Recent reviews by Kamahl

Very short (took me 15 minutes on hard) but really cute and nice little game. Loved the artstyle, the music was well chosen and I was actually quite impressed about the different creature and boss related mechanics. Hard was a really fun mix between stressful but still enjoyable.

Exploring this DLC is actually quite fun and the visuals of the game are absolutely fantastic. There are many well designed locations and screenshot worthy spots. There are a lot of new weapons and weapon types with some really neat additions. Also a lot more spells, but sorceries drew the shorter stick here in comparison to incantations. The combat of the Souls Series (and Elden Ring) has not really evolved since DeS. In comparison to other similar combat systems such as Nioh 2, Elden Rings's combat feels pretty stiff and simple and this DLC does not help with that. While the weapons have slightly more complex movesets and only some weapon arts are the Elden Ring "stand in the spot while doing some magic attack" variation, it is by far not enough to bring the combat to a new level. I think even older titles such as DKS2 had some weapons like the Bone fists, which had more complex movesets than ER does now. Disappointing. It also is disappointing that there is no intro cutscene to the DLC, you are just teleported there and thats it. The final cutscene is also a 10 second typical Miyazaki rumbling that if you didn't watch all the lore videos won't tell you anything at all. After all these years I am honestly bored by Miyazakis story telling and it really could use some general accessibility with deep dives through indirect story telling.

By far the bigger issue is the absolutely horrendously poor performance, enemy design and especially boss design. Performance causes big dips in FPS in crucial times, especially in boss fights with a lot of particles which is absolutely unacceptable. Enemy design and boss design in this DLC is as unfair as you can make it, which bosses trying to hit you 20 times in a row and sometimes they reward you with 0.5 seconds window to get 1 hit into or heal and then get back to beating you again. HPs are incredibly bloated so you essentially have to cheese and build some stupidly overpowered build (many of which are out there, whether that is by poor balancing or by design choice I am not sure) and then you just stomp every boss (except for the last one). The final boss of the DLC is the new lowest low I have seen FromSoftware produce and that is saying a lot, considering they are the geniuses behind things like the Anor Londo Archer sequence, Frigid Outskirts or the Curse mechanic in DS1.

As a result the exploring is neat, but the combat, the unquestionable core if this game is brought to completely unenjoyable levels thanks to its awful enemy and boss design. A good combat system requires good enemy design, and here we have an aged and flawed combat system with the most awful enemy design I have seen in a long time. I heavily recommend staying away from this one even if you like the Souls series.