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If Blockbuster was still a thing, The First Berserker: Khazan would be the perfect weekend rental. Grab a two-liter, some pizza, and go to town smashing and stabbing your way through a dense arcade action-RPG that will kick your ass but not waste your time.
I’ve played about 6 hours of The First Berserker: Khazan, which arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on March 27, and have been having fun in a very old-school kind of way. Think anime God of War mixed with Dark Souls, but with enough neat additions and unique style that it never feels like just a knockoff of more popular things. Made by South Korean studio Neople, it’s another one of those AA games that punches way above its weight.
Part of that comes down to Khazan’s look. The cel-shaded art helps give the game’s grimdark fantasy world some color and flash you wouldn’t normally see among the grimy throngs of other dark and brooding Soulslikes. Red demonic energy pulsates through everything you do. Blood liberally spills from friends and foes alike. It’s a big like a heavy metal music video cut to footage of hyper-violent anime series Berserk.
You play as the titular general after he was exiled as a traitor by the empire he served. He then becomes possessed by a phantom on a mission to investigate the source of an imbalance between the worlds of the living and the dead. It’s based in the fictional world of Neople’s previous game, Dungeon Fighter Online, but little of it outside of voice actor Ben Starr’s partially wasted performance as Khazan (he doesn’t get to speak enough) left an impression on me. The story is fine but little more than cool set dressing for fun action.
A lot of Khazan’s appeal for me is in the feel. Combat is crunchy—every hit feels like slicing through boulders—and a bevy of unlockable abilities means there are lots of ways to chain attacks together that let you move quickly while still maintaining the hefty momentum that makes every action feel satisfying. My only gripe is that you can’t jump in this game, a weird limitation that occasionally felt stifling.
Fights revolve around stamina but with a cool twist. A perfectly timed block will deplete your enemy’s stamina meter but also refill your own. A perfectly timed parry will let you counterattack and quickly break their stance at which point you can unleash special punishing moves. Khazan rewards aggressive play and risk taking and changes up the combat economy just enough to make it feel distinct from some of its influences and overcome some repetitive enemy types.
There are three weapon styles—dual wield, greatsword, and lance—each with unique attack patterns and skill trees. Unlocked abilities use skill charges to unleash powerful combos that add another layer of strategy to fights. There’s also a full suite of loot you collect across your travels, as well as a crafting economy with Diablo-like custom stat bonuses to navigate. I’m still too early to know how all of those subsystems will feel by the end of the game but my initial instinct is that it might be a bit too much.
Something I do appreciate about Khazan is that it’s not afraid to make use of an overworld map where you select missions and locations from a menu rather than snaking around a sprawling open world or metrodivania labyrinth of interconnected regions. I’ve also only encountered light exploration so far. The environments look pretty but aren’t overly complex. Against some other games that might sound like a critique, but here it’s part of the old-school energy that helps Khazan feel breezy despite its sometimes punishing difficulty.
There’s an easy mode, though, for anyone who hears Soulslike and immediately shakes their head. I played around with it a bit when I got tired of having my ass beaten and found it a perfect approximation of Khazan-lite, retaining what’s fun about the game while sanding down a bunch of the difficulty spikes. It was great for learning certain enemy patterns and working toward a build I was comfortable with before upping the difficulty when I wanted more of a challenge. Another nice tweak is that making it to a certain point in a boss fight will still reward you with a bit of currency with which to level up, even if you lose again. Coupled with fast restarts, it makes banging your head against a particularly tough encounter feel less like you’re wasting your time.
There’s a lot in Khazan that I haven’t even mentioned, including the Phantom System with which you can summon dead warriors to fight alongside you and give you various ambient buffs that recharge things like stamina faster. You also unlock an ability for Khazan himself to transform later on once a gauge is filled up in battle. I can see how it could all get a bit unwieldy at some point (the game is reportedly roughly 30-35 hours), but the anime look and strong fundamentals of the Souls-infused arcade action combat have been more than enough to carry me forward so far. I might run out of gas in the second half, especially if the difficulty keeps ramping up, but so far Khazan has been one of 2025’s nicer surprises.
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Kurt Indovina
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