TL; DR: My first Souls-like game, very ruthless and unforgiving at start, but extremely satisfying and (sometimes) forgiving on the long run.

Full review:

Starting off, first 10-20 hours as a Souls first-timer, were absolutely unforgiving, ruthless and straight up bullcr*p (in my mind). Enemies with fast attacks, slow attacks, alternating between them, homing projectiles etc. Everything felt like it worked against me and to kill me. This contributed to something amazing: Nothing beats the feeling of FINALLY killing a boss that I've died to 40 times in a row - I am talking about you, Crucible Knight! I knew i could kill him, and never stopped trying; and the satisfaction I got from killing him was IMMENSE. That was the moment I felt like I finally understood how this game works, and I was correct (partially).

The immense satisfaction factor this game has to offer is absolutely stunning, the world is incredibly large, full of new things to discover, stories to learn, stuff to find and gather, small bosses to defeat, merchants, anything you'd dream about an open world game to have, this game has it.

The storytelling is good, but sometimes hard to follow, the stories themselves are kinda sad (in my experience so far at least), but they are not even remotely compared to a typical "go there, kill that, gather that, come back, go back there etc" quests that you find in most other games. I loved every single quest I did, and never knew how so many hours passed by while doing that.

The replay-ability of Elden Ring is crazy, never experienced anything like this before. When you start a NG+, you get to keep your levels, souls, items, materials, and the discovered points of interest on the map - the more you discover before NG+, the merrier. There are new places I keep discovering even after 100 hours of gameplay, new builds to try out, stories that I could have missed, NPC's that I forgot to talk to and.....the endings, there are known to be at least 6 endings which is CRAZY. I don't even know how to express how many things you can do and how much stuff there is for you to discover.

In conclusion, this game is very close to perfection and I mean it, apart from some obvious optimization problems in very few areas, there are no any other things I didn't like. I got used to the game, I understand how it works now, but hell, I am going to play the ♥♥♥♥ out of this game to find out everything that there is to learn about the lore and world. The start will be very hard for non-souls-veterans, but trust me, your patience will pay off IMMENSELY after you get used to the mechanics.

A well deserved 10/10 for a masterpiece of a game! Well done, FromSoft! Cannot wait for the DLCs!