Impossible to make progress without voice chat.

If you have 3 friends you can talk to and play regularly, you will have a great time, the connection is smooth, the map is full of events and the game loop is very interesting.

However I am a 41 year old man and I don't have friends to regularly play this with, let alone 2 others (you need 3 people to go in as a team, 2 won't work either).

Even if they bring voice chat in the game (i'm not sure how there isn't one at the moment) you won't really enjoy this as much as if you were trying to fight with buddies, as your responsiveness with randoms will affect how you feel about your game a lot.

Playing it solo queue with randoms is hard, it's hard to communicate, it's hard to share items, it's hard to discuss tactics or decide on the next area to farm, it's just hard.

TL;DR, if you don't have 2 more friends you can group up with regularly, it's not fun.


Edit: So after 421 comments and 379 clown emojis as of writing this review, I'd just like to point out that I never expected this review to be this controversial, so I'd like to clarify a couple of points...

Not having friends who want to play nightreign is not the same as having no friends, not everybody is excited about this sort of game. Furthermore, I'm not going to go and join random discords to try and find 2 other people that I may click with.

With regards to skill issue for solo play, yeah, no ♥♥♥♥ I'm not good enough to beat the game in solo mode, I'd gather most people aren't... not sure why this is a talking point though when the game is clearly meant to be played coop.

I mentioned this in a few comments the day I posted this review but I find having no voice chat availability in a coop game and no way to ping items in a game about sharing items to be unacceptable in the year of our lord, 2025. You don't need to play for 20 hours to realise that voice chat is important in a game like this, two runs at 1.2 hours in showed me well enough that the game simply is not fun at all for me, unless you have two friends to play with.

And as a final point, I have recieved so many friend offers and people actually messaging me to tell me not to be worried about all the negative comments (which was honestly very unexpected and kinda sweet), and I would say that despite what everything looks like in the comments, souls community is still one of the best in my book. I'm honestly not bothered by the comments, I find them quite funny honestly and some of them aren't even wrong. I love the souls games and have been playing them (badly) for almost 15 years now, I wish this game clicked with me, I really did, but it didn't.

Poor tools for communication in a game about cooperation and teamwork is not acceptable. I will repeat once again, and if you disagree with this point, then good for you, it doesn't work for me though, and I have no problems telling people in my review about it.

Enjoy the game, happy hunting.