The presentation is gorgeous - art direction and music are a 10/10

However, the gameplay makes the game hard to recommend - spastic bosses with jerky roll-catch movements and a plethora of physically nonsensical moves make the bosses in this DLC hard to put up with. You can just spam weapon arts and chug your flasks, so they'll run out of health sooner than you do, but it won't be an enjoyable experience. As someone who beat all the Fromsoft games with gimped Lvl1 characters for fun (the base game included), I'll be calling quits on this one. It's fine if enemies jump high, fly or do magic, but changing trajectory mid-air, floating ominously and having impossible pauses mid-movement to throw the player off their reflexes is atrocious design for an action game. I'm not making mistakes because my reflexes are weak, but because I can't see what's happening. Enemy movements are specifically designed to not make sense to make the fight more "difficult" - apparently rolling when the enemy swings his sword is not good enough, now you have to memorize how much delay there is between each specific sword swing combo's slashes mid-movement. Once again, this difficulty is made redundant by the absurdly powerful weapon arts the player is given, so we end up with a game that's not hard to beat, but where engaging with the bosses' mechanics is torture. How dreadful.

Also, performance is total ass. I have above recommended specs and there's a tremendous amount of framedrops, especially during bossfights. I'm fine with games needing stronger computers, but why lie about recommended specs on the store page? I expect consistent 30 FPS or higher.

The presentation is gorgeous - art direction and music are a 10/10 However, the gameplay makes the game hard to recommend - spastic bosses with jerky roll-catch movements and a plethora of physically nonsensical moves make the bosses in this DLC hard to put up with. You can just spam weapon arts and chug your flasks, so they'll run out of health sooner than you do, but it won't be an enjoyable experience. As someone who beat all the Fromsoft games with gimped Lvl1 characters for fun (the base game included), I'll be calling quits on this one. It's fine if enemies jump high, fly or do magic, but changing trajectory mid-air, floating ominously and having impossible pauses mid-movement to throw the player off their reflexes is atrocious design for an action game. I'm not making mistakes because my reflexes are weak, but because I can't see what's happening. Enemy movements are specifically designed to not make sense to make the fight more "difficult" - apparently rolling when the enemy swings his sword is not good enough, now you have to memorize how much delay there is between each specific sword swing combo's slashes mid-movement. Once again, this difficulty is made redundant by the absurdly powerful weapon arts the player is given, so we end up with a game that's not hard to beat, but where engaging with the bosses' mechanics is torture. How dreadful. Also, performance is total ass. I have above recommended specs and there's a tremendous amount of framedrops, especially during bossfights. I'm fine with games needing stronger computers, but why lie about recommended specs on the store page? I expect consistent 30 FPS or higher.