that makes Limveld dangerous, as the Night Tide besieges the land, reshaping it each night ahead of the coming of the Nightlord, a being linked with the ancient Nox civilization, who were known worshippers of the night even after they were forced into exile in The Lands Between. The only warriors capable of surviving the Night Tide and taking on the Nightlord and its hordes are the Nightfarers. Defined by their combat abilities, but with their own personal stories and motivations, the eight warriors – Wylder, Guardian, Duchess, Ironeye, Raider, Recluse, Revenant and Executor – often embark on Expeditions in Limveld from the Roundtable Hold base to fight off these hordes, defeat the powerful Nightlords, and discover the truth behind the mysterious being behind it all.

In true FromSoftware fashion, Elden Ring Nightreign features plenty of story, but it’s up to players to put the pieces together. Instead of featuring the same envrionmental storytelling of every Souls game, which would have been difficult to implement in a fast paced game like this, the game’s story is developed using character profiles that are accessed in the Roundtable Hold, as well as with Nightfarers’ individual quests part of the Remembrance mechanics that require players to complete certain tasks while on an Expedition. New story elements are introduced and developed after a few Expeditions, in the vein of story-heavy roguelikes like Hades or Returnal, so even a failed Expedition rewards players for their effort beyond giving them Relics and Murk, central elements of the permanent progression system featured in the game.

On the surface, Elden Ring Nightreign doesn’t feel any different from the base game, only featuring a considerably smaller but denser map filled with locations to explore, which hide all sorts of enemies but also weapons and upgrades. It also plays almost exactly like it, down to the weapon’s moveset and balance, reminiscent of the first few versions of the game. If one were to pick the Wylder, for example, there almost wouldn’t be any difference from playing any player-created character from the original game, and, as such, the game can instantly feel familiar to those who have already spent time in The Lands Between. Everything else surrounding the most basic Elden Ring mechanics, however, is completely different. As the land of Limveld is besieged by the Nightlords, which, unsurprisingly, only come out at night, there’s a time limit for exploring Limveld. Each game consists of three days, the first two lasting around 15 minutes, and the final comprising only the boss fight against one of the seven Nightlords. As time passes, the Night approaches, and the playable area becomes smaller in the first two days, eventually forcing the Nightfarers to convene in a certain spot on the map to take on a powerful boss, often a familiar face lifted straight from Elden Ring or the Dark Souls games. Defeating any boss in Limveld will reward Nightfarers with more runes needed to level up and one of three passive upgrades to help them better define the builds they have started putting together on the fly during the current Expedition.

Doing things as quickly as possible is the name of the game in Elden Ring Nightreign. With the Night constantly threatening to engulf certain parts of Limveld, Nightfares have to come up with a plan rather quickly, prioritizing where to go and which upgrades to get depending on the their position, the areas that will potentially become inaccessible as the Night Tide closes in, and the affinity of the Nightlord they are hunting. As the position of almost every location on the map is randomized at the start of an Expedition, knowing the layout of the map will not, by itself, be enough to level up, enhance the more than important than ever Flask with additional charges, and upgrade characters enough to survive the Night. After defeating the first Nightlord, Gladius, Shifting Earth events will be unlocked, special events that significantly alter the basic Limveld map to provide some welcome variety, and with World Events and Raids thrown in randomly, which can even cause Nightlords to appear before Day 3, Nightfarers can never rest easy.

With no time to waste, it’s not surprising to see how character progression in Elden Ring Nightreign has been considerably streamlined, as, upon level up, stats are upgraded automatically depending on the Nightfarer. This doesn’t mean that the immense number of character build options available in the original game are gone. The contrary, actually: there are so many options that everything feels almost overwhelming during the first couple of Expeditions. Every weapon in the game, which can be obtained by opening up treasure chests, raiding enemy camps, and defeating bosses, comes in different rarity levels and with different passive skills, the vast majority of which are active just by having the weapon in your inventory.

These passive skills empower all sorts of builds, allowing players to recreate the devastating bleed builds seen in Elden Ring’s first few versions, elemental builds, tanky builds with increased poise and damage negation, critical hit builds that work great with characters that have an easy time opening enemies to them, like the parry-focused Executor, and so on. Further defining builds are the Relics, special items representing the game’s permanent progression system, coming with passive skills that can be equipped to any character before the start of any Expedition, which can make a huge difference in a variety of situations.

Adding more depth to the experience are the eight Nightfarers, who all play very differently from one another. The already mentioned Wylder is the most balanced of them, offering a balanced mix between offense and defense that can work in every situation, but every other Nightfarer is more specialized, offering a different gameplay style, such as the ranged-focused playstyle of Ironeye, the traditional tank with great supportive skills like Guardian, the magic oriented Recluse, the frontline fighter Raider, the quick Duchess, the spirit summoner Revenant and the parry-focused Executor. Each character’s uniqueness is well-defined not only by the ability to use certain weapons effectively with enhanced movesets, but also by their unique Passive Ability, Character Skill, and Ultimate Art, which generally have a few uses besides damaging an enemy.

For example, the Ironeyes’ Single Shot Ultimate Art can knock down the vast majority of foes and quickly revive downed companions, who usually have to be hit multiple times with regular attacks to return to life. After playing Elden Ring for hundreds of hours, this character system feels a little off, but thankfully it doesn’t take a long time for it to shine, as it makes a lot of sense given the game’s co-op focus, which is the feature that mostly defines the entire experience, and, most of all, makes it a ton of fun.

Elden Ring Nightreign can be either played solo or with two other players, but it’s clear how the experience has been designed for co-op first and foremost. Elements like the time limit, the huge enemy numbers, which comprise the vast majority of enemies seen in Elden Ring, and their high HP values clearly indicate how Elden Ring Nightreign has to be played with friends. In solo mode, only the HP values are tweaked, so having to deal with a huge number of enemies is a challenge that only the best will be able to overcome. In the thirty-plus hours I spent with the game, I only managed to get to the Nightlord fight a handful of times playing solo, and most of the time, it was more frustrating than fun. Playing with others, no matter their knowledge of the game’s mechanics, on the other hand, was always tons of fun.

While using voice chat to communicate and set up strategies consistently led to the most victories, even just using the in-game pin system, which allows players to indicate where they want to go to the other Nightfarers on the map, works reasonably well, and is a completely viable way of handling the war against the Night and its hordes. With other players by your side, the culmination of each Expedition, the fight against one of the Nightlords, becomes even more epic and memorable. It also helps that these bosses are among the best FromSoftware has designed to date. Each Nightlord has a distinct combat design that makes fighting them a joy, although they can be quite challenging, with unrelenting movesets that leave very few openings. For some, this will be a frustrating issue, but for others, their incredible power will only make the fights more epic, coupled with the fantastic soundtrack.

With online co-op being the focus of the experience, Elden Ring Nightreign provides players with plenty of options to enjoy the game with others. Besides allowing regular matchmaking, the game also offers the chance to put together squads by inviting users from the friend list or setting up passwords to join a game. The password system can also be used to allow a certain number of users to more frequently encounter the remnants of their defeated friends, giving them the chance to obtain their dropped equipment or see the manner of their defeat. Unfortunately, the game does not feature cross-platform play, which feels like a baffling omission. The lack of duos matchmaking also feels like an oversight, which is probably justified by balancing reasons, as it would really take too long to take down the Nightlords with just two players with the current HP values, although the developer is thinking about implementing a two-player mode down the line.

Using a good portion of the assets seen in the original game, Elden Ring Nightreign doesn’t look much different from the 2022 Game of the Year, although visuals have been clearly touched up slightly, and present a high level of polish with little to no visual glitches and some beautiful skyboxes that well deliver the oppressive atmosphere of Limveld and the impending arrival of the Night. Character models are also, for the most part, lifted from Elden Ring and from the Dark Souls games, but those that aren’t, like the models for new bosses, look great and contribute to better separating the co-op game from its predecessor and to making it more engaging.

Speaking specifically about the PC version of the game, in proper FromSoftware fashion, the game has a 60 FPS cap, so a high refresh rate experience is not possible, at least at launch. Though the game comes with a limited selection of graphics settings to tweak, and doesn’t support any major upscaler (NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS), Elden Ring Nightreign seems to fare much better than the original Elden Ring in terms of performance. In a benchmark session comprising two in-game days on the base Limveld map without any Shifting Earth events, the game ran at 4K resolution, max settings an average of 59 FPS, 45 FPS 1% low on my machine (I7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB RAM), with no major stuttering, so the slight drops weren’t an issue whatsoever. In addition, online play works great in all manner of situations and with all sorts of connections. Due to an issue with my internet connection, I temporarily could only play the game online via a mobile hotspot, and experienced no trouble whatsoever matchmaking with other players and enjoying full sessions, so, if the servers manage to keep up with the expected influx of players in its launch window, I expect online play to perform great for the vast majority of players.

Elden Ring: Nightreign, more than many other FromSoftware titles, is likely to be an acquired taste for most players. My first few Expeditions into Limveld weren’t particularly enjoyable, but the more I learned its mechanics, and the less I expected a traditional Soulslike with some roguelike elements sprinkled in, the more the game grew on me. Now, after dozens of failed Expeditions and a handful of successful ones spread over 30+ hours, I find it hard to put down. With its wealth of character customization options and the tension of a ticking clock dictating the fast pace of the experience, Elden Ring Nightreign is an engaging and exhilarating experience that even those with only a passing interest in FromSoftware’s games, or those still skeptical about it, should give a chance. Like me, they may find themselves drawn to the Night so deeply that they may never want to leave.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

9.0

WCCFTECH RATING