The First Berserker: Khazan is in some ways a Soulslike crafted for hardcore Soulslike fans. There are few ways to too cheese boss fights with broken builds and the skill-checks come early and often (Chapter 3 boss Viper is already infamous as “newbie crusher). But it also has the DNA of an old-school action game that can be a lot of fun, even for people who are burnt out on the bonfire formula pioneered by FromSoftware. Fortunately, The First Berserker: Khazan has an easy mode to help bail out those players and give them a good time anyway.
While a common feature across every other genre of game, easy modes are few and far between in the Soulslike genre. The First Berserker: Khazan stands apart not just for actually having a way to dial back the game’s difficulty, but also for doing it in a way that doesn’t completely negate the underlying challenge of the gameplay. You will die less often on easy mode, but you will most definitely still die, and probably still a lot. In fact, developer Neople recently buffed the mode (and tweaked some boss fights) because players were still dying too much.
It changes things like player and enemy health as well as, most importantly, stamina recovery. Khazan’s combat system revolves around staggering enemies by depleting their stamina gauge. Managing your own in response is a key part of survival. But on easy mode your stamina meter is almost constantly recovering, and fills up fast if you’re using the occasional perfect guard to instantly top-off the gauge.
The result is that you get more chances to experiment, practice, and learn from your mistakes. Khazan’s boss fights have the delayed combat animations that are intentionally designed to throw off your timing, and becoming well acquainted with each and every small pattern variation is more than half the battle. The easy mode doesn’t just lower the bar to clearing these encounters, it’s also a great way to spend more time actually learning how to master them and less time staring at “ Khazan Has Fallen” plastered across the screen.
Khazan has another forgiving feature that I think non-Souls fans will really appreciate: Every time you die at a boss you still get additional progress toward your next level-up, as long as you reached a certain milestone in the fight (usually depleting half the health bar or reaching a second phase). You can also still earn skill points to further progress through the skill tree by hitting perfect guard and counter timings in fights. These small tweaks are nice rewards for what can occasionally feel like hitting your head against the wall.
And then when you feel like you’ve got Khazan figured out you can turn off the easy mode and see yourself plunge from hero back down to zero, but with the confidence to climb back up that tortuous ladder. It makes The Last Beserker: Khazan easier to recommend to less diehard fans in a way that I wouldn’t do with things like Nioh 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, or Lies of P, all great games that I would argue don’t have some of the difficulty spikes seen in Khazan, but are also less forgiving overall due to the lack of alternative difficulty modes. So, to anyone out there who has been intrigued by The Last Beserker: Khazan but afraid to take the plunge, I’d recommend giving it a second look.
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