The First Berserker: Khazan Steam Charts & Stats

Up there with the best non-From Software soulslikes, alongside Lies of P. incredible game.

Just a short preview for the game as the early access has now begun, specifically from a PoV of playing on the Steam Deck OLED: 1. Game runs amazingly well with a mix of medium/ low settings at a locked 45FPS (half of the OLED's refresh rate, 90, so it's perfect). It's UE4 so no shitty shader stutters. The Deck's GPU is somewhere around the 1050Ti's performance, so if it can run it at 800p, I think any budget GPU should be able to run it just fine. 2. The weapon feedback is AMAZINGLY well done. So the things like your attacks, your perfect parries and such have a really good and satisfying sound and weight to them, just like Sekiro and Lies of P. It's very similar to Lies of P actually. 3. Game doesn't seem brutally difficult, especially for someone who's played a decent amount of soulslike titles. The parry windows are VERY forgiving, and I think anyone looking for a decent challenge should be able to enjoy the game. I'd rank it somewhere below Wukong in terms of difficulty. 4. I can't say anything about the story or the difficulty in later stages of the game since Ive only played for an hour. So yeah, I hope this convinces someone who's on the fence right now to get the game or not, especially for their handhelds.

This game is great. Complete on release and well polished, combat flows nicely and just a well designed game. Great job to the devs! I recommend trying if your an action rpg fan who likes the ebb and flow of fights along with fun abilities. Just a real good game.

Updated review 01.04.2025 - After beating the Game This game is still awesome, but It may not be for everyone. I will try to not spoil any details, but this is what I observed. 1. Quality of life improvement compared to other Souls games: - You can change skill points without costs all the time in the game. Change from Greatsword to dual wield or whatever. - When you get killed on enemy boss, you gain Souls depending on how far you have progressed in the fight. Meaning Character getting stronger the more you try. Skills are also leveling up by parrying and dodging etc. You don't have to farm trash - You have an option to recover your lost souls without running to the place you died. - Elite enemy placement is usually near a short cut from the previous savepoint. Allowing if you fail, that you don't have a too long of a run back. - Checkpoints are mostly in front of bosses and you usually don't have to engage any trash mobs when running back to the boss. - Some items that have healing abilites outside of the normal healing spell - "Invisible Walls" are easier to spot compared to Dark Souls. If you are near a potential invisible wall, the wall get's "wobbly" and you can dash through - Breakable Ground where you would normally fall through, sometimes make a "cracking" Sound when you get near them. This way you can spot them before running on it and falling to your death - If you fight near a ledge with an enemy, your sword attacks will NOT make you fall (but only as long as you have stamina and attack). The game is very intuitive. As long as you pay attention and listen, you can prevent a lot of deaths from the environment. Not like other games where you learn after you died. 2. Gameplay - The worst part of the gameplay is at the start due to Stamina issue and not having weapon skills yet - When you don't have the gameplay "clicked" in yet, you will run out of Stamina a lot and everything will feel very SLOW. After you get your combos down, it will get a LOT more fluent. Later in the game, you won't even notice the stamina bar that much. - Generally very responsive gameplay. This game can get really fast, really quick. You can combo a lot of skills together. Very good thing thoug, when you press the button for the brutal attack, it will cancel all other actions you do. So you automatically cancel your combo to go for the big crit. - Gameplay could feel repetitve after a while due to the length of the game, and that you get strong Skills quite early (middle of the story) 3. Difficulty I have played all fromsoft titles and re-killed a lot of bosses. My longest learning points where 8-10 hours of Malenia progress on a saturday (Trying to kill without summons), or 7-10 Hours of learning to hitless Inner Isshin from Sekiro. I have no issues learning boss moves and taking my time. But some of you maybe do. Or get mad really quick. This game I have finished without summons and on normal difficulty with a greatsword. It felt really hard. I only had about 3 Main-Bosses which I "first tried" (Most of them early game). But that was about it. I usually needed more tries and died a lot. The boss that took me the longest was the 3rd Mission (which was now nerfed, which is good). I needed about 3-4 Hours to get through it. After that, I usually needed 1-2 hours of learning depending on the main-boss (sometimes less). If you play on easy difficulty with summons, I cannot comment on how difficult that still is or not. This is just my experience. 4. Main Boss fights So the only difficult games I played where mostly fromsoft titles. I didn't play NIOH or NIOH 2, so I cannot compare. This is my experience from this game: - The bossfights take long and have usually several phases build into it. Example: Standard moveset from 100%-75%. Adding 1-2 abilities from 75% to 50%. Having a special move at 50%. 1-2 additional moves from 50% until death. - This is a weird comparison, but the boss fights sometimes feel like playing a raid boss in mythic retail world of warcraft. You have a lot of abilities happening, need to position yourself properly, phase transitions etc. This is a full house of mechanics at some points. - You can't just only parry or only dodge. The game forces you later to adapt to the boss. Example: If the boss hits you with a flame weapon, you get a burned status effect, regardless if you perfect parry. So you need to dodge the flame weapon attacks and parry the attacks that have no status effect. - The general boss experience is really good and feel like peak Cinema, especially with the fitting music. They put a lot of thought and work into the fights and it shows when you play it. You have a lot of tools to counter boss moves. If you get the combat down for a boss, you feel like a boss and spam damage like a berserker 5. Story - I don't know the DnF universe. Story felt good. The Characters are well written. But it is not very deep story wise. But all decisions are understandable and make sense. And you have lot of hot characters (°-°) 6. Game length/Environment - The general theme for this game is dark. And unfortunately it did not change much. I would have love it if they had more contrast in it (at least some sunshine and a brigter day). But if you like dark themes, it will stay that way mostly. - I played for about 50 hrs until finishing the game and I did all side-missions and collections. The game feels pretty long. Sometimes it feels it drags itself out too much. I think they could have made it a bit smaller and it would still be good. They re-used a lot of monsters later in game. I don't mind that as I like to smash monsters, but maybe you care about it more than I do. 7. PC Performance - In 50 hrs of gameplay, only 1 serious crash and 2x fps drops. - Audio sometimes bugs out when a lot is happening. - Audio in some cinematics is missing (you can only hear musis and read the text, but no voice speaks) - I would say this is a damn good performance for a first launch. 8. Subjective opinions - This game gave me hard headaches at the start. I was so focused on the game and needed to remind me to drink enough water. - I dreamed about the boss fights (no joke). Especially when I didn't beat a boss before going to sleep, I dreamed about how I could beat it. - When I did my workout in the gym at 07:00am, I thought about how I will smash that boss I am struggling with. This made me stronger and do more reps while training (it boosted my training moral, getting stronger to deafeat the demons) 9. Conclusion It is hard. It is rewarding. It feels good. It is fun. You can do so much to improve your gameplay experience in this game how you want. I had one of the best gaming experiences in my life with this game. Every heavy Hit I landed, felt great. Every counter I did, was satisfying. Every dodge and parry I hit perfectly, made me go BOOM. Go hard fellas. This is what Action-Games are about. PEAK. I hope they will make another game.

Nioh players will feel right at home instantly. It is truly a Nioh-like. Very addictive and not too difficult. Play the demo first so you get a B+/B scaling weapon you can carry to the main game.

If you like Dark Souls, Sekiro, Wukong, God of War, etc, you will like this game.

After completing the first 2 missions, I can confidently say this game is absolutely amazing. - [b]Combat is incredible:[/b] Parries feel satisfying land and enemy attacks feel fair. Freeze frames for that extra juice when perfectly dodging is great, the weapons aren't too slow nor too fast, (even the great swords!) and there isn't any visual clutter or insane particle effects that disturb fights. - [b]Leveling and skill tree is great:[/b] There's only a handful of stats to level and they're all quite clear and balanced. Normally I would invest a ton of points into one stat, but these stats actually make me want to spread them out carefully. As for the skill tree, I love the simplicity of it, once again not overwhelming me. If I see one more celestial tree with 50 thousand nodes I'm going to lose my mind. The skill tree also contains upgrades that actually matter, it doesn't boost my attack power by 1.3% but rather useful, but not required skills. - [b]Level design has been good so far:[/b] No crazy boss walk-backs, auto soul-pick up without needing to press a button is a great QoL feature, the way the level interconnects back to previous areas and rest sites are good. - [b]Performance is good:[/b] Surprisingly, this game seems decently optimized. I play on an RTX 3070 and can comfortably run the game at 60-90 FPS on medium-high settings. I have a lot more to say about this game, but these are the points that stood out to me the most. I heavily recommend it.

As a souls-like veteran I like how the game is pretty difficult. When Wukong came out there were very few bosses that I actually struggled with. Here every boss feels hard, makes you learn those moves and when finally beat it feels amazing. Game runs smooth as butter right after release (should be standard in new games but isn't) and that desrves praise honestly. Love it so far, keep it up devs!

This game is truly something special, the combat successfully nails the feeling of Nioh combined with Sekiro. Pros: - Story. It's great to have a souls-like that actually has dialogue and cutscenes. - Visuals. Animations and graphics are top notch. Everything looks and feels great. - Fast movement. Loved this about nioh, and still love this feature here. No walking in tar pits. - XP forgiveness. You still earn XP while fighting bosses (even when you die). This means that if you are struggling on a boss, you can eventually earn enough XP to level up enough to beat them. Fantastic touch that tailors the difficulty to the player. - Looting. This is the aspect of Nioh I hated because of the sheer volume, but this game does a great job of trimming all of that down and makes attributes easy to follow. - Steam Deck verified. - Combat. The combat is insanely good; the parrying of sekiro, the dodging and burst countering of Nioh. Every hit is super satisfying. - Seriously, the combat. It's so freaking good. Cons: - Some stuttering. Nothing gamebreaking, but there have been some frame drops here and there. - Levels and enemies are reused constantly. Be prepared to see a lot of the same levels/enemies throughout your time.

die 20+ times to boss, manage to finally defeat boss with 5% hp left, cutscene plays and the boss gets angry, begin phase 2 with full health bar... ah shit, here we go again.. 10/10