First Berserker: Khazan Is a Wildly Hard Soulslike [Review]

Like other Soulslikes, Khazan has you essentially build a character in order to deal with increasingly difficult challenges. Players get the choice of three types of weapons: a dual wield sword and axe, a spear, and a great sword. Each of them has their own advantages and drawbacks. Combat consists of executing combos and attempting to guard and dodge enemy attacks to avoid taking damage. You’ve also got some special moves you can do that range from pretty effective to “wow that was worthless!” The biggest challenge in Khazan is that it forces you to manage a relatively limited stamina bar.

Khazan is that it’s a tremendously hard game. While the levels themselves can be fairly easy, bosses almost always take numerous tries, during which you’ll need to experiment with figuring out what strategy you want to use to take them down while also learning their move sets and patterns. There’s something immensely satisfying in getting through Khazan’s boss fights, and there’s nothing quite luck perfect guarding and dodging a flurry of attacks, responding to them with counters of your own.

That being said, Khazan’s difficulty is likely to be a turnoff unless you’re really into hard games.

There are times as well where Khazan’s difficulty feels more frustrating than challenging. A big part of that has to do with the stamina system. Players use stamina when on the offense and defense. They also lose stamina when they’re hit. This can lead to attacks stopping dead with no real feedback from the game except that you stop attacking, and it can also lead to one hit resulting in numerous others, since you’ll get hit, lose your stamina, end up exhausted, and get hit again.

I do think there’s some value in this from a player standpoint, since it really does make you think about how much you’re attacking and encourages you to master your guards and dodges. However, the stamina bar ends up limiting the possibilities for the game pretty heavily, because it’s so punishing. You basically have to always play as defensively as possible.

There’s also not a lot to mitigate the difficulty. Khazan technically has companions that can help you during boss battles, but in practicality, they’re pretty useless. That means you really do just have to get good at the game. That’s certainly going to be a turn off to some, as when you hit a difficulty spike, there’s really no way out but through.

Khazan‘s difficulty is also tied to its customization options, which honestly, I’m not sure are very well utilized. The stats themselves don’t really end up doing much in the grand scheme of things. I’m sure it’s possible to really heavily specialize into one thing, but because you have access to all three main weapons — and you can start leveling up your stats before you even know what those weapons are — it’s hard to really plan a build. I mostly just ended up relying on what seemed to work best for me. Occasionally, I’d try switching things up, but changing my stats up was a pain, so I just avoided doing it unless I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t just being dense.

This issue applies to armor as well. At one point in the game, I found myself going to the heaviest possible gear and experienced basically no repercussions from doing so. I’m not sure if it’s just that I was leveled up in a way that reduced the effects or it simply didn’t matter to the game. I found no advantage in using lighter gear, so I opted for heavier gear to make the damage from the bosses a bit less frustrating. I would have loved to have felt like my character customization choices mattered more.

First Berserker: Khazan’s Bosses Are Fantastic

Despite those criticisms of the gameplay, I really love the bosses in Khazan. They are, without a doubt, both incredibly challenging and interesting. Bosses really feel like they tell a story in the way that the rest of the game often does not. Every single one that I faced was memorable, and learning how to specifically beat each of them was great. I felt immense satisfaction every time that I took one down.

Part of what works about them is that boss fights are where Khazan‘s mechanics really come together. They require you to guard and dodge perfectly pretty much every single time, and that leads to these combat sequences that are thrilling and fun to look at. Hitting your groove in Khazan during a boss fight is an experience like no other.

Level Design Is a Problem

As promised, here’s my complaint about level design in Khazan. Frankly, I don’t think the levels are very well-designed. In addition to the problem of not really helping with the storytelling, they often feel very generic, and I’m not sure, given the chance, that I could tell most of them apart.

They also contribute to the difficulty problem. The basic levels aren’t very hard, so you don’t really adequately get trained up for the boss battles. A fair number of enemies repeat throughout the game, and they never feel quite unique or suited to the areas that they’re in. I found the same strategy could basically annihilate everything, and enemy move sets tended to be pretty identical across the whole game. There are slight variations, but nothing that felt special.

Khazan‘s levels are kind of long (they’re not extremely long, just longer than I felt justified in a lot of cases), and they don’t feel like they exist to do much more than fill the time between boss fights.

Stray Thoughts

I didn’t know how to fit this neatly into any other category, but I just wanted to add that the soundtrack for Khazan is fantastic. Like, every single track that I heard is an absolute banger. 10/10 sound and music design.

Verdict: Recommended (for Hardcore Soulslike Fans)

First Berserker: Khazan is, overall, a pretty good game. It’s mainly brought down by its uninspired level design and mechanics that are occasionally more frustrating than challenging. That being said, those who love a challenge will absolutely enjoy the game’s bosses.

A PS5 review code was provided by the publisher for this review.