Elden Ring?

If you liked the SoulsBorne series then you will most likely like this one. Nevertheless, after finishing it I do not think that it is the masterpiece that the press made it out to be. Some very personal thoughts on the game:

+ Great and proven combat mechanics
+ Great music
+ Good pacing: in the beginning there is a lot to explore and enough time to learn, while towards the end the areas will appear more "empty" and linear. However, this is a good thing in my opinion since after 30+ hours you definitely want the pace of the game to pick up.

- Level design lacks in quality, both open world and legacy dungeons, compared to DS1 or Bloodborne. I rarely had this "AHA" moment where I found an intriguing and smart shortcut in a level.
- Balancing seems a bit off: you can basically summon NPCs that fight for you, but it makes the game comparably easy. There is a bit of a trade off here, since you have to invest FP (Mana) in the beginning, which again helps balancing that issue a bit.
- Quite a bit of reused assets, enemies and bosses. However, there is always a small variation so that you will never have the same boss fight twice. Instead, you may encounter two different bosses first individually and later on both of them together in a single boss fight.

Overall great game, I can only recommend, especially after a number of buggy and disappointing releases (BF2042, DL2, etc.) in the past year.