its good but its kind of disappointing.

a lot of areas are just super empty and big and just a chore to explore with nothing rewarding to find, the only overworld bosses i saw were dragons reused from the base game, bears that were just boring to fight, and the furnace golems which are the most tedious way to get important items fromsoft has ever thought up.

the actual main bosses have cool designs, cool music, cool movesets, but theyre extremely not fun to actually fight. im not necessarily talking about them being too hard; i think the final boss is easily the hardest one in the game and i beat him in under 30 minutes. theyre all extremely aggressive with you needing to dodge or block for multiple full combo strings before you get the opportunity to get ONE hit in which deals maybe 1% of their health bar before you need to repeat the process.

then theres two bosses in particular, who im not gonna name for spoiler reasons, who just feel incomplete, like i beat them and instead of feeling happy i got through them my reaction was just "THAT WAS IT?!".

i was hoping for a more dense version of elden ring with this dlc, but instead what i got is just exactly what the last stretch of the base game was but worse in every way.

also enir-ilim is literally the most frustrating legacy dungeon in the game by far, it is incredibly annoying to traverse.

update: after some deliberation i am dropping from a 3.5 to a 3 because i really enjoyed very little about this experience honestly

this game really came outta nowhere. its the only roguelike i can think of id recommend for the story and not the gameplay, not because the gameplays bad, but because the story is better. the gameplays still good enough to keep me playing this game after finishing the story and getting both endings. i did find it a little easy, with a sudden difficulty spike for the true final bosses, but its "easy" in the sense that i felt like i could solve my way out of most situations rather than because i can just blindly use the cards with the highest numbers and win, which is a good thing.

i forgot to update this review for a while but im here now.

so im a little conflicted after finishing it. gameplay wise its incredible, but... at some point you wonder to yourself "is this it?". you fight a lot of the same enemies, the exploration isnt very meaningful a lot of the time (though the exploration that does feel good, is very good), and the story is just frankly not good. the game really takes its time in the first region, but then you move onto the next one and its over in less than half the time, then you move into the last and third region and the games over pretty much right away. and if that was it this would be a 3.5, but then if you engage the true ending at the very last section you get into a far more interesting part of the game in pretty much every way. i wont spoil it, but then after just a few more hours its over. those last couple hours do drag it up by quite a bit honestly. it has a strong beginning, a very weak middle section and a strong ending, but i expected a pretty heavily replayable game which this isnt. it would be a little that if some of the changes to the world that are made in the last part were made permanent in ng+, but as is this is a one and done kinda deal which feels a little disappointing, but its still amazing in the gameplay department so its really really worth playing just for that, just dont expect it to change your life.