I jumped into the first technical closed beta test for The First Berserker: Khazan over the weekend and came away excited to experience more of what the game has to offer. While I hit bugs and balancing issues, I was overwhelmingly impressed by the art, action, and world that the game presents.
Story and World
After being convicted of treason by the emperor, the world-famous hero, General Khazan, has the tendons in his arms severed and is exiled from the land.
Khazan is chained up in the back of a caged wagon, being transported over a precarious ridge, when a not-so-natural avalanche sends the wagon tumbling over the cliff. His broken body is possessed and healed by a malevolent spirit, The Blade Phantom.
The Phantom wants to take full control of Khazan’s body, but after you defeat it in combat, the pair instead make an agreement to share his body until their goals are met.
The world of The First Berserker: Khazan is exciting and engaging, with graphic novel-like character art and 3D environments that are designed with verticality and exploration in mind.
In addition to animated cut-scenes, there’s also comic-book style images by which some of the story is told. There’s a wide selection of foes to cross swords with, and of course, Ben Starr does a great job voicing the main character as always.
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Soulslike
The First Berserker: Khazan is billed as a hardcore action role-playing game, though, I guess that’s just a roundabout way of saying soulslike? It has all the trademarks, after all.
There are sparse checkpoints throughout each level where you’ll respawn upon death. Enemies and healing vessels will also respawn when you die or when you rest at a checkpoint.
You acquire ‘lacrima’ (souls) as you defeat enemies, which can be used to upgrade your stats. Your lacrima is dropped upon your death, and you’ll have one opportunity to pick them up during your next life, before they’re lost forever.
There’s also a stamina bar, which depletes when dodging, blocking, or attacking. Combat can be absolutely brutal, especially the boss fights; much like many older soulslike games, you can’t jump.
Combat
There were three boss fights within the beta, the last of which I’m still yet to defeat! Like many soulslikes, the first boss is an unforgiving skill check that is intended to teach you a vital aspect of the game.
The first half dozen times I clashed heads with Yetuga the yeti, I had my ass well and truly handed to me. The beast is fast and ferocious, delivering crushing blow after crushing blow. I quickly learnt that the dodge just wasn’t cutting it. I couldn’t evade all of its strikes, and the constant dodging drained my stamina bar so low that I couldn’t launch my own attacks.
When I eventually realised that the game wanted me to focus on blocking and parrying, I had a much easier time of it.
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The second beta boss, the Blade Phantom, was even harder, taking around fifty attempts to beat. I even developed a small welt on my left index finger from pressing the block button so much!
While I would feel frustrated when I missed multiple blocks in a row, or close to breaking when I whittled the boss down to its last bit of health but couldn’t clinch the victory, I still couldn’t help but admire the fight.
The Blade Phantom comes at you with an array of weapons: dual-blades, a dragoon lance, a gigantic hammer, and even unarmed martial arts. At first, it’s overwhelming, with so many different attacks to defend against. But the patterns ARE there; it takes patience to learn and counter them.
Before battling the last boss, you have the option of summoning a Spirit of Advocacy to help you in combat, drawing aggro away from you, and dishing out damage themselves. Elden Ring had this feature, which was almost like a difficulty toggle for bosses.
I was elated to be given the option here, too. That feeling was short-lived once I realised that the feature was tied to a rare consumable, The Lacrima of Circulation. Summoning a spirit to aid you in every boss attempt just isn’t realistic.
The unforgiving nature of soulslike games means that you really need a good reason to be clashing heads with bosses dozens of times. Whether that’s the story, world building, characters, or enemy design — you need a driving force to get to the other side of that battle, or you’ll quickly bounce off and go play something else.
I didn’t have that problem with The First Berserker: Khazan. The world design and aesthetics are so good that I was yearning for more, and to get that, I needed to get good and kick the bosses to the curb.
While some fights are absolutely ruthless in their difficulty, I still had a lot of fun with them… Okay, fun AND frustration.
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There were three weapon types to experiment with in the beta; the spear, the greatsword, and a dual wielded axe and blade. Each has its own skill trees with enhancements such as additional attacks, extending combos, or decreasing stamina costs for guarding or dodging.
Assigned skill points can be removed and re-assigned, but it would’ve been nice if there were profiles for each weapon, so I didn’t have to re-arrange the points each time I switched weapon types.
It was especially irksome when doing multiple runs at a strong enemy or boss, experimenting with different weapons and tactics. But each time I swapped weapons, I’d need to spend time moving around skill points first.
Stamina
In The Last Berserker, everything revolves around stamina, which can be to the game’s detriment. Dodging, blocking, attacking, and even taking damage depletes your stamina bar.
Against regular enemies, this isn’t a problem as you can easily block their simple combos and have enough stamina to launch your own attack.
But against bosses, I could barely defend against their brutal onslaughts, let alone have enough stamina left for an attack of my own. Deciding to attack would leave you in a precarious position if the boss launches another assault before your stamina has recharged. Getting hit while your stamina bar is empty will stun you and leave you open to a world of hurt.
Reducing stamina cost for blocking and dodging — or even having perfect parries not cost any stamina — would go a long way to making the game feel a bit fairer.
Some of the bigger enemies that wield heavy weapons seem to be unfairly balanced. They’re able to attack far too frequently, and their crushing attacks don’t deplete as much stamina as they should. Their wide-sweeping, heavy attacks would wipe out my stamina bar after a couple of blocks, which made defeating them a real chore.
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UI and Bugs
One of the cool options in the game is that you can turn the HUD off completely — great for snapping clean screenshots. But doing this removes all interactive prompts, health bars, enemy lock on indicators, etc. — it makes combat harder. I hope the devs implement a way to easily toggle the UI on and off as I love the clean screen when not in combat.
There’s no pausing in the game. You can access the menu, but the action will keep going in the background. Unfortunately, this means that it’s impractical to swap weapons mid-fight, which is a shame.
I encountered a few bugs and frame rate dips during my 10-hour playthrough, but far fewer than I had expected from the very first beta. The devs have already pushed a patch to fix some of the bugs, which just goes to show how hard they’re working to polish the game.
The one major bug I encountered has already been fixed. It left me unable to heal during combat, which is obviously game breaking in a soulslike! I’m glad they got on top of that right away.
Another temporary bug I came across caused my combat UI to almost completely disappear, which meant I couldn’t see how many healing flasks I had left or what secondary consumable I was using.
The First Berserker
Overall I really enjoyed my first dip into The First Berserker: Khazan. The art style and world design made it feel like a brutal graphic novel come to life. There was an impressive array of enemy types, and for the most part, the combat felt satisfying.
I think there’s definitely some balancing that Neople, the developers, need to tweak. But that’s the point of a technical beta, to identify what areas of the game need work.
The First Berserker: Khazan is set to release next year on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
