Recent reviews by Venithien

Raise army of zombies. Thousands of zombies.
Throw at dwarven fortress. Lose miserably.
Raise larger army of zombies.
Throw at dwarven fortress.
Win?
10/10 will ignore ALL advice from friends

I'm not one to write reviews usually, but I think it's wild this DLC is getting bombarded with negatives. I'll avoid spoilers.

I've finished the DLC now. Is it hard? Oh, yeah. Bosses have tricky movesets and they do a ton of damage. It's hard to find windows to attack in some places. Boss damage is so high I can rarely afford to make two mistakes in a row. I totally lost track of how many times I died to one of the bosses.

But that's what I wanted. I don't want bosses to be permanently staggered by my R1. I don't want boss movesets to be so simple that I learn everything on my first attempt. I don't want to just ignore what a boss is doing. I'm here to gradually learn how to fight something stronger than me. I'd feel cheated and scammed if I steamrolled through without thinking.

I love the visual variety of this DLC's areas. I've found tons of interesting weapons and quite a few interesting spells, not to mention all the new craftables. There's quite a few secrets I've found hidden around and I know sure I've missed tons.

All in all, this DLC is everything I wanted from an Elden Ring DLC and then some.

The only negative I could point out is that performance is pretty bad here and there for me - I've gotten some spicy FPS drops in various places, enough that it eats my inputs sometimes. It isn't ruining the game, but it's definitely an issue. Hoping for a performance patch. I had the same problem with the base game until patches started rolling out. For anyone else having issues, turning off raytracing helped me a ton, but some things are still rough.

*Edited to add that I've now finished it.