The First Berserker: Khazan Review

Love or hate them, it’s undeniable that FromSoftware pioneered an entire subgenre in the action RPG space through their Souls games. Dozens of developers have utilized that foundation as their guiding principle in designing their own projects; some manage to break through and find a dedicated audience, while many struggle to captivate those who give them a chance. It’s no secret that the market has been continuously flooded with Soulslike games – big and small – that “Souls fatigue” is becoming more of a common term among action RPG fans.

Achieving success in the Soulslike ecosystem these days undoubtedly requires a bit of luck, but most importantly, something that sets it apart from the rest. Recent examples that have managed to find success include Lies of P and the Lords of the Fallen reboot, while others have managed to establish their own franchise identity altogether, such as the Nioh series.

Developer Neople is no stranger to the action RPG genre; they built, and continue to thrive off, one of the most unique MMO games ever – Dungeon & Fighter (titled Dungeon Fighter Online in the west and often abbreviated as DNF). Although DNF has dwindled in the west over time, it is still an enormous IP among Asian markets. DNF offered a mechanically in-depth combat system in its side-scrolling beat’em up battles, incredibly flashy over-the-top visuals, and compelling character progression with a variety of different classes. Above all else, it was one of the more high-profile free-to-play games when it first emerged in the market, during a time when there weren’t many of those quite yet.

Neople and DNF publisher Nexon have started to embark on a similar path as Cygames. Much like how Cygames began to branch out its Granblue Fantasy IP with the Granblue Fantasy Versus and Granblue Fantasy Relink console games, Neople and Nexon are also looking to break into the same market with DNF. They recently partnered with Arc System Works and Eighting for the 2022 fighting game, DNF Duel. Now, they’ve steered the DNF IP into their own attempt at a Soulslike game with The First Berserker: Khazan.

Although it ties into the DNF universe, newcomers don’t need to know anything about the DNF series to understand the story in The First Berserker: Khazan. In fact, knowing the DNF lore beforehand will spoil the already predictable twists the game has in store, because it takes place roughly 800 years before the main DNF game. It chronicles the origin story of the Berserker class which has its roots tied to General Khazan, the titular protagonist.

The First Berserker: Khazan tells a rather simple, straightforward story of how the Pell Los Empire betrayed Khazan and exiled him. Before death could claim him, a mysterious entity known as the Blade Phantom possessed Khazan. He breaks free from his captors and begins his journey to uncover who was responsible for his current circumstances. Khazan wrestles with the Blade Phantom trying to fight for control of his body early on, but the situation eventually calls for an uneasy alliance and a mutual agreement to fight together. Players will meet several allies along the way to join Khazan’s cause, so the journey isn’t as lonesome as it initially seems.

It's easy to see that The First Berserker: Khazan turned to the Nioh series as its primary inspiration, and unfortunately, I think it took the wrong lessons almost every step of the way. Games don’t exist in a vacuum and evaluating The First Berserker: Khazan will naturally bring up comparisons to Nioh, because this game replicated so many of its systems.

First off, The First Berserker: Khazan is divided into linear stages that have several side paths for goodies. Main story stages lean on the lengthier side relative to Nioh, and I felt that most of them often overstayed their welcome. These tend to be roughly twice as long as the average Nioh stage, and their structural layout largely follows the same philosophy. Checkpoint “bonfires” in The First Berserker: Khazan involve de-crystalizing a sword that looks like the fleshy Soul Edge from the Soulcalibur series. There are unlockable shortcuts that lead back to these checkpoints, either through kicking down ladders, opening locked doors from the other side, making nearby elevators operable again, and such. It’s all very typical.

Khazan himself can’t manually jump, so expect lots of awkward, wonky platforming through dropping onto thin planks and landings. This is nothing new to the genre, though it does manifest into one of the worst final stages I’ve ever seen in an action RPG in recent memory, and I’m left a little baffled that the developers decided to keep that stage the way it is.

Anyway, one of the aspects that truly irks me about The First Berserker: Khazan is that I find its art direction stunning, yet it is immensely held back by its color palette. I love the cel-shading method that Neople employed for the models in this game; they found the perfect balance of retaining DNF’s stylishness without leaning into a “blobby” aesthetic. Muscle definition stands out, and facial expressions are conveyed clearly without having to exaggerate them for impact. It is a lovely look… but there is one humongous caveat to it.

The color direction does it no favors. I understand that the state of the world in The First Berserker: Khazan is utterly fucked; dozens of savage beasts, undead horrors, and corrupted entities roam the land with no hope of improvement in sight. To emphasize the bleak, decaying world, the overall color palette of the game is desaturated. I recognize the intent behind this deliberate direction, yet I wholeheartedly disagree with the way it was executed. It results in muted, low-contrast visuals at every step of the way; scenery shots, stage exploration, battle confrontations, and character interactions look like most of the color has been sucked right out of them.

I think this creates a fundamental problem with the game in several ways. DNF fans going into The First Berserker: Khazan will be greeted with visuals that betray the vibrant, lively colors that breathe life into Dungeon & Fighter. Although it had its own set of issues, DNF Duel was able to convey the spirit of DNF brilliantly in its visuals. Now I’m not saying that a bright, energetic color palette would’ve been apt for Khazan’s drab world, but I think there are other ways to showcase a similar atmosphere without drastically toning down its overall color use to the point that nothing feels visually stimulating. Numerous other games with grim settings have found methods to make their visuals pop, while retaining their dark atmosphere.

This creates an unrewarding feedback loop when progressing through its stages, because the lifeless nature of its visuals means that there’s not much that left a lasting impact. Much of the color palette throughout the entire game is simply dull to look at, and the most common things that my eyes were drawn to were either the torches lighting the way, or the next checkpoint location ahead. Ironically enough, the color palette gets further desaturated and drained when an elite enemy is nearby; it does serve as a decent warning marker when one is around, though, especially because it provides a somewhat frosty screen overlay to shake up the visuals once in a while.

Sets of stages are spread across a few different regions, though nothing about the places themselves are outstanding or memorable. Most areas have Khazan traverse through villages, dungeons, mines, ruins, the wilderness, and such. A lot of them look identical to one another, and the shorter side quest stages reuse sections of main stages frequently.

They aren’t all that exciting to go through, though it does throw in the occasional puzzle or stage gimmick to shake things up. Some of them are clearly winks to the first Dark Souls, which had me mentally rolling my eyes. There was a stage that had the player enter a painting, and another one called “Sentinel’s Fortress” that was very much The First Berserker: Khazan’s version of Sen’s Fortress, and a few stages that really embraced the annoying Anor Londo sequence of traveling on thin walkways on Gothic architecture as mobs assaulted players. Yes, there’s a poison swamp as well.

Another design decision that didn’t feel great in practice is The First Berserker: Khazan’s deliberate emphasis on its restrictive stamina bar. Both offensive and defensive maneuvers consume stamina, so people are constantly juggling the risk-versus-reward of extending an attack chain or cutting it off early to conserve enough stamina for defensive measures. Now this is very typical of many other games in the Soulslike subgenre, though The First Berserker: Khazan’s stamina feels too limiting for a vast chunk of it.

Players can make small incremental additions to how much stamina they have, how fast stamina recovers, and how much a perfect guard/dodge impacts stamina drain yet sadly, it does little to mitigate the overall clunkiness of the combat flow. Several skills consume spirit, separate from stamina, from the spirit gauge - so I thought the game would be aiming to achieve a satisfying feeling of momentum from properly see-sawing between stamina and spirit consumption. I was let down when I began to realize that this wasn’t the case, since some enemies either wouldn’t flinch for that long or they’d armor through continuous hits after a certain point.

After exploring a variety of abilities with the three different weapon types, I eventually realized that the game boiled down to finding the best “damage-to-stamina” option and doing it over, and over, and over, and over again. I found an extremely effective move that didn’t cost spirit and consumed relatively little stamina, therefore I spammed it endlessly on every single enemy in The First Berserker: Khazan from there on until I beat it.

I think it’s frustrating that The First Berserker: Khazan is on the cusp of being a good game, yet it misses the mark in so many odd ways. It borrows a lot of Nioh’s notes, copies them in ways that Nioh already solved, and offers very little new to separate itself from the plethora of Soulslike titles. Sure, it probably shouldn’t copy Nioh’s ki pulse system 1:1, but presenting an equivalent mechanic to refund a portion of stamina to make extended offensive assaults feel more viable would help without necessarily compromising on the challenging, punishing nature this game is striving to achieve.

Another example of how the game copies Nioh’s notes in a half-assed manner is through how it handles red phantoms. Players can choose to summon them at designated spots, and much like Nioh, they can drop a piece of gear and a consumable item that can summon an NPC helper for bosses. Unfortunately, when Khazan runs on over to these spots, the pop-up text doesn’t list what equipment the red phantom yields, so it makes this specific system way more unintuitive than the inspiration it’s derived from. There are other ways to obtain gear of course, but the implementation of this particular system feels more of an afterthought, rather than something that naturally supplements the user experience – which Nioh already figured out.

Believe me, I know this is getting a bit repetitive but another element of the game that, by all means, should have been a positive with no caveats is its free skill point respec anytime anywhere. It’s great that The First Berserker: Khazan makes it easy to explore different builds, though the way it handles it is a bit clumsy when it comes to switching between the three different weapon types - dual-wield, greatsword, and spear. Each of them has their own separate skill tree, plus a fourth one that has “common” universal abilities, such as gaining more spirit upon a perfect guard or perfect dodge, or increasing the damage on the javelin that Khazan can toss to faraway enemies.

Let’s say a person wants to try out the spear after putting 30 skill points into the greatsword and common abilities’ skill tree. They can refund those 30 skill points immediately, and have to re-distribute them now into the spear and common tabs; if they want to switch back to greatsword after spending several minutes with the spear and coming to the conclusion it isn’t for them, they have to respec and re-learn all those skill nodes again.

If someone is the type to constantly switch weapons to see what they can do, they’ll have to be prepared to spend several minutes re-learning skill nodes again and again. There probably is a better way to handle this, and I’m left wondering again why the developers thought this was acceptable to ship. Having some sort of customizable preset that people can register would be one of several viable solutions to fix this.

One of the few shining points in The First Berserker: Khazan is that its gear system eventually becomes interesting. After all the gear crafting and augmenting systems are unlocked through completing specific side quests, there is a lot of flexibility in working towards a build. There are gear set bonuses that substantially enhance specific abilities, and the blacksmith gradually learns to craft new gear sets when people find the recipes for them throughout stages.

Then, gear can be leveled up by consuming unneeded higher item-level equipment, and each individual attribute can be re-rolled. There’s even a pop-up menu that shows all the potential attributes that sub-stat can be re-rolled to, and what the lower and upper caps are for that attribute; thus, there’s no guesswork on whether the attribute that it was rerolled to was a low or high roll. It’s through these incremental upgrades throughout gear where The First Berserker: Khazan’s combat system starts to feel okay, after going through the process of optimizing all equipped gear to enhance certain playstyles and tendencies.

Enemy variety is also one of The First Berserker: Khazan’s stronger points. There was a lot of care put into making a lot of different types of foes for Khazan to slaughter; I’m sure a good chunk of them came from DNF, but it’s been many, many years since I last played that game. I enjoyed a later stage’s gimmick of having to explore three different paths to activate the portal to the stage’s boss, and each of the three paths had different enemy theming with a path dedicated to undead foes, spiders, and wild animals. There is an option for arachnophobia mode for those who need it, thankfully. Some of the more interesting enemies to me are in the last stretch of Khazan’s journey. I was pleasantly surprised.

Of course, the bosses are the stars of the show in this subgenre of action RPGs. The First Berserker: Khazan doesn’t disappoint in this regard, with a lot of different boss battles that tend to change their behavioral pattern at certain HP thresholds. Some have multiple phases with entirely new movesets, and smaller side quest stages often contain “remixed” versions of previous bosses that exhibit new attack chains altogether. They’re all decently challenging, and often require some level of trial and error to learn when and where their openings are, and which attacks can be quickly punished. Most of them are thrilling without overstaying their presence, though I think a few of the later ones have a tad too much health and are a bit of a slog. Still, the bosses were all-around alright.

I played through the PC version of The First Berserker: Khazan and it ran fine on my system with a 3080 GPU and 5900X CPU at High settings usually running over 90fps on average. Throughout my 33-hour playthrough, I had the game crash on me three times. The first two crashes were sudden, and turning off DLSS seemed to help; the last one had an error message pop-up, but it seemed to be a one-off isolated incident in that regard. There was some stuttering here and there, but it rarely happened in the middle of combat. Overall, I had little performance issues on my end.

The First Berserker: Khazan is a typical Soulslike-inspired action RPG that takes a lot of inspiration from Nioh, and offers nothing new that separates itself from the dozens of others out there. Even in the many aspects it takes from Nioh, it often does them worse. Its beautiful art direction is largely held back by a deliberately dull color palette. Additionally, its combat has some great animations, yet overall feels sluggish because of how restrictive its stamina system is. I was prepared to have a great time with The First Berserker: Khazan, but there’s so little that I enjoyed because it always took two steps back in every step it took forward.