izigame.me

Let me preface: This game is great. The new bosses are fantastic, and if you're a die hard Souls fan, of course its worth the buy. The new music is beautiful, and I adore all the new characters. There is a lot of good here, with great foundations, but there is more work to be done for the average player.
-No new weaponry, very little new content
Nightreign is an 'asset flip' of Elden Ring, which was expected and FromSoft didn't try to hide that. However, you would expect at least some new gear and enemies. So far, only some starting weapons for characters are new-ish (IE a different looking greatsword, ect), meaning there are no new weapons, spells, incantations, or weapon arts to pick up in the world. There isn't even the new weapons or enemies from Elden Ring DLC, besides one minor demi-human mob.
The only new enemies are the day 3 Night Lord bosses, so the other 80% of the game can get repetitive.
Again, I don't think anyone was expecting everything to be 'new', its an asset flip. But some new stuff was expected.
Although the new Night Lord bosses are brilliant, beautiful, and function fantastically in multiplayer, the bulk of the rest of the game is pretty 'samey'.

-Extremely poor communication tools
Most PvE group games like this have pinging, voice lines, ect to facilitate communicating with randoms. Elden ring has almost nothing. You can put a marker down on the map, and that's about the limitation of your communication.
Even something as minor as seeing your party members in the hub is missing.
-Overly strong 'encouragement' for group play
You can queue solo or with 3 randoms. However, the game is pretty difficult and balanced towards 3 players, especially Night Lords. Going at it solo, you'll need to be experienced and pretty skilled to make any progress. Even with 3 legacy players, all of us playing for 5-10+ years of souls games, it was difficult to beat the first Night Lord.
Meaning without a dedicated group of friends, you're likely at the mercy of randoms to progress. People disconnecting, trolling, leaving at inopportune times, or just being new or less skilled is just what you're going to have to put up with. We had two randoms leave/disconnect before the second night finished and the game does not auto-adjust, making the final boss rush nigh impossible with inflated pinata healthpools.
There is no 2-player queuing, though they've said it'll be implemented at some point.
-Rough experience for new players
The lack of progression, and the game's difficulty - hard even for the first boss set - is going to be a serious barrier of entry to new players. We're all here for difficulty, but for a healthy multiplayer-only game to survive, it needs to be able to ease players in. The game very much expects you to already be familiar with enemies and weapons from Elden Ring, and the UI is struggles to properly show what spells, buffs, and weapon arts do.
If you're new to Souls games, I'm sorry, you're going to have a really rough time starting with Nightreign.
-Limited sense of progression
There is no real 'progression' without beating Night Lord bosses. Initially, you have access to very little until your first kill. Night Lords are difficult to kill, so if you're a new player and not able to reliably down them, or even if you're struggling as a veteran, you're going to be spinning your wheels without feeling any sense of progression for a while. To compare to Helldivers, you always at gain levels which shows time played to give some sense of progress, and currency to spend on permanent upgrades - even if you fail. Nightreign does not have anything equivalent.
There is a shop that lets you spend some currency at for small upgrades (+2 dex, start with a Lightning residue ect), but its easy to buy it all and the upgrades you can get are pretty minor - at least until you kill Night Lord bosses. All progression is tied to downing Night Lord bosses.
-Limited customization for runs
Runs are repetitive right off the bat being 99.9% recycled Elden Ring gear and enemies, but I expected to be able to select different starting weapons, spells, and/or abilities to give runs more variation and as progression. Maybe try out a greathammer on Wyld, or a crossbow on Ironeye ect.
At time of writing, there's only minor changes you can make with Relics. Start with this buff, start with fire damage on your weapon, or that consumable, and that's about it. I'd expect some options to swap out character skills or starting weapons.
-Paid characters
The language of the Deluxe Edition implies future characters with be cash. As they are the only real variations to runs in the game, this is gating replayability and content behind $$.
-Massively inflated healthpools mixed with weird pacing
Nightreign wants you to GO GO GO - enhanced movement and speed mixed with limited time makes you feel the need to constantly rush around and gear up.
Enemies healthpools are inflated to balance for 3 players. Night bosses can take annoyingly long to down, and some roaming bosses take most of a day to kill.
This makes you feel the need to go faster faster in the world, to stack as much damage as you can so bosses aren't taking annoyingly long to kill. It leads to a mixed pacing of feeling rushed, but things taking awkwardly long to kill.

To me, these are some glaring issues for a brand new Multiplayer game. But I think they're all pretty fixable, and reasonable to fix. DLC content can be imported, starting gear can be made adjustable, numbers can be tweaked.
If From Software is listening, I'd napkin-math guess 6-12 months to fix most of the issues I've listed here.
From Software has never done a game like this before, so it's unclear just how much content and support the game will get going forward. Maybe these are going to be permanent issues forever, or maybe they'll be good about patching and content and have plans down the road that'll erase these problems. Or maybe not. Unfortunately, From Software has a history of not communicating at all and making strange changes without explanation. The future is unclear for Nightreign.
As always, remember this is a Steam review. I'm just a player like you, and I'm writing a stream of consciousness and my own opinions. I'm not a professional being paid to review and manipulate you into agreeing with me. Just my own thoughts and some of what I think and have put here is probably just wrong or a bad take.
Nothing I've said here invalidates your own opinions of the game, and as you can see from my playtime, I'm still playing Nightreign - even if I think it has problems.