The First Berserker: Khazan - Review

[HiddenX]

Mortismal Gaming reviewed The First Berserker: Khazan:

The First Berserker: Khazan - Review After 100%

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[sakichop]

To back up what he’s saying about difficulty, This is easily the consistently hardest souls game I’ve played. Meaning that most souls games I play I may have trouble with some bosses and others I’ll beat on the first try. Not Khazan, every boss is trouble to the tune of 45 plus minutes per. For reference I only had 1 boss in elden ring take me that long and it was the last boss of the DLC.

It’s not even that their movesets are that difficult as many of them aren’t too hard to learn fairly quickly. The problem is the extremely tight stamina management. ( you are often running out) Every boss has an ungodly amount of hit points. You can pull off a nice 10 to 15 hit combo and then look up to see only about 1/20th of their health bar gone. I won’t lie it’s a bit demoralizing. lol. Then they all hit like tanks. Taking only a few hits to exhaust your entire health bar and all off their second phases have elemental damage that not only goes through blocks but also parries. So you’re constantly taking chip damage at this point. They also like most souls games seem able to ignore stamina, have hyper armor and endless consumables. Oh yeah, they will also heal themselves and often you can’t interrupt it. So spend 10 minutes whittling down their health bar only to have them stand there and heal themselves back up despite you unloading on them while they do it. To top it all off you only have 5 heals ( as of mid game) and they only heal about half your health. There are a few other consumable you find for healing but they heal almost nothing and are pretty scarce.

This war of attrition can start off feeling fun and challenging, but after many, many tries it can start to feel like a chore. I won’t lie there’s been times I’ve come to a boss door and just thought I Don’t want to deal with this right now and I go do something else for a while . The combat is fun and addictive enough to always pull me back though.

 

[SpoonFULL]

To back up what he’s saying about difficulty, This is easily the consistently hardest souls game I’ve played. Meaning that most souls games I play I may have trouble with some bosses and others I’ll beat on the first try. Not Khazan, every boss is trouble to the tune of 45 plus minutes per. For reference I only had 1 boss in elden ring take me that long and it was the last boss of the DLC.

It’s not even that their movesets are that difficult as many of them aren’t too hard to learn fairly quickly. The problem is the extremely tight stamina management. ( you are often running out) Every boss has an ungodly amount of hit points. You can pull off a nice 10 to 15 hit combo and then look up to see only about 1/20th of their health bar gone. I won’t lie it’s a bit demoralizing. lol. Then they all hit like tanks. Taking only a few hits to exhaust your entire health bar and all off their second phases have elemental damage that not only goes through blocks but also parries. So you’re constantly taking chip damage at this point. They also like most souls games seem able to ignore stamina, have hyper armor and endless consumables. Oh yeah, they will also heal themselves and often you can’t interrupt it. So spend 10 minutes whittling down their health bar only to have them stand there and heal themselves back up despite you unloading on them while they do it. To top it all off you only have 5 heals ( as of mid game) and they only heal about half your health. There are a few other consumable you find for healing but they heal almost nothing and are pretty scarce.

This war of attrition can start off feeling fun and challenging, but after many, many tries it can start to feel like a chore. I won’t lie there’s been times I’ve come to a boss door and just thought I Don’t want to deal with this right now and I go do something else for a while . The combat is fun and addictive enough to always pull me back though.

 

[sakichop]

Thats no lie. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a love hate relationship with a game.

 

[JFarrell71]

Khazan just looks flat out bad to me. Maybe the combat does feel good, but given how how spongy the bosses are and how unfair some mechanics are (like frequent uninterruptible heals), I don't think I'd have fun fighting anybody. And the rest of the game looks boring, drab and repetitive.

 

[sakichop]

Khazan just looks flat out bad to me. Maybe the combat does feel good, but given how how spongy the bosses are and how unfair some mechanics are (like frequent uninterruptible heals), I don't think I'd have fun fighting anybody. And the rest of the game looks boring, drab and repetitive.

Yeah, the games a bit of a conundrum for me. On one hand you have excellent combat and character progression, Rewarding exploration that can be more than just finding a good item, despite being rather linear, good level design, some really cool enemies and good enemy variety. Then on the other hand you have what I described above.

The overall reception I've seen online has been very positive. It doesn't seem to bother people to run back to the bosses over and over. I've read several comments like " this boss took me 90 minutes or that boss took 2 hours, It was great". I watched one review and he said the final boss took him 6 hours, and he thought it was awesome. 6 hours?? that's crazy imo. I'm spending about 30-60 minutes per boss and feel that's about my limit. I can't imagine 6 hours.

In between the bosses it's one of the most fun souls likes I've played. Some of the mini bosses, they call them elite enemy's are harder than most Elden ring bosses, but are manageable. If they tweaked the bosses to make them less frustrating this would definitely be a top 3 souls game for me. Funny thing is, they released a patch today that nerf's some areas because they said that the area " may cause frustrating and overly exhausting experience rather than challenging." but then said that it excludes the bosses of these areas. So, maybe I'm the crazy one??