Elden Ring: Nightreign review - Multiplayer madness without Ultra Instinct Comet Azur

Comet Azur is an infamous sorcery in Elden Ring. If you’re an average player that struggles against most bosses, then you might find yourself downtrodden after hours of boss attempts, and finally relent, opting to summon an online helper to ease you through the fight. Moments later, that online helper just might melt the boss you were struggling against with an energy beam straight out of Dragon Ball Z. It’s an underwhelming end to a tireless effort. That’s how multiplayer boss fights usually play out in Elden Ring, but Elden Ring: Nightreign sees bosses shrug off assaults like Goku going Ultra Instinct. Not even Comet Azur is going to end these fights effortlessly.

Nightreign is mostly the Elden Ring you know, but strictly designed for multiplayer madness. You can jump in solo, but it’s strongly advised against unless you’re an experienced player that knows exactly what you’re getting into — and even with three players, what you’re getting into isn’t going to be a cakewalk. While in Elden Ring you’ll spend the entire game optimizing your build to output the most amount of damage possible, in Nightreign you’ll have around thirty minutes total to prepare for the onslaught of a Nightlord. Even if you find all the gear you want in that time, each strike against a Nightlord will probably only shave off a tiny sliver of a screen-filling health bar.

In Nightreign you depart from the home base of Roundtable Hold on expeditions, each with the intent of felling the Nightlord. Each expedition is split into three days; your first two days focus on exploring and pillaging the locale of Limveld, and the third day is a showdown with the Nightlord, if you can make it that far. That means you’ll spend most of your time in Limveld where you work against the clock to prepare everything you need to deal the most damage and survive as long as possible.

Your map screen highlights camps, towns, ruins, rises, churches, and more. Most points of interest are home to at least one boss, and defeating a boss yields rewards themed after the element of the area. The exact locations where each point of interest will spawn randomize a bit from run to run, but the POIs themselves always have the same layout, meaning you’ll soon start beelining for bosses to harvest rewards. Much bigger transformations to the map come in the form of Shifting Earth events, which transform an entire quarter of the map into something unrecognisable that hides its own unique rewards.

As you explore Limveld a fiery border slowly closes off the map’s safe area. Straying outside the border of the safe area eats away at your health at a frightening speed — you might survive in the flames for a short sprint, but not for long. You’ll continue to respawn after death – as long as you’re not against an end-of-day boss – but you’ll lose a level, along with your held runes. This can be avoided by having your teammates attack you when downed in order to bring you back with half health. Each time you fall another segment is added to the amount of damage required to bring you back, and recovering a teammate with three segments in a heated battle can feel impossible.

While Elden Ring and the Dark Souls games as a whole give you ample time to consider your strategy and approach depending on the gear you’ve collected, Nightreign constantly puts you on a timer. You can assign Relics to each playable character at Roundtable Hold, angling their abilities and stats toward your desired playstyle, but that won’t guarantee that you’ll find the gear you want when on an expedition. When the end of Day 2 rolls around, you have to make do with whatever you’ve gathered to take down the Nightlord.

That’s part of what makes Nightreign so compelling. It’s easy to settle into one kind of build and gameplay style in these games, and way harder to actually branch out and learn new styles of gameplay. With eight pre-built characters and the inability to precisely choose which weapons you can use, Nightreign is begging you to leave your comfort zone, and the incentive is a bunch of abilities unique to this game.

Characters don’t just have varying stats and specialties; the way they dodge is different, in addition to two unique abilities. These abilities see characters summoning tombstones, summoning ghosts to double damage, summoning spirits, absorbing and combining different kinds of magic, grappling across the battlefield, and much more. Yes, you can just equip each character with a sword, shield, and ignore every ability, but only when you dig deep into the full variety of skills and techniques at your disposal do you get the full picture of what Nightreign is.

It’s hyperactive. You’ll spend much of your time sprinting between POIs in order to maximise the number of useful weapons and passive upgrades you can gather for the final encounter. While you’ll likely spend your first few runs understanding the lay of the land and what to expect, with familiarity you’ll be blitzing through with purpose, pinging locations on your map as you’re already sprinting towards them, hoping that your teammates will catch up in case of an emergency. The constantly ticking timer – roughly 15 minutes per day for the first two days – puts you under pressure, which just might lead you to rush things and make mistakes. Getting downed solo, miles away from your allies, feels like it can doom your run, not just because of the lost level, but the time required to backtrack and recover your runes.

There are genuine frustrations. You’ll need to clamber up piles of gravestones to ascend to higher places at times, and the climbing mechanic can charitably be described as “finicky,” sometimes launching you up a high wall, and sometimes making a shorter wall feel insurmountable. A bad series of events can lead your team to mumble “cursed run” repeatedly over voice chat. The end-of-day bosses can be frustrating too, as larger enemies love to leave the safe zone. Some bosses just aren’t fun to fight against, while seeing other familiar foes and new opponents is genuinely thrilling.

But when Nightreign is at its best, it also provides some of the best moments of any Souls game. The same joyous highs when victory is achieved, the epic cinematic moments, and the thrill of discovering powerful build synergy. It has that “one more run” magic that’ll have you either keeping your friends up until the early hours, or waking them up in the early hours. There’s a random element to your build and the areas you’ll explore, and that’ll keep you playing, but victory is ultimately down to your skill, which keeps things feeling fair.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is more Elden Ring, but it also isn’t. It’s a brave new multiplayer experiment, and a bold recycling of older assets, to mixed results. Parts of Nightreign will likely define your fondest gaming moments of 2025, while the frustration caused by others might haunt your dreams. Nightreign’s budget price indicates that this isn’t the next big FromSoftware Souls experience, but it is something incredibly special. If you’re a FromSoft fan that wants an interesting co-op experience with no Ultra Instinct Comet Azurs, Elden Ring: Nightreign shouldn’t be missed.