I Can’t Believe It Either, but Mixing Fortnite With Elden Ring Kinda Rules

If you know much about me, you’ll know I’m not very into multiplayer games. Less so co-op games, even less so games where co-op is mandatory. So when Elden Ring Nightreign was revealed as a three-player co-op roguelike set in the Lands Between, I was immediately sceptical. And yet, despite it all, infusing Elden Ring with Fortnite kind of absolutely rips.

In Nightreign, three players are dropped into a map, where there’s a ton of randomly generated landmarks, be that camps, strongholds, churches, the full kit and caboodle. But the catch is that a growing storm eventually circles in, giving you even less options, before funnelling you into a boss fight to end the day. You’ll then get the chance to repeat this on the second day, before taking on your main target after defeating the Day Two boss fight.

Elden Ring Nightreign is the closest thing to a full-blown action game FromSoftware has made since Sekiro. Everything is faster paced, and while it does still have levelling up, it’s done in a ‘press the level up button to get better’ way as opposed to building yourself around specific stats. Instead, you’ll pick a premade character at the start of your run, which will dictate how you’ll want to approach things. 

The classes are fantastic, however. You have your standard Warrior, Knight, Mage archetypes, but after that, FromSoftware decided to go Super Smash Bros with it. There’s a class that plays just like Sekiro with its mass amounts of parrying, while another can dodge around the arena and looks suspiciously like Lady Maria from Bloodborne. Couple that with returning bosses from the likes of Dark Souls, and you’ve got some good stew.

Even as someone who adores the slow-paced and methodical combat found in souls games, Elden Ring Nightreign thrives in its chaos. Wandering around the map with your gang absolutely decimating lower mobs and clearing out camps to find some loot is a great feeling. On the opposite end, accidentally stumbling into the aggro range of a superboss and getting destroyed by it is a nightmare as death means the loss of a level. Considering it's rare to reach past level 11 on plenty of runs, that’s a massive downgrade.

In a world when everything is getting live service’d as of late, Elden Ring Nightreign and the subsequent announcement of The Duskbloods had me worried about the future of FromSoftware. But after 15 hours with it, I can see this one going into my rotation for the foreseeable future.