fyrerise

There's nothing quite like the sense of exploration that you get from Elden Ring, and that goes doubly for Shadow of the Erdtree. Beautiful open world, with some of the best level design in the industry. The graphics feel like an upgrade from the base game as well, and it's got a fairly clever system that makes the expansion approachable difficulty-wise from regardless of where you got to in base Elden Ring. The biggest downside is that FromSoft got a little lazy while filling out content. The world is cleverly designed, but after you've been through it a couple times, you noticed that the first legacy dungeon you get to is by far the best in the game, with none of the others even coming close. There's a couple other decent ones, but only decent, and last couple areas of the game feel completely phoned in. While the open world is interesting and varied, once the initial endorphins have worn off and you start to take a closer look, you realize that it's all quite empty. Some of the bosses and mini-bosses — Messmer, Gaius, the divine beast warriors, the final boss — are complete BS that spam you nonstop with no real opportunity to retaliate. Unless you're an S-tier steeped-straight-from-the-crib FromSoft player who can memorize 15 different attack variations, each of which has 10-hit combos with different timings and pull your rolls over perfectly with 100% accuracy, you're going to have to play like most of us and repeat each fight 50 times hoping to get lucky. Bosses aside, there's one magic-spamming-on-stairs situation near the end which alone made me reduce this review from a 7/10 to a 6/10 — just unbelievable stupidity that someone should have playtested. All in all, good game, great ambience. I wish they'd put a little more effort into it, and I wish they'd ironed out some of the most idiotic parts.

This is a "game" that's not a game. Think of it as a series of little minigames (skipping rocks across a bond, skateboarding down a road, pretending to control your character as they float through a forest, etc.) interspersed with hours of the most pretentious dialog you will _ever_ hear as adult children in Australia write what they think middle America sounded like in the 80s and 90s based on what they saw in movies like "ET" and "Stand By Me", and with a healthy dose of their own political modernism blended in to reinforce the message. It's not fun, it's not clever, it's not original. It does have a very expensive soundtrack, as it was bankrolled by Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle centibillionaire Larry Ellison. There's not much content here either — overall play time is 2 to 4 hours, although by the end of that you'll be thankful it's not any longer. Perhaps the most disturbing part of this debacle are the critic review scores which glaze the "game" undeservedly to a suspicious extent. Perhaps the most outrageous example is the perfect 10/10 assigned by IGN. No one who has _ever_ picked up a video game before could ever mistake this for a 5 or more out of 10. Whether it's a 1, 2, 3, or 4 is debatable, but it's objectively not a 5, and is galaxies away from a 10. So how did IGN get to a 10? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but a significant factor is that the game aligns the political priors and social objectives that game "journalists" push. However, that alone doesn't seem to explain it, and we shouldn't rule out some other kind of "sponsorship" for the reviewers in question. It's impossible to imagine any other way this blemish on human thought could get anywhere near a 10 otherwise. Even discounted 80 or 90%, this would still be a "do not buy". Don't waste your time.

I like the game's ambience and the shooting feels good, but I've never encountered a game so disrespectful of your time. It's punishingly difficult, single runs take multiple hours, there's few ways to replenish health, and so a single mistake anywhere burns your entire session. Almost nothing carries over between runs, so after you finish one, you're left with this empty feeling where you can viscerally feel the hours of your life it'd taken to get there just ... gone forever. I've given it good faith attempts 4-5 times over the years since it came out, and I never get passed the first biome. I'm not a great gamer, but I'm not particularly bad either. There's no way to grind or make the game easier, so if you can't build up the considerable skill required to get anywhere, you're just down $70 with no recourse. I saw that the same studio released a new game last month ("Saros") and I didn't consider buying it for even one second. I'm sure the guys at this studio think they're 1337 game designers or whatever by screwing over half their customer base, but eff them. You burn legitimate buyers by making games with big price tags and zero forgiveness in play style.