Pretty embarrassing display on Fromsoft's part.

Insult to injury:
- Elden Ring DLC weapons were not added.
- Overpriced for what little you're getting.
- Scaling for solo & duo is even more abysmal. (Solo is hilariously easy, 2 is painful)
- The lack of playtesting is painfully apparent.
- Feedback from the survey they sent out for this DLC clearly wasn't used.
- Optimization took yet another tank.
- RNG issues with relics got worse.
- Whole new RNG relic system that's even more RNG than the last one.
- The new map has only 1 viable route & is an absolute nightmare to navigate.
- Powerhouse PC destroying snowstorms were added in without fixing the FPS tanking issue that comes with them.

TLDR; unless you specifically dislike audio+visual parry mechanics similar to Sekiro, get it. 9/10

The Good
+ the story
+ writers don't treat you like an idiot
+ the music
+ the visual feast that is the environment & combat (overworld is a bit of a toss up)
+ weapon & monster design
+ the combat (be forewarned: even on Easy with QTEs turned off, you will still have to parry)
+ the most challenging boss fights are optional & entirely out of the way
+ almost every boss fight is enjoyable (definitely not staring at a certain snake, nope)
+ the voice acting
+ refreshing take on turn based combat that keeps you engaged beyond team building strategy
+ while some animations are hilariously stiff & there's clipping, majority of the characters are well done and display expansive + clear ranges of emotion
+ Auto Death exists
+ game doesn't hold your hand, allowing you to discover + explore things on your own while not being so enormous in scope that it's unrealistic to expect



Worth Mentioning

-/+ Outside of forcing an auto-save by changing the weapon on a character out of aggro range of enemies, there is no manual saving (save system is a giant plethora of auto-saves)

-/+ While the story is a highlight, it DOES leave you clueless for the majority of the game & may not be enjoyable for those who don't enjoy chasing a mystery.

-/+ While this was likely a personal issue, I went through the entire game and ended up caring about only 1 out of the 5 characters. Even after doing their side content. Technically 2, but when you boil it down that was only because that character mattered to the 1st. Side characters mattered more to me than the majority of my party.

-/+ KB+M randomly decides it doesn't want to work mid-combat (An issue that isn't present on controller, and is bad enough that it forced me, someone who played Elden Ring with KB+M, to pick up a controller)

-/+ Fights that have no audio queues and fights that have no visual queues both exist.

-/+ NG+ has a lot of QOL missing and feels like a tacked on feature; both the prologue & the tutorials have to be repeated, the beginning doesn't account for your full party and turns it into an annoying slog to trudge through, game constantly changes your party setup without notifying you, scaling issues ramp up, etc.



The Bad

- Level scaling is poorly done and it's not uncommon to reach the last boss of the game severely over leveled. Doesn't help that the difficulty tuning is also a mess

- The removal of the damage cap happens too early & suddenly, skyrocketing your damage from 9999 to the millions. The optional modifiers made available to you to alleviate this don't actually help any who still wanted a challenge but don't want hour-long slogs for boss fights & those who do want the hour-long slog fests will simply not use something given freely rather than the modifiers x_x

- A lot of boss fights will make you slap music to 0 & Special Effects to 100% simply so you can actually hear the audio queues, blasting your ears with noise you don't want to hear while the audio queues you actually want are still real low AND it's depriving you of the soundtrack.

- Romance felt as if it was shoe-horned in to appease the RPG crowd; wish it didn't exist or at the very least was harder to run into. It's real shallow, overall disappointing and there's a lot of story-related reasons why it doesn't work beyond being a narrative device to make you care about the 2 characters more.

Tried it for the 1.0 free weekend; can't say it was a wise use of my time. While I thank the devs for the opportunity, it definitely should have stayed in EA longer. 2/10

The Good
+ the cave system allows for boat retrievals on foot by getting to the island you lost it at underground
+ build system is easy to understand
+ Players can be in different areas (i.e 1 in underworld, 1 in over-world & 1 in dungeon) without issue
+ simplified inventory system; no durability, no weight & no inventory boxes to manually sort

Worth Mentioning
-/+ the UI format & chosen layout leaves a lot to be desired
-/+ while the traders having items laid out around them that you have to manually interact with each time is a cool idea on paper, it's not very practical and quickly loses its charm
-/+ Failing a set of platform jumps = you get forced to start back at the first jump.
-/+ Customisation, in all aspects, is very limited despite being a "cosy" game.
-/+ Character Creation is senselessly limited for the supposed reason of "gender neutrality", yet the character model is very clearly male instead of androgynous. While this certainly isn't a deal breaker, those looking to play a female character or anything looking similar to female (your only option is a camisole) will find themselves heavily disappointed.
-/+ You will never wear shoes, and you will never have the option to change this despite having a foot gear slot. The devs think it's funny. Make of this what you will.

The Bad
- Plagued by frequent loading screens that are painfully long
- Constant & massive memory leak issues, requiring the game to be restarted every so often.
- the above fix does temporarily stop the leak, but does not fix the general issue in every zone; you're always going to deal with random FPS drops during certain fights, against certain volumes of monsters & in certain areas
- Massive performance issues (i.e lights & fires are a massive FPS sink that can easily get into 100+FPS drops, corrupted dungeons randomly skips/freezes frames from what I can only assume is the background corrupted effect that's unique to them)
- Forcing you to manually control the camera with mouse clicks is one thing, but not giving full control of said camera & constantly having to deal with automatic systems changing its direction/zoom level is an awful design choice
- You can be attacked & killed while in a loading screen (dying forces you into another loading screen where you can also be attacked and killed, shoving you into an infinite loop that requires a server restart or a co-op companion)
- Dying in a dungeon vs a boss = you have to run the entire dungeon again, including any platforming sections. Corrupted versions of dungeons go out of their way to make this process even longer without increasing the threat or entertainment value.
- Death bags do not require a prompt to pick up, resulting in other players accidentally picking them up on the regular (especially if you died in a boss room)
- Travelling is a pain. It's boring, it's bland (as are the repetitive environments you travel through), it's mind-numbing and it never gets anything added through further gameplay to make it enjoyable. Be it on land, be it on water, be it underground...it doesn't change. Real shame.
- Combat is extremely basic and cursed with a block system that barely functions, high jump animation attacks will get you hit but jumping over things will not, hit boxes are wildly inconsistent, tracking is wildly inconsistent, pathing can be defeated by circles, FPS drops occur constantly in battle & will constantly kill you...it's a mess.
- The tutorial barely teaches you anything. Majority of actually helpful information is found from reading item descriptions & the text that comes up in loading screens, NOT in any of the tutorial.
- Tutorial prompts come up randomly and interrupt whatever you're doing, including when your co-op partner gets one islands away while you're mid-combat and now you're dead.
- For a 1.0 release, there's a ton of game-breaking bugs; crops & their seeds like to randomly disappear, enemies & players fall through the floor and/or walk around invisible, the loot crates on larger ships randomly delete their contents, storage containers randomly delete their contents, floors suddenly disappearing, bases deleting themselves, etc.
- missing an absolute plethora of QOL features; no craft from chest, no simultaneous use of chests or workstations in co-op, no quick deposit, no shared map discovery, no saved invite code, very few map markers, no ping system, etc.

I cannot, in any form of good faith, recommend a walking simulator that blatantly lacks any ability to speed it up outside of a very short & very punishing sprint (200+ of my hours is just that; being AFK as my character does a snail pace walking that you can't alt+tab away from, an experience that never changed no matter how many times I came back to try again over the years). A walking simulator that STILL has no tutorials & lacks mod support outside of the devs getting others to do their translations for them. Even came out of Early Access far too early, despite numerous bugs being around for literal years & 5+ years on a story mode that still isn't finished (that you also now have to pay for as DLC).
Insult to injury, it's made by developers known for empty + broken promises who're far more interested in cutting up the base game for DLC (full of their own unique bugs they also aren't fixing) than they are anything else.

─▄▀─▄▀
──▀──▀⠀⠀If you liked what was in base,
█▀▀▀▀▀█▄⠀⠀you won't be disappointed here.
█░░░░░█─█ ⠀Just the mod functionality&co-op/vs alone is worth it.
▀▄▄▄▄▄▀▀ ⠀⠀⠀The rest is icing on the cake.