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Elden Ring Nightreign Review: An Addictive Multiplayer Roguelike for Challenge Junkies

FromSoftware’s first multiplayer game is as tough as its oeuvre, sure to please longtime fans and test new ones.

I drop into a fantasy land with a sword and two squadmates, all dedicated to defeating the Nightlord ruling over our shadowy limbo realm — but first, we have to survive. From the deepest mines to the highest snow-capped peaks, we clashed and slew monstrous beasts for two in-game days at a breakneck pace to stay ahead of the closing ring of blue flame. On the third day, confronting the Nightlord in its lair, we get close to defeating it with wild weapons and spells — but win or lose, we shrug and queue up to drop once more.

This is Elden Ring Nightreign, a spin-off of studio FromSoftware’s phenomenally successful and notoriously difficult fantasy action-RPG game Elden Ring. Rather than spend dozens of hours exploring wide lands in a solo adventure, Nightreign takes the combat and boss structure to a co-op multiplayer setting where tight gameplay must be balanced against speed and strategy to survive each trip into the game’s arena. 

Nightreign is a departure for FromSoftware, eschewing the slow solo explorations of its previous games in favor of fast-paced rounds building your heroes from scratch, kind of similar to battle royale shooters like Fortnite and Apex Legends. But unlike those PvP-intensive games, each Nightreign round pits the friendly squad against a map full of computer-controlled enemies, leaving players dependent on teammates to survive — or themselves, if they’re bold enough for a solo run. (Currently, players can either go it alone or queue for three-player squads.)

Nightreign is focused, repeatable Soulslike action 

Nightreign ambitiously tries to see how much of an idiosyncratic yet popular game can be slimmed down and imported into a new gameplay loop. It’s easy to put a hundred hours or more into Elden Ring, exploring every nook and cranny, upgrading weapons and trying out different strategies. Nightreign punishes that slow pace, requiring squads to blitz around the map, hitting specific points of interest to get as strong as they can to survive and defeat the big boss at the end of each three-day run. (Playing through three in-game days and facing the Nightlord boss at the end of a run can take 45 minutes to an hour — or less, if you die along the way.)

This approach will be catnip for fans of FromSoftware’s signature tough boss combat, as it distills Elden Ring down to its core combat loop with just enough randomized surprises to somewhat refresh each run while keeping enough the same to quickly plan and alter course along a run. That makes sense, as Nightreign is directed by Junya Ishizaki, the person in charge of overseeing the combat for Elden Ring. 

On the surface, a lot has carried over from Elden Ring, but there are plenty of subtle refinements to make it fit fast-paced multiplayer gameplay. Player characters kit themselves out with powerful weapons and spells without worrying about stat requirements or armor. There’s no fall damage, allowing players to drop from great heights to keep moving, and spirit hawks lift them in aerial routes around the map. Running up to a spiritual spring of blue fire lets you leap upward hundreds of feet in an invigorating ascent with a heavy bass sound effect — I breeze around the map feeling fast and powerful, a hunter in a forsaken land.

But there is some part of FromSoftware’s spirit that’s lost in Nightreign: that feeling of being dwarfed by an alien world that slowly unfolds its mysterious history as you cut your way through its cursed remains. Instead, Nightreign leans heavily on the mystique and lore built up in Elden Ring, presenting a mirror version of that well-known setting with its own limited mythology that can be revealed with optional missions. But you can just stick with the gameplay loop, and many will, turning Nightreign into a greatest hits album of fun FromSoftware moments that doesn’t introduce too much that’s new — beyond designing the game around persistent squad multiplayer.

And the multiplayer is a joy, despite rough edges that, in true FromSoftware fashion, are unexplained or buggy in ways that the community will likely fondly rehabilitate as part of the game’s charm. For instance, the game requires a lot of ascending big plateaus by hopping up misshapen steps with erratically successful ledge grabs. It’s minorly frustrating, but does ratchet up the tension when you’re trying to escape death or rush to a teammate’s aid — and much like the rest of FromSoftware’s games, Nightreign is so tightly polished elsewhere that this slight jank, or other aspects like it, is tolerated and treated as part of its difficulty and flavor.

Which is all to say that, for $40, Nightreign delivers on its vision of concentrated, easily repeatable FromSoftware action that’s sure to hook the studio’s die-hard fans and potentially lure other difficulty junkies who prefer quick multiplayer romps to lore-heavy solo adventures. With rogue-like novelty that rewards replaying, there’s a decent blend of familiar elements and shifting map factors for fans of FromSoftware’s tough gameplay to get their fix without needing to replay games they know so well.

Fans of the longevity of Elden Ring and its DLC Shadows of the Erdtree should be cautioned: On top of a more narrow appeal than prior FromSoftware games, players will vary in how much replay value they’ll get out of Nightreign, since there’s currently only one map and a finite number of end-run bosses to tackle. The eight character classes, called Nightfarers, have varying complexity in their ability mechanics and will take players a while to master, but they’ll likely spend most of their time attacking with weapons and dodging enemy blows, as in Elden Ring.

There are plenty of randomized factors that mix up a run, from shifting terrain opening up new areas to «invasions» of powerful enemy computer-controlled Nightfarers. But in the 20 hours it took me to beat half the end-run bosses and kill the final boss, the single map became such a known entity that I stopped paying attention to it as anything but a race course to speed over on the way to my next task.

Where Elden Ring Nightreign triumphs and falters

As a FromSoftware fan who can muck his way through its games in ways that nobody would describe as «dominant,» Nightreign is something of a relief, as my two permanent teammates can help a lot in distracting bosses and picking me up when I make mistakes. 

Thanks to previewing the game earlier this year, I hit the ground running, pairing up with CNET teammates to try taking on big bosses — and failing. But after pairing up with a very skilled Bandai Namco employee (one of many who volunteered to help reviewers like me take on bosses and finish the game), we took down some of the biggest and baddest Nightreign has to offer. 

There’s no mistaking that I was carried by more skilled teammates, and that has me concerned for a bit of the game’s flow and player skill growth. While I was used to cautiously and slowly going through FromSoftware games, my more skilled teammates flung us outbound on a speedy tour of the map zones we needed to hit to get as strong as we could. When I fell, they tanked bosses and dodged attacks to revive me. When the map’s Shifting Earth conditions led to a new area, my expert teammate took us to the exact right spot to take full advantage of it — something that might have taken plenty more runs to figure out on my own.

I certainly improved over time, but it was all during rounds — in the Roundtable hub, players return to between missions, a Sparring Grounds area lets you try out each of the eight total (six starting, two unlockable) Nightfarers’ regular and ultimate skills, along with every weapon in the game. But it’s a far cry from the game’s high-pressure situations of boss events, enemy groups and more. Players will improve only by trial and error in the field, sometimes letting down their teammates in the process.

Yet, when you and your team are firing on all cylinders, there’s no thrill like eking out a win over a monstrous boss. After killing a trio of end-run bosses, another reviewer, Bandai Namco employee Micah (team Cat Password all the way) and I locked in to beat the game’s final boss. Shouting out congratulations over team chat, my body shaking with adrenaline, I felt like I’d completed a gaming feat — something not unknown to many Elden Ring players after surmounting one of that game’s many challenging bosses. 

I felt accomplished. I wanted to tell everyone, and when the game comes out, bring my friends in to play Nightreign with them, guiding as I was guided. But would I recommend my FromSoftware newcomer friends to play?

Who is Elden Ring Nightreign for?

The more I thought about it, the more I felt my dozens of hours in Elden Ring were essential to starting Nightreign strong — and even then, it took 20 hours in Nightreign to feel like I’d gotten a good handle on the best way to play. Knowing Elden Ring’s massive arsenal of weapons and spells felt essential to picking up Nightreign and immediately having fun.

New players who don’t have baked-in knowledge of Elden Ring or the combat flow of FromSoftware games will probably be left in the cold. Aside from a tutorial section teaching players basic mechanics, Nightreign lacks the carefully crafted early sections of the studio’s other games — it quite literally drops players into the map for a run and tells them to get killing. 

The virtue of FromSoftware’s single-player adventures’ difficulties is that players could approach them at their own pace; in Nightreign, they must rapidly adapt to the studio’s particular flavor of tough combat while also figuring out a largely unexplained world. The studio’s famed minimalist storytelling will likely do a disservice to new players who die too quickly to learn.

Whether they continue with the game after a humiliating defeat is, indeed, the classic trial that every FromSoftware player faces. But it sure seems like new players have a high hill to climb picking up on the game’s subtly conveyed details — map flow, enemy camps, bosses, weapons, churches, strategies — while also figuring out how to play Soulslikes from scratch. 

And yet, Nightreign is so unlike every other game out there that its sheer novelty may be enough to tempt FromSoftware veterans and newcomers alike. It’s polished, is easy to get into the action and has a very high skill ceiling. If players stick through its lack of direction and difficulty, they’ll find a multiplayer game that feels rewarding to win in a way few other games are. And when they lose, they may find themselves like I did — nursing annoyance that they fumbled but eager to drop in one more time with their trusted squad.

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Technologies

SpaceX Plans a Launch Almost Every Other Day for the Rest of 2025

The company anticipates 170 orbital launches for the rest of the year, shooting past its record-setting 134 launches in 2024.

SpaceX wants to launch rockets into space 170 times in 2025. That’s an amibitious goal, considering that only 64 launches have been completed so far this year, and to hit that goal, SpaceX would need to launch a rocket nearly every other day. That’s a significant increase from SpaceX’s single-year record of 134 orbital liftoffs in 2024. For comparison of just how normal the new cadence has become, in 2020, there were only 25 launches. The average launch is every two to three days now. 

Read more: SpaceX Loses Contact With Starship in Third Test Flight Failure in a Row

SpaceX can undertake so many launches because of the Falcon 9, the world’s first orbital-class reusable rocket. Being able to reuse the most expensive parts of the rocket not only drives down the cost, but it also allows SpaceX to increase the number of launches each year. Falcon 9 performed 132 of 2024’s liftoffs, and the other two in 2024 were performed by the Falcon Heavy, which is composed of three reusable Falcon 9 engine cores. So far in 2025, all 64 orbital missions have used Falcon 9. 

Read more: Here’s How to Watch Every Major US Space Launch for the Rest of 2025

It could also be another big year for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite venture. Two-thirds of the launches last year were in efforts to build SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation. And growth is expected to continue — of the 64 orbital missions in 2025, 48 have been Starlink flights.

This number doesn’t include the suborbital Starship test flights. Orbital launches require more speed to go into or beyond the Earth’s orbit. Suborbital launches move at lower speeds since they don’t enter orbit. 

Starship, a suborbital rocket, is a reusable craft designed to carry humans and cargo through space one day. The three most recent Starship test flights, including one on May 27, have ended with the craft breaking up. Previous rocket explosions happened in both January and March.

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Technologies

Tell Ya What, Hulu’s King of the Hill Reboot Has a Clip and Release Date: How to Watch

Need any propane or propane accessories? Bobby Hill is all grown up, and parents Peggy and Hank are a bit older in the new show.

Get ready to return to Arlen, Texas, with the first season of the long-awaited rebooted King of the Hill from creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels. On Friday, Hulu posted a clip of the opening sequence and revealed the release date, which is Aug. 4. You’ll be able to stream all ten episodes exclusively on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

The opening sequence, which thankfully kept the catchy original theme music, tells us that the reboot will pick up years after the original’s end. Bobby Hill is an adult, and Peggy and Hank are drawn a bit older. Original characters like Dale and Boomhauer are also in the clip. Various events are referenced in the scene, like face masks during the pandemic, and Dale running for mayor of Arlen. A drone even brings in some Alamo beer.

We don’t know how the show will address all the original voice actors who have passed away since the show wrapped in 2009, including Brittany Murphy as Luanne and Tom Petty as Lucky. Johnny Hardwick, the actor who voiced Dale Gribble, passed away during production. Hardwick reportedly did some of the voice-over work for the new show.

You can expect many members of the original cast to return. Mike Judge will be back as Hank Hill and Boomhauer, Kathy Najimy returns as Peggy and Stephen Root is back as Bill Dauterive. And I can’t forget about Pamela Adlon as Bobby.

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Technologies

CNET’s Daily Tariff Price Tracker: What Trump’s Plans Are Doing to 11 Key Products

The legal fate of Trump’s tariff barrage remains up in the air but the effects they’ve had on supply and prices so far are evident.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say President Donald Trump has made tariffs one of the signature policies of his second term in the White House. Now, that plan has hit its biggest roadblock yet in court and while the tariffs remain in effect for now, their future is in doubt. The impacts they’ve had on prices to date, however, are not.

On Wednesday evening, the three-judge panel at the New York-based US Court of International Trade ruled that Trump had overstepped the bounds of his executive branch authority with his wide-ranging tariff policy, effectively nullifying it for the time being. The court explained that Congress, with its «power of the purse,» has the primary authority to impose tariffs and that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 — which Trump has used to justify his ability to impose them — does not grant the president «unlimited» authority on tariffs. By Thursday, an appeals court allowed to tariffs to resume while the administration seeks a final reversal of the original ruling from the Supreme Court.

The Trump administration has, unsurprisingly, decried this ruling and moved swiftly to request that the Supreme Court strike it down. We’ll see how that ultimately plays out but, for now, the possibility that the president’s tariff policies will lead to price hikes remains likely. That’s why I’m continuing to monitor several key products you might want or need to buy soon, to keep track of the potential tariff impacts.

CNET Tariff Tracker Index

Above, you can check out a chart with the average price of the 11 products included in this piece over the course of 2025. This will help give you a sense of the overall price changes and fluctuations going on. Further down, you’ll be able to check out charts for each individual product being tracked.

In the past few weeks, Trump ramped up his clashes with companies over their reactions to his tariff agenda. For starters, he demanded that Walmart — the largest grocery chain in the US — eat the cost of the new import taxes after the company said its prices would go up by the summer because of his import taxes. To close out last week, he threatened Apple with a 25% duty on its products if it didn’t plan to move manufacturing to the US, a prospect that has been widely dismissed as a fantasy. As I’ve written about before on CNET, despite these attacks from Trump, the reality of tariffs is that they will almost certainly raise everyday prices and won’t bring much manufacturing stateside.

We’ll be updating this article regularly as prices change. It’s all in the name of helping you make sense of things so be sure to check back every so often. For more, check out CNET’s guide to whether you should wait to make big purchases or buy them now and get expert tips about how to prepare for a recession.

Methodology

We’re checking prices daily and will update the article and the relevant charts right away to reflect any changes. The following charts show a single bullet point for each month, with the most recent one labeled «Now» and showing the current price. For the past months, we’ve gone with what was the most common price for each item in the given month. 

In most cases, the price stats used in these graphs were pulled from Amazon using the historical price-tracker tool Keepa. For the iPhones, the prices come from Apple’s official materials and are based on the 128-gigabyte base model of the latest offering for each year: the iPhone 14, iPhone 15 and iPhone 16. For the Xbox Series X, the prices were sourced from Best Buy using the tool PriceTracker. If any of these products happen to be on sale at a given time, we’ll be sure to let you know and explain how those price drops differ from longer-term pricing trends that tariffs can cause.

The 11 products we’re tracking

Mostly what we’re tracking in this article are electronic devices and digital items that CNET covers in depth, like iPhones and affordable 4K TVs — along with a typical bag of coffee, a more humble product that isn’t produced in the US to any significant degree. 

The products featured were chosen for a few reasons: Some of them are popular and/or affordable representatives for major consumer tech categories, like smartphones, TVs and game consoles. Others are meant to represent things that consumers might buy more frequently, like printer ink or coffee beans. Some products were chosen over others because they are likely more susceptible to tariffs. Some of these products have been reviewed by CNET or have been featured in some of our best lists.

Below, we’ll get into more about each individual product.

iPhone 16

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone brand in the US, so this was a clear priority for price tracking. The iPhone has also emerged as a major focal point for conversations about tariffs, given its popularity and its susceptibility to import taxes because of its overseas production, largely in China. Trump has reportedly been fixated on the idea that the iPhone can and should be manufactured in the US, an idea that experts have dismissed as a fantasy. Estimates have also suggested that a US-made iPhone would cost as much as $3,500.

Something to note about this graph: The price listed is the one you’ll see if you buy your phone through a major carrier. If you, say, buy direct from Apple or Best Buy without a carrier involved, you’ll be charged an extra $30, so in some places, you might see the list price of the standard iPhone 16 listed as $830.

Apple has made several moves this year to protect its prices in the US as much as possible, like flying in bulk shipments of product ahead of the tariffs taking effect and working to move production for the American market from China to India, where tariff rates are less severe. This latter move provoked a response from Trump, given his noted fixation on the iPhone, saying last week that he «had a little problem» with Tim Cook over the move, claiming without evidence that the Apple CEO pledged to bring more manufacturing to the US. Cook and others close to the company for years say that the supply chains for its products are too complex to move manufacturing entirely to the US. 

This week, Trump further threatened a 25% penalty rate against Apple products if it did not move manufacturing to the US. How that will play out is still unclear, but notably, foreign-made iPhones with 25% tax would still probably be much cheaper than iPhones predominantly made in the US.

Duracell AA batteries

A lot of the tech products in your home might boast a rechargeable energy source but individual batteries are still an everyday essential and I can tell you from experience that as soon as you forget about them, you’ll be needing to restock. The Duracell AAs we’re tracking are some of the bestselling batteries on Amazon.

Samsung DU7200 TV

Alongside smartphones, televisions are some of the most popular tech products out there, even if they’re an infrequent purchase. This particular product is a popular entry-level 4K TV and was CNET’s pick for best overall budget TV for 2025. Unlike a lot of tech products that have key supply lines in China, Samsung is a South Korean company so it might have some measure of tariff resistance. 

For most of 2025, this model has hovered around $400 but it’s currently sitting at about $427. Whether this is a temporary fluctuation or a more permanent price hike, we’ll let you know as time goes on.

Xbox Series X

Video game software and hardware are a market segment expected to be hit hard by the Trump tariffs. Microsoft’s Xbox is the first console brand to see price hikes — the company cited «market conditions» along with the rising cost of development. Most notably, this included an increase in the price of the flagship Xbox Series X, up from $500 to $600. Numerous Xbox accessories also were affected and the company also said that «certain» games will eventually see a price hike from $70 to $80.

Initially, we were tracking the price of the much more popular Nintendo Switch as a representative of the gaming market. Nintendo has not yet hiked the price of its handheld-console hybrid and stressed that the $450 price tag of the upcoming Switch 2 has not yet been inflated because of tariffs. Sony, meanwhile, has so far only increased prices on its PlayStation hardware in markets outside the US.

AirPods Pro 2

The latest iteration of Apple’s wildly popular true-wireless earbuds are here to represent the headphone market. Much to the chagrin of the audiophiles out there, a quick look at sales charts on Amazon shows you just how much the brand dominates all headphone sales. Earlier in the year, they tended to hover around $199 on the site, a notable discount from its $249 list price. In the past month, however, its gotten closer to that price on Amazon, so if you’re looking to buy a pair, you might want to consider doing it sooner rather than later.

HP 962 CMY printer ink

This HP printer ink includes cyan, magenta and yellow all in one product and recently saw its price jump from around $72 — where it stayed for most of 2025 — to $80, which is around its highest price over the last five years. We will be keeping tabs to see if this is a long-term change or a brief uptick.

This product replaced Overture PLA Filament for 3D printers in this piece, but we’re still tracking that item.

Anker 10,000-mAh, 30-watt power bank

Anker’s accessories are perennially popular in the tech space and the company has already announced that some of its products will get more expensive as a direct result of tariffs. This specific product has also been featured in some of CNET’s lists of the best portable chargers. While the price has remained steady throughout the year, it is currently on sale for $16 on Amazon, but only for Prime members.

Bose TV speaker

Soundbars have become important purchases, given the often iffy quality of the speakers built into TVs. While not the biggest or the best offering in the space, the Bose TV Speaker is one of the more affordable soundbar options out there, especially hailing from a brand as popular as Bose. This product has been one of the steadiest on this list in terms of price throughout the year, but it’s currently on sale for $199, potentially as part of Amazon’s Memorial Day sale. So, if you’re looking for an affordable, tariff-free TV speaker, now might be the time.

Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrush

They might be a lot more expensive than their traditional counterparts but electric toothbrushes remain a popular choice for consumers because of how well they get the job done. I know my dentist won’t let up on how much I need one. This particular Oral-B offering was CNET’s overall choice for the best electric toothbrush for 2025.

Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook

Lenovo is notable among the big laptop manufacturers for being a Chinese company making its products especially susceptible to Trump’s tariffs.

Starbucks Ground Coffee (28-ounce bag)

Coffee is included in this tracker because of its ubiquity —I’m certainly drinking too much of it these days —and because it’s uniquely susceptible to Trump’s tariff agenda. Famously, coffee beans can only be grown within a certain distance from Earth’s equator, a tropical span largely outside the US and known as the «Coffee Belt.» 

Hawaii is the only part of the US that can produce coffee beans, with data from USAFacts showing that 11.5 million pounds were harvested there in the 2022-23 season — little more than a drop in the mug, as the US consumed 282 times that amount of coffee during that period. Making matters worse, Hawaiian coffee production has declined in the past few years.

All that to say: Americans get almost all of their coffee from overseas, making it one of the most likely products to see price hikes from tariffs.

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