The First Berserker: Khanzan misses the mark when it comes to difficulty, creating spongey boss fights that take far too long, regardless of how good you get. These tanky fights weigh down an otherwise great experience, with a reactive and fun combat experience that asks you to maximize your perfect blocks and dodges, along with a fun if shallow narrative that provides just enough interest to see it to its conclusion, despite the tedious boss fights.
The First Berserker: Khazan
Developer: Neople
Price: $60
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S (reviewed), PC
An Xbox Series X|S code was provided by the publisher for review
The First Berserker: Khazan in many ways is one of the better “one of those,” when it comes to souls-likes made by a developer not named FromSoftware. It’s got a compelling narrative, excel combat feel, and interesting level design, but straying too close to well-worn territory and boss fights that are unfortunately tedious hold it back from greatness.
You play as the great general Khazan, cast out after being accused of being a traitor, before being possessed by the Phantom Blade, a spirit with the job of defeating chaos in the human realm. Together, you journey across a variety of environments, including spider caves, castles, and a creepy mansion, to piece together why Khazan was betrayed and how it ties to chaos. It’s not a story that has much in the way of emotional moments, but it does a great job of explaining itself just enough so you know what is going on without overwhelming the gameplay or taking away from some of the mystery.
The First Berserker: Khazan takes a level-based approach, with interweaving areas that feature shortcuts to open. Each level does contain secrets to find, like Soulstones for passive upgrades, enticing exploration beyond finding the main path forward. Despite having fairly winding levels, they are designed just simply enough that I never got lost, even when I ventured so far from the checkpoint that I wasn’t sure how to get back to it. There is variety in these levels too, giving a nice refresh for the environment every time you move to the next main area.
In addition to the main levels, there are also side quest areas. These side quest areas usually repurpose parts of the main level, but will contain a shorter area or have you run it in reverse. The layout changes make enough of a difference to keep it from feeling like a rehash, but these side quests do typically unlock after beating a level, so if you rush to do them you will likely go through the same environment on back-to-back missions. Oddly, there are some pretty key features, like the Blacksmith, which are only unlocked via a side quest, blurring the lines between mainline and side content in a way that made me feel like I should do all of them, even if most didn’t offer rewards that important.
The combat loop in levels functions exactly how you would imagine in a souls-like. You move from checkpoint to checkpoint, gathering XP currency, called Lacrima. If you die you drop it, and if you take enough to a checkpoint you can level up and increase a stat. The combat challenges are mostly on the easier end during levels before the boss fight. Many enemies can be stun-locked by using heavy attacks, but the flow of combat feels good enough that it doesn’t take away from the experience too much.
There are three weapon types; Dual Wield, Greatsword, and Spear. You will be forced to try out all three in the first level, which made it easy in my case to pick the Dual Wield and stick with it for the rest of the game. The combat loop in The First Berserker: Khazan is all about perfect blocks, dodges, and counters. While the tutorial area makes it seem like blocks and dodges are interchangeable in how you play, it becomes clear pretty quickly that you need to use both, depending on the situation. A perfect example is an early boss fight against an enemy with dual-wielding weapons. One weapon is on fire, while the other isn’t. That means even if you perfectly block the attack with the flaming weapon, it will still build the fire status, so it’s smarter to dodge those attacks and perfectly block the other weapon, to whittle down the boss’ stamina meter.
Boss Battles: A War of Attrition, Not Skill
The boss fights are incredibly well-designed, with cool enemy appearances, and movesets that are fun to learn and avoid, but all of this is undercut by some abysmal balancing. You may notice early in The First Berserker: Khazan, that you do very little damage to bosses. It’s the equivalent of fighting game chip damage, full combos taking away only a few percentage points of the health bar. Even a Brutal Attack, which you can do after depleting a boss’s stamina bar, does, at best, like five percent of the boss’s health bar. This problem is exacerbated in fights where the boss has a second phase with a fresh health bar, creating these long tedious fights that are less about learning a boss’ moves and more about playing perfectly for such a long time. You still take a ton of damage when hit, and because fights are so long, any mistake is costly.
There isn’t a single boss fight that doesn’t suffer from this issue. There are even bosses that can heal themselves, and it’s hard to think of a time a game was more demoralizing, than watching minutes worth of work get undone. While I have to review the game based on my experience playing it, I expect that this will get adjusted with patches post-launch. The First Berserker: Khazan does have an easy difficulty you can switch to, but you cannot swap back once you do it. It’s an unfortunate choice to do this since it discourages the easy difficulty. It also creates frustrating scenarios. Late into the game, I was so frustrated with how little damage I was doing to bosses, that I swapped to easy for the final couple of levels. Unfortunately, while easy was easier, it didn’t increase my damage, so my main frustration wasn’t fixed and I couldn’t undo my choice.
The damage issue is made even more painful by the loot system. There are colored loot and full item sets with special abilities. While I never found the loot cumbersome, it also isn’t exciting. Even if it changes stats and appearances, it never meaningfully changes how you play. This means that The First Berserker: Khazan has visible damage numbers, which makes the chip damage in boss fights even more frustrating. You can see plainly that you do over a thousand damage per hit late in the game, but it makes such little impact that it feels like a pointless piece of information.
The Final Word
The First Berserker: Kahzan features a fun combat system, an interesting world, and an enjoyable revenge tale, but tedious and overly long boss fights make what should be the most exciting part of the game too frustrating to enjoy. It’s unfortunate, as the rest of the experience is a ton of fun, but when the main selling point of the genre is the weakest part of the game, it weighs down the entire experience.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
