FromSoftware established the first pillars of the soulslike genre back in 2009 and, alongside other studios that adopted the now-popular formula, has been perfecting it for over a decade. The result is Elden Ring: the crowned king of all soulslikes. Nothing else has come close in the four years since its release to match its massive scope and mind-blowing variety. Elden Ring offers countless weapon types, skills, spells, incantations, and summons, resulting in combat that feels almost endless in its possibilities. The number of unique enemies and bosses is on par with that, constantly surprising players across the game’s entire 100-hour runtime.
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Despite how great Elden Ring is, no game is perfect. While the genre is by design tied to death and difficulty, there are also clear issues with how the game’s combat and related elements work, at times causing needless frustration that adds little value to the overall experience. Even before 2022, other soulslikes had already solved some of Elden Ring’s combat frustrations, and their number has only grown since. Below are the most annoying aspects of Elden Ring’s combat, alongside the best soulslike games that offer convenient solutions without sacrificing the genre’s signature challenge.
Who’s That Character?
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Overtuned Bosses
Many Bosses Have Very Long Attack Combos With Very Brief Openings To Retaliate
The Lands Between (and the Realm of Shadow in the expansion) is a truly vast realm, with an enormous variety of bosses encountered at every turn. True to FromSoftware’s style, boss difficulty spikes quickly, with many fights featuring varied attack patterns, numerous ranged spells, jumps, grabs, and everything in between. While the game boasts some of the genre’s best bosses, many late-game encounters, especially in the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, are simply overtuned. In a relentless pursuit of the most challenging enemies in history, several bosses feature excruciatingly long combos, notorious delayed attacks followed by AOE splashes, and a habit of instantly closing distance only to evade far away again. Under these conditions, fights feel dragged out at times: players get too few openings to deal damage while spending excessive time rolling, blocking, and merely surviving.
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Many modern soulslikes approach combat and bosses very differently from Elden Ring, adding even greater dynamism while giving players far more ways to strike back. Take The First Berserker: Khazan, which handles bosses perfectly. Its combat system rewards aggression and lets players seamlessly weave offense into defense through numerous options to block, deflect, interrupt, or parry, keeping control of the battlefield. As a result, The First Berserker: Khazan arguably delivers even more intense, blood-pumping battles that never feel overly long and instead resemble true duels rather than a stage for the boss to show off.
Camera Behavior
Many Gigantic Bosses Can Make Things Unnecessarily Confusing
Various camera woes, like clipping under bosses and losing sightlines in battle, have long been staples of the action-RPG genre, including soulslikes such as Elden Ring. Many bosses in the game are towering giants with weak points out of players’ reach, so most melee builds won’t even see what’s happening if they're sticking close to the boss’s feet. Certain big, twitchy bosses must be fought in pretty tight spaces, making camerawork even more of an issue: players can rarely react to what’s happening, dying more from confusion than their own mistakes. Trust us, few other frustrations in the genre come close.
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This issue can be solved in various ways: featuring fewer bosses of colossal size, designing their arenas to exploit their size, or making the lock-on camera less sensitive and farther away during such encounters. While this falls into personal preference, as some players love fighting colossal enemies like dragons in Elden Ring, fan discussions over the years show they’re in the minority; most players value bosses the exact size of or slightly bigger than the playable character. This not only fixes most camera issues but also results in more dynamic, personal battles. When it comes to camera adjustments for a better experience against colossal bosses and enemies, Black Myth: Wukong does a pretty good job, letting players fight even colossal creatures like Fuban comfortably without losing orientation. Another great example is Lords of the Fallen, which implements clever see-through effects on large bosses for full visibility, preventing player blindness even during the toughest encounters.
Runes Retrieval Between Boss Attempts
It’s Rarely Worth Retrieving Lost Runes In A Boss Arena at All
In every FromSoftware soulslike game, players drop their collected souls or runes at the spot of death and can retrieve them by reaching that location without dying again. This applies to Elden Ring boss encounters as well: if you die, your runes drop exactly where you fell in the boss arena. This creates an unnecessary frustration loop, forcing players to begin each new boss attempt by retrieving their lost runes instead of focusing on the boss itself. Worse, the system locks players into the current boss fight, preventing them from changing plans and heading elsewhere, like leveling up in the open world, without risking permanent rune loss and mounting frustration. This feels especially contradictory in an open-world game that should let players freely choose their next step rather than bash their heads against a wall in desperation.
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One of the first games in the genre to address this long-overdue issue was Lies of P. It places dropped Ergo (runes) right outside of the fog wall leading to the boss, so players don’t have to worry about losing them or ruining their next attempt by rushing into the arena to grab them. This lets players re-evaluate their strategy and even go elsewhere first if needed. After all, why punish players so harshly just for learning a boss’s attacks? Many soulslikes have since adopted Lies of P’s smart approach. Even better, The First Berserker: Khazan rewards players with small amounts of Lacrima for every attempt while placing their lost souls safely outside the arena. Frankly, this should have become the new norm long ago.
The Parrying System Could Be Better
Players Often Struggle Learning Which Attacks Can Be Parried
Even if the majority of players spend most of their time rolling to avoid incoming damage, Elden Ring provides plenty of defense mechanics to choose from, like blocking with a shield or weapon, evading through skills, and classic time-based parries. Parrying in Elden Ring... Well, it works, but it’s a relatively poorly communicated mechanic consisting of several phases, so only soulslike veterans will grasp it quickly. Not only that, but for some reason, there’s no reliable way to identify which attacks can be parried in the game, and plenty of moves in every elite enemy or boss’s arsenal just can’t be parried. As a result, players have to try and fail to know, which isn’t the best way of communicating how the system works.
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All that combined, Elden Ring's parrying falls short even of FromSoftware’s previous games like Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Granted, parrying is one of the central mechanics in these games because they lack the weapon variety seen in Elden Ring, but it’s just so much more satisfying to parry in them, not to mention that it’s faster and more fluid. In many other soulslike games, including Lies of P and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, parrying is much more reliable than in Elden Ring, with games like The First Berserker: Khazan and Nioh 3 also providing easy-to-read visual cues for players to distinguish each type of attack and the tactics that should be used to counter them.
Boss Runbacks
After All These Years, Long Runbacks To A Boss Shouldn’t Be A Thing
Another common but outdated trait of the soulslike genre is traditionally long boss runbacks, with players having to run a long way back to the boss arena every time they die, at times even dying in the process due to carelessness. It’s hard to say what exactly this feature brings to the overall experience, but that’s a topic for another day. Luckily, in Elden Ring, boss runbacks aren’t as frustrating as in earlier FromSoft titles like Dark Souls, where the journey to the boss arena is often the hardest part. Still, certain encounters in Elden Ring have checkpoints located pretty far from the boss, especially in caves. At times, players have to wait for elevators and ride them to get to the boss, which isn’t a very elegant solution either.
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Fortunately for those who prefer to fight rather than run the same route over and over, almost every modern soulslike game since Elden Ring has switched to much more convenient ways of placing checkpoints right near the boss arena entrance, so players can instantly get back to the action once defeated without losing their battle flow in between. From The First Berserker: Khazan to Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and Nioh 3, modern soulslikes are gradually abandoning boss runbacks as something ancient — and it seems that hardly any player has really missed them.
Elden Ring
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 95 /100 Critics Rec: 98%
- Released
- February 25, 2022
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
- From Software
- Publisher(s)
- Bandai Namco Entertainment, From Software
