The First Berserker: Khazan Steam Charts & Stats

the bossfights are good for the most part and levels are pretty fun. combat feels fun and fluid. gameplay can get repetitive and the game lacks creativity in certain areas but the combat is enjoyable enough to overshadow those flaws. 9.2/10

While there are a few things this game does REALLY well and I really don't want to dismiss their merits, the sum of its parts at the end of the day vastly outweigh the limited successes. TL;DR very flawed Soulslike with poor gameplay and no identity, but an absolute visual treat for the eyes. In respect for what the game did well, I'll cover pros first: + Brilliant visuals: The art direction and the sheer quality of textures, lighting, effects, and honestly even the very detailed expressions and body language are all so incredibly well done. They even put a tremendous amount of effort into expressions and body language to really make this game come alive, and it helps build an amazing atmosphere very well. Even with the gameplay's massive shortcomings (more on that later), looking at the moves themselves and how cool they were was most of the fun. + Excellent sound design: The attacks, hits, and effects from both the player and enemies are all incredibly meaty, you can really feel the impacts and my god, the boss fights are cinematic as hell with how great every attack sounds. + A good English cast: English voice performance is super solid and enjoyable... but emphasis on performance. Ben Starr was the entire reason I got this game and that man is a genius for being able to do as well as he did with what he had. And now, the problems... And hoo boy, are they problems. - A confused identity: [u]This game has no clue what it is trying to be.[/u] Everything from the skill tree to the combat pacing to the effects SCREAM that this game wants to try and be an action game, and frankly if it was, I think this could have been one of the most fun action games to come out since DMC 5. What further supports this is the set building mechanics, the perk mechanics, and even the animations of combat moves. Why this is a soulslike is beyond me—it does not ever leverage the strengths of the genre (exploration, lore, massive world building) and in fact it's almost like they were making an action game and changed mid way. The contrast between the game it could have been amazing at and instead chose to be middling at paints an incredible portrait of wasted potential. - An RPG with toothless builds: The 'building' is completely awful in this game. As a long time player of looters (including the huge live service ones) and RPGs alike, I LOVE making builds of all kinds, and on the surface it looks like this game gives you tons of option, but its a mile wide and an inch deep. The bonuses are so small, so menial, and so spread out between different systems that you never actually feel like you're getting stronger. It is the entire definition of the whole [i] "+0.47% bonus to your toe-wiggling stat"[/i] stereotype brought to life, unironically. This is accentuated by the aggressive enemy scaling, which means the more stats you pump in the stronger enemies become, so it really does not matter what you do; you will take the same effective damage from enemies, deal the same effective damage to them, and just in general, the "RPG" component of this game completely does not exist. The game only has 3 weapons which seems like too little, but would not have been a problem at all because they're really fun to use and look cool as hell, but when factoring in that the build you use doesn't matter, it increases the repetitiveness by exponential amounts. - Very unstable boss design: The fight design is cool on some bosses, and atrociously boring on others. the first half of the game is just fighting nothingburger trash mob bosses that get turned into standard enemies later in the game. After the halfway point, its like they suddenly woke up and decided to actually design real bosses, after which the game got slightly better, but is still dragged down by the rest of gameplay issues. - A story you won't remember: The story is extremely boring and as bog standard as it gets. It doesn't even have the decency to be a boring revenge story, it really tries to force you to care about its completely unremarkable and detached characters, even throwing a MONTAGE cutscene of Khazan and a side character bonding. But because of the way the game is and the soulslike element of it, you never interact with these characters outside of the hub or at the end of a mission sometimes. You don't know who these people are and you're barely given a single reason to care. Despite that, the game confusingly tries to make itself out to be a misery festival, killing characters left right and center as if players are supposed to be bawling their eyes out for these people they have no attachment to. Even the antagonist's motivations are agonizingly cliche, predictable, and obvious with its attempts to bait sympathy. - Moan and groan music: The music is maybe technically impressive, but it lacks soul and any real identity. Just your typical depressing, gothic operas. The last boss's theme gets a little good and interesting in a few segments but ultimately is never anything I'd even look up, let alone play in my spare time. All in all, The First Berserker: Khazan is a swordfish in a fishbowl; naturally impressive and full of potential, but stuck in a completely unsuitable environment.

If Nioh weren’t garbage, it would be this game. And this game copies it in everything. Sometimes to an absurd degree – the mission system, the backtracking in “side missions”, the gear/sets/stats system – all of it is lifted straight from Nioh. Even the same “graves” are scattered around locations, from which you can summon a spirit to duel. The only difference is that in Nioh you could farm the gear you needed from these spirits, and the summon points appeared where other players had died, whereas here they’re just randomly placed. If you don’t mind, you can collect every single one along the way, but after a while it just gets tedious. I fully completed Nioh 1 only because it had an interesting story that was fun to follow, and I wanted to know how it ended. Everything else in this game is awful and miserable mess and i have no idea how it even has fans. The second game turned out to be exactly the same – except with no story at all – so i had zero desire to keep playing that pile of garbage. And here’s where the Kazakh shines – it fixes the “original’s” mistakes by adding a ton of ways to avoid and counter damage, proper enemy animations, reasonable timings, and minimal reliance on grinding numbers. The ability to set up tons of moves, chain them together without pointless, tedious stance-switching, and instantly shift from offense to defense by canceling animations makes the combat smooth, easy to pick up, and simply satisfying. And the thrill of landing a ten-hit combo on a raging boss – complete with screen shakes, effects, blood splashes, and all those flashy sh*ts – is something you just can’t get in any other game in the genre. I doubt the announced Nioh 3 will be even a third as good as this game that copied its formula and actually perfected it. Everything else – like location visuals, effects, and music – is also top-tier. The effects designer must have been working 24/7, and the composer delivered an excellent OST. Hearing metal music in a soulslike is something truly rare. The enemy variety is a mixed bag. Out of my 47 hours in the game, the full enemy roster was already revealed around the 20-hour mark, after which it was just random combinations of the same ones. The placement logic isn’t great either – the same corridors with 1–3 mobs every couple of minutes. With this combat system, the game had potential for much more, but sadly the devs didn’t bother to realize it. Still, that’s not even its biggest flaw. The worst part of the game is, oh f*ck, its story. I have never seen a more cliched, uninteresting set of events with such utterly useless characters, except maybe in recent Marvel movies. The funniest part is how the game tries to stage a dramatic moment around the death of a side character, but your interaction with them beforehand is so minimal that the devs shove in a one-minute cutscene right before it – packed with random “romantic” moments – just to make you feel sad. You know, for emotional impact, yeah. And this applies to all the side characters – they show up, dump a ton of supposedly important exposition in your face, and then die in the dumbest possible way three hours later. Every major plot twist can be guessed about 10 hours in advance, and the final one is obvious from the start. If the main story is just dull, then the side quest stories are such surreal, lazy nonsense sh*t that the only way to play is to turn your brain off, press buttons, and enjoy the awesome combat. All in all – the game is excellent, and everyone clearly put effort into it… except the writer. Playing it is a pleasure, but following the story is physically painful. If that’s not a dealbreaker for you, and you just want some great action on screen, this is one of the best picks you can make. For everyone else – I recommend turning off the voice acting and skipping cutscenes. You’ll lose less than nothing. 6/10. Could have been higher if not for the terrible story.

Changing terms without offering a refund is a big L. Great game otherwise

Solid souls-like. Combat and bosses were excellent and make it standout from other similar games. I definitely recommend to those who enjoy difficult action RPGs.

Love the game so far. I got this game rather late and have been enjoying it. It's good and smooth all around. This is a personal nitpick. I'm a bit of a trophy chaser and was hoping to get an achievement called 'The Expert's Journey', which states beat the game on normal. I'm finding out now that you need to do it on expert. (Some would argue that it's called the 'Expert's Journey' for a reason, and you'd be right but the requirement for this was beating the game on normal). I didn't know that they rescaled difficulty for people who weren't comfortable with these kind of souls-like games. It's just gonna take a NG+ playthrough but I wish there was a sign or notification or something within the game to tell you this. If you got into the game and started playing after the patch like I did: - Their previous "Easy" is now "Normal". - Their previous "Normal" is now "Expert". Save yourself the time, just play it on Expert. The game is fun enough and enjoyable enough to make me try for a NG+ for this but it's just a minor inconvenience. Again, I recognize this is a nitpick. I just really REALLY would've appreciated a heads up in game about it.

[b]The First Bereserker: Khazan[/b] is a game that is not shining as bright as it should, but it truly deserves the word-of-mouth praise it has been getting, despite recent uproars over cosmetic additions and difficulty tweaks. We’re seeing a very interesting divide in the Soulslike genre in recent years, and I feel that Sekiro and Nioh were the starting points of that shift, which led us to 5-star gems such as Lies of P, Nine Sols, and now Khazan. Instead of following in the footsteps of From Software’s design of slow and tactical gameplay with open-ended build-variety that can be broken in more ways than one, we now are seeing tightly-designed faster-paced action games that have an intended experience of challenging melee but with a fully-developed kit that empowers the player to truly feel like they are getting good. It’s this growing trend that has made me appreciate what Khazan managed to accomplish, despite some flaws I can point out. The mechanical depth is the star of the show here, and it is a marvel just how unbelievably fluid and tight everything feels in this game. While you only have three weapon archtypes to focus on, their playstyles and numerous options will leave you with a desire to keep refining your combos and options from beginning to end. It was very smart to allow skill-respecs on the fly, because you will oftentimes find powerful skills that should be great on paper, but end up not giving you the edge you, personally, need. So? You swap and try other skills until you find that sweet-spot that allows you to dominate in your preferred fashion. Defensive options are greatly packed, as you are actively rewarded for both dodging, blocking, counter-attacks, and reflection-parrying; I want to say that I never cared much for this game’s reflection-parry option, but the other options are dopamine-overdoses to consistently pull off during the many boss fights within the game. Speaking of, there’s a pretty fun roster of bosses. Each one feels like it is doing its best to out-do the previous boss, and this momentum lasts all the way to the very final showdown, which might possibly now be my favorite final boss fight in the genre next to the likes of Nine Sol’s final boss and P’s DLC finale. Khazan falls into the same trap Elden Ring has of having recycled boss encounters during its side-missions. I’ll give credit and say that I was more forgiving of the repetition in Khazan than I was in Elden Ring, and it mostly just comes down to one factor: All of the bosses in Khazan are just more fun to fight. Every time I got to a side-boss door, I wasn’t thinking, “Bleh, gotta fight this guy again...” I was thinking “Sick, I get to now wreck this guy with my new combo I discovered!” Audio deserves some mention, because while the sound-track was hype-enough during its boss encounters, I want to highlight the ambient tracks for the stages, themselves, as they did a great job setting the atmosphere. Khazan isn’t telling the most original story or setting, but I was getting great vibes throughout thanks to the ambience of the visuals combined with the audio. The ultimate showcase of the audio, however, comes from the impact-feedback of the combat. Whoever provided the audio cues for the brink dodge/blocks/counterattacks, as well as the sounds of the clashes and enemy guard-breaks should given a dramatic salary bonus, because those cues helped really sell the feedback of the combat. The audio-cues even help in many ways during combat, as some of the hardest attacks to avoid can be easily avoided thanks to subtle audio-telegraphs. The shortcomings are there, but I’m quick to forgive them on this. The story is what I’d call: Satisfactory. Not incredible, but not boring. It’s your typical revenge-mission, cranked up to 11 with the sheer amount of obstacles thrown at your protagonist. There are some moments that punch higher in the writing department than the total experience, but I’d say it never became bad. Voice talent definitely makes up for it, with Ben Starr of FF16 and E33 fame leading the charge with the usual gusto he provides. The other real shortcoming is the repetition through side-missions, which effectively take previous stages and re-arrange them into bite-sized chunks of content. I was never bored during these thanks to the combat, but I was never excited to do them, either. I have to wonder if I would have been happier if they didn’t exist, opting to, instead, concentrate on making main missions as polished as possible. The overall experience left me more than satisfied. I even went out of my way to immediately do a full playthrough of the recently-added Hardcore difficulty after finishing my first Expert playthrough, and I have to celebrate this addition, as it actually made the game even more fun for me with the added tension of the restricted camera and hidden health/stamina of the enemies, which really tests you to know the game inside-out; special shout-out to the high-risk high-reward element of the enemies not only doing more damage, but also you doing more damage to make fights that much more intense. There were a [i]few[/i] boss encounters I can think of where the Hardcore camera was rough to deal with, but it was such a neat addition that I was happy enough to do a full second playthrough with it. If you are a fan of this action-driven take on Soulslikes in the vein of Sekiro and the above-mentioned, you absolutely should play Khazan.

What an epic game! The story is great, and the combat is solid as hell. Highly recommended!

The games provider retroactively changed the ToS and does not offer a way to opt out of these changes (which is illegal) - while claiming in their blog post about it, that they do offer said opt out.