Billed as a ‘hardcore action RPG’ (role-playing game), The First Berserker: Khazan from developer Neople lives up to its description by offering a back-breaking, taxing, and demanding soulslike game that doesn’t ever let up, for better and for worse.

With some impressive combat and progression tweaks to the genre’s formula mixed in, it also has some solid ideas of its own. Dozens of hours of content, optional side missions, and secrets to find are backed up by some excellent voice work - even if the narrative doesn’t quite match the performance quality.

However, for long-running Soulslike fans, The First Berserker: Khazan’s combat feels on par with Lies of P’s quality. We are now at a point in the genre where developers are able to make combat that is on par with FromSoftware’s work on the iconic Dark Souls series, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, et al. What is even more impressive is that this is Neople’s first soulslike - and you can’t tell at all.

A familiar formula

The setup of The First Berserker: Khazan is a familiar one for the genre. General Khazan wakes up after narrowly escaping death upon being branded a traitor and mercilessly tortured. Frail and weak, he stumbles upon an entity known as the Blade Phantom), providing him with grand, otherworldly powers, and allowing him to get back to his full strength.

On that journey, he will regain powers and abilities allowing him to use one of three weapon types while meeting a cast of characters that join him in a hub called The Crevice. They can upgrade his gear, improve his stats, and offer equipment to purchase, from weapons to armor pieces and your usual batch of consumables you can find in a soulslike game.

Khazan then journeys from level to level to seek revenge and become The First Berserker. While the game is set within the Dungeon & Fighter (DNF) universe, I have no experience with the other projects in it, but I found the story to be initially intriguing, offering impressive world design and great visuals and environments that grabbed me from the get-go.

It also helps that the voice performances from Ben Starr as Khazan and Anthony Hell as the Blade Phantom, the two main characters you are with for most of the game, are fantastic. The rest of the supporting cast, bosses, and human characters you fight are also just as good. Everyone here does the best they can with the writing which often underdelivers.

As the story goes on, the game piles on lore and terminology that makes it a bit hard to follow for newcomers. The world you are exploring and the rules of it just sort of become an amorphous blob of stuff interjected between each level and boss fight. I’m sure it's really cool for fans of the DNF universe to see their world brought to life in a way it never has been before, but The First Berserker: Khazan doesn’t do a great job of keeping new players invested in it past the first few hours.

A brutal battering

While I wasn’t thrilled by the story, the combat in The First Berserker: Khazan is just exquisite. No soulslike has challenged me this consistently since I got into the genre with Bloodborne. There are so many adjectives I could use to describe the combat’s difficulty but it is simply one of the hardest soulslikes I have ever played. However, I loved every second of getting slaughtered.

The First Berserker: Khazan is heavily reliant on blocking, parrying, and dodging at the right times to avoid attacks, with even one hit doing significant damage. Precise dodge timing is required and parry windows are even shorter. Missing these will also lower your stamina with each block as you take damage, leaving you vulnerable and unable to move for a few seconds as your stamina fully recovers. It is grueling and there aren’t ways to get around these requirements either, unless you opt for the easier difficulty mode which lessens the effects of a lot of these punishing mechanics. You can’t simply out-level a boss or area.

The game also doesn’t opt for the build flexibility and customization that many soulslikes do these days, instead letting you develop and deepen combat with the three main weapon types (dual blades, greatsword, and spear) as you play. As you kill enemies and bosses, you earn skill points that unlock abilities that you can activate that vary up a weapon's moveset, as well as other moves and passive bonuses that are imbued into the weapon once activated.

I opted for a Greatsword in my playthrough and that allowed me to unlock abilities such as Breakthrough which let me charge into an enemy push them back away from a group and then slam down. Other abilities like Inner Fury summoned an explosion underneath where I was standing, dealing area of effect damage to everyone around me acting as a stun, building up an enemy’s stun meter to land a Brutal Attack while they were immobilized. It also helped with crowd control.

Within the skill tree, there are also additional combat moves that you can seamlessly slot in between attacks, such as being able to use a charged heavy attack with some added reach after performing the first hit in a light combo or being able to guard as you charge your heavy attack. There is even a ranged Spear attack that you can use.

This is the first time I can remember a skill tree and traditional combat abilities working this well in soulslike and I loved the fluid, dynamic nature of fighting in The First Berserker: Khazan as I unlocked more skills with a weapon. There’s an exceptional flow I got into as i combined attacks and seamlessly interweaved moves that became addicting. It’s all supported by excellent sound design and music, with the clink of a parry and the swoosh of a perfect dodge being especially satisfying.

Of course, combat is nothing in a soulslike without enemies, and The First Berserker: Khazan has a wealth of them. Skeletons, humans, demons, dragons, and more litter the game’s 16 levels and many bonus missions. They all have a great, varied selection of attacks and I never had issues with struggling to understand which moves were being telegraphed. The only downside is there are a few too many brown and grey villages and areas where you fight these enemies, that lack the flair seen early on and towards the end of the game.

Bosses, however, are exceptional and always a spectacle. The way their attacks and the visual effects combine together to create grand, herculean challenges is an aspect of the game that never gets old. Each one also challenged me in entirely different ways, requiring different approaches almost every time and forcing me to adapt to new combat styles.

Endure and try to survive

However, the sheer amount of attacks to learn, the parry timing, and the damage these bosses do, combined with the demanding combat is a lot to endure. I spent several hours on every single boss, sometimes spending more than five hours trying to finish them off. For example, Aratra, a giant spider has a number of stabs and swipes it can perform with its legs, a few jumping grab attacks, as well as a charge that requires you to block half-a-dozen successive hits. It also can inflict poison with its attacks, forcing you to manage a poison meter at the same time.

Another boss Rangkus, offers a unique blend of both ranged crossbow atatcks and melee attacks, forcing you to adjust to his constantly shifting moveset that switches between the two styles. You not only have to block, parry, dodge, and close the gap on him, but you also need to manage your position in the arena to stay close to him, preventing him from doing his more punishing area of effect attacksor charged crossbow shots that are almost impossible to dodge.

The First Berserker: Khazan has some of the hardest bosses I’ve ever experienced in the genre because they all ask so much of the player. While it felt like being in the trenches in the moment, the exhilarating jubilation I felt after beating each one is a feeling I haven’t felt in the genre in a very long time. Combat is really quite exceptional and to have something of this quality come from a studio’s first soulslike game is impressive.

Ideas of its own

While The First Berserker: Khazan definitely borrows a lot from the games that came before it, there are a few interesting twists to the formula, most of which work. For example, you can actually provide larger damage and stamina recovery boosts to Khazan beyond the traditional five stat upgrades you get from the currency enemies drop. By finding Vengeance Points, you can boost these stats universally across the game’s levels which encourages you to explore thoroughly as there is a meaningful reward for doing so.

You can also perform similar upgrades by using items gained from the red enemy summons or spirits to boost your own summon, enhancing their damage and strength during boss fights, giving you a reason to actually fight them and invest in your summon if you want. Although the AI isn’t that great on your summon, they can be used as a punching bag for a boss to let you land some free hits.

There are also a lot of fun twists and optional bonus missions, such as fighting a boss again in a new form or exploring an area from a main level in a new way. There are also a few collectibles to find in these and the main missions that can provide a variety of extra bonuses, armor pieces, or gear. I really enjoyed doing these and chasing these items. Being encouraged to explore in this way for tangible rewards made the linear-level design more intriguing as I scoured every crevice for secrets.

The one area that the game offers a twist on the soulslike formula here - that doesn’t really work - is the amount of gear (weapon and armor) customisation options. You can craft gear, upgrade gear, rework attributes and stat bonuses on gear and entire gear sets, sell that gear for money and buy other gear, and even dismantle gear.

It’s a lot of ways to use your unwanted items, but I never felt the need to engage with any of them meaningfully. I was still just using everything I obtained while exploring and making use of gear sets and the bonuses granted by them. I never felt a need to actually think about crafting a gear set or dismantling gear to save up for a specific item from the blacksmith. It largely just feels tacked on because I got so much gear as I was playing.

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Accessibility features

The First Berserker: Khazan includes aim assist for ranged weapons and an easy difficulty for those who are finding the combat too challenging. However, once you choose easy difficulty, you can’t change the difficulty back to normal, and the game doesn’t have any fine-tuning options for combat such as adjusting the parry window. The combat also doesn’t have much wiggle room to make things easier with upgrades and you can’t customize button mappings outside of the two default templates.

There are also no options for people who are colorblind, visually impaired, deaf, or have motor and reaction time problems besides some very minor adjustments such as hold to sprint, turning screen shake off, and basic subtitle options.

How I reviewed The First Berserker: Khazan

I played The First Berserker: Khazan for 30 hours completing the majority of the game’s main missions and finishing most of the side content. I played the game mostly in performance mode on PS5 with a DualSense Edge PS5 controller on a Gigabyte M28U gaming monitor and using SteelSeries Arena 3 computer speakers.

The First Berserker: Khazan tested me in much the same way Bloodborne did when I tried the genre in 2015. Since that year I have played almost every game in the genre including Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Elden Ring, Demon’s Souls, Lies of P, The Surge, Lords of the Fallen, Ashen, Darksiders 3, and more.

First reviewed March 2025.