For reference, I just finished my first run, having beated about every boss except for one or two that I missed maybe.

This game was an awesome experience to actually meet the expectations and go beyond what I hoped for. It feels different enough for it not to be Dark Souls, yet still be your typical FromSoftware-soulslike-experience we all love to suffer through.

***CAREFUL! SPOILERS***

The visuals are amazing. The landscapes in the Lands Between are truly beautiful, the items and enemies really diverse in their looks in so many creative ways. Astral and Radahn (and the spirits in the underground city) probably being the most visually engaging boss fights really stunned me in awe at their beauties.

Along with the visuals, the music and sound-design felt similarly beautiful to the visuals. Orchestras gallore when fighting bosses, demonstrating and emphasising their strength (and often beauty).

The difficulty was...hard. The Godskin Duo and Malenia both put up a difficulty I haven't had before in a Souls game. The closest thing would be Manus from the Dark Souls 1 DLC. Also, aside from some of the recycling of enemies and bosses in particular, pretty much none of the bosses felt really annoying to fight. The difficulty really came down to learning the patterns and mechanics. No random dogs or puzzle bosses like in DS1. All of them felt doable, some more than others, some can be made easier with spirits or cooperative assistance but none of them felt BS to play against, aside from a few minor exceptions. Obviously, some minor bosses were easy and basically forgettable, serving more as a small obstacle. Most of the main bosses were powerful and unique enough to be remembered.

The lore was...typical for FromSoftware-titles, really hard to fully grasp and probably needs some offline research to truly appreciate. Nothing too new under the sun, general idea is similar in many ways to other From-titles. I don't mind, since it just works for their games. Keep doing what already works.

Also, this game had a lot of quality-of-life improvements compared to previous games. Things like an automatically sorted inventory, spawning right before boss arenas instead of having to run there for 10 minutes before your next chance to fight them. Having a horse is just necessary, otherwise you'd take way too long to traverse the countryside. Also, fast travel seemed necessary, though it is fun to just gallop through the map, searching for a random enemy to kill or event to appear.

I played a Stength Melee Build with some Faith on the side to use some incantations here and there. I found this experience doable for pretty much all bosses. Some would have been definitely easier if I played a ranged build, but it didn't feel undoable. The only exception to that was the Godskin Duo. That sht felt impossible and harsh in punishing the tiniest mistakes with my build.

I have no interest in PvP so I can't give any credible review about that.

All in all I enjoyed this game a lot and will replay it sometime in the future, probably with a different build. I encourage anybody to pick up this masterpiece of a game, as a first soulslike-experience definitely recommended since it fixed a lot of the annoying parts of previous soulslike-titles.