Starts off the wrong foot by featuring clearly overtuned early bosses at a stage of the game where your Scadutree buffs are not appropiate to their difficulty, but this part is apparently getting patched so these lines of this review will hopefully be rendered moot in the near future. Beyond this rough start however we encounter a synthesis of base Elden Ring's strengths: A compact yet dense open-world with plenty of verticality that is great fun to explore and features some of FromSoft's strongest art design yet (as with every of their games, honestly) and a set of varied bosses that demand the player adapt to them rather than keep doing the same thing they were doing in the base game; some clearly meant for you to use your whole arsenal no matter how much it might hurt your ~gamer pride~ and others that as usual make for the mano-a-mano duel highlights, with the phenomenal final boss being of special note. It's worth going solo with no summons and learning it properly, I promise.

All in all, rough beginnings aside, Shadow of the Erdtree ends up being an excellent followup to an excellent game. Like its base game it is by no means perfect, but it is clearly more than the sum of its parts and you'll have great fun with it if you meet it halfway.