Recent reviews by Hazzy

Tl;dr - my man Igon almost turned this to positive single-handedly

To get the obvious good parts out of the way:
The team has really outdone themselves here. The zone designs are great and feature a decent variety, with plenty of eye candy for everyone. Be it a beautiful cerulean flower field along the coast or a terrifying mountain enshrouded in dark clouds that spew endless lightning, they're all beautiful.
The enemy designs keep up well as well, there's plenty of both interesting and horrifying examples.
Of course, the main boss battles themselves are quite grandiose and I did find myself just observing them for a while to take in that beauty, before promptly dying.

Loooots of good stuff sound-wise in this DLC. Some of the boss themes are still playing in my head even as I'm writing this.
You generally know what to expect, the epic orchestra and such, but some of the themes really caught me by surprise and instantly stand out from the rest of the game.
As was with the enemy designs, they didn't hold back when it came to the spooky parts.

I'll be honest and say that in the previous games I only find 1 or 2 characters per game that I'm actually interested in and still remember their story. The rest just didn't matter.
I have a feeling I'll remember more of the characters in this DLC alone, and it might be for the simple reason that they share a connection with each others. The also have great conclusions to their quests as well.
Their quests are sadly rather shorts but I found them interesting due to their little story.
Shoutouts to my boy Igon and his lungs.

Always great to see. Plenty of new fun stuff to play around with.
I'll point out that they really went full on in with Incantations in the base game + this DLC as well, which is great considering how lackluster it was in most of the previous games. Faithchads keep winning.

So after all that high praise, what went wrong?

You know, like a video game is 'supposed' to be? Great art and great sound will carry a game hard, but in the end it is a video game which you play and it will never excuse the glaring issues.

You can not keep this archaic player control system AND keep making enemies go as berserk as they are in this DLC.
One of these concepts needs to go.
It's been over 15 years and the greatest change in the control system has been... jumping.
I honestly don't know what else there is. Of course, with each game there have been QoL additions that now in ER make the control system feel MUCH smoother than, for example, Demon's Souls or first Dark Souls. Some stuff gets changed around... but in the end we've always had spells, we've had weapon abilities (or special weapon attacks) for a long while now, various consumables, etc. The only thing we didn't have was the horse and we were better off without it.

Either give us a new way of controlling the player character or new gameplay mechanics which would better fit the direction these new games are going at, or take a step back and reflect on what made the older games good, because it certainly wasn't stuff like the final fight or mounted combat. More on mounted combat... now.

I'm looking at you Gaius. I honestly don't know if he was designed with mounted combat in mind or not and I didn't care as I fought him on foot. Why? Because the mounted combat is terrible and unfun in its entirety.
A simple and very slow attack combo, of which there's one, and one heavy attack. That's all you get for mounted combat. Worse even is the fact that some weapons are absolutely TERRIBLE with it, be it due to range or the awkward direction the weapon hits towards. The horse being hard to control for fine-movement doesn't help either. A boss knocks you off your horse in 2 hits most of the time, which locks you in this terribly long stagger animation.
Yes I get it that it's supposed to be a riposte opportunity but that doesn't make it fine especially when it's so easy to find yourself in it.
There's nothing good about mounted combat and Gaius has cemented that.
Get rid of it or stop trying to force me into it.

I understand wanting the bosses to feel epic. I understand wanting to make the fights an even better spectacle than they were in the previous game. But you can't just keep piling and piling on all of these ideas that just don't work with the unchanged gameplay system.
Half of the bosses are either oversized or too jump-happy which ruins the camera. If I can't see what my enemy is doing, how am I supposed to fight it?
And I'm not just talking about the lock-on system making you very disoriented. Unlocking the camera is even worse in certain cases if the enemy likes to jump around. I have to keep moving AND sprinting/dodging, which makes my thumb occupied with the B button. That makes me unable to reposition my camera to even see where the enemy is.
The lock-on system has a great deal of problems too. Some of Messmer's attacks are almost enough to make me nauseous.

Newsflash: no it doesn't. Not with these mechanics.
Thanks to this DLC, I don't think I ever want to see another dragon in a video game ever again (Bayle was cool tho).
Contrary to the small and fast enemies ravaging your camera and giving you motion sickness, the oversized enemies don't even fit on the screen (for reference, 1440p monitor). The camera is too close to the player with no option of changing it. This has always been a thing, but we didn't always have this many giant enemies. These enemies also love getting in close melee range for fighting, so it certainly doesn't help much if you have some long range build.

I mostly play offline and sometimes I like summoning story NPCs for fights in case they have special abilities or dialogue. Thankfully, this DLC has some of that!
However, their AI makes them borderline useless, or even a hindrance. The AI especially struggles with large enemies.
I've seen the mighty drake warrior Igon, with his powerful dragon-killing greatbow, MISS a giant-ass dragon that was basically standing still, 3 times in a row.

For the love of god, stop making tanky and unfun enemies like the Furnace Golems. They're not hard but they're absolutely dreadful to fight. Who finds these fun?
I get that you're supposed to use a consumable on them, but that seems to only be intended for two of them, out of 8(?).

Yes, it's very pretty to look at, but that's about it. A lot of it feels quite empty, especially when I try to explore every corner so I don't miss out on any potential cool items.

The new weapons are cool. Some are quite flashy.
None of it matters as they either do subpar damage or are unreasonable to use in most fights.
Everybody focuses on proccing ailments again and it's not hard to see why.
I'm very disappointed with hand-to-hand especially. Does a great job for mobs, but feels terrible and weak for bosses, making everybody use them as ailment proccing weapons as well.

Overall, I'm mostly disappointed with how the gameplay feels, but this is a video GAME, so I'd say that's a crucial part of it.

If things keep going in this direction I might just drop all interest for future installments in this series and just keep an eye out for new stuff like Sekiro. At least that game implemented the new mechanics very well while keeping the world interesting.

more like kinoshima

The stuff of legends, made a lot more approachable with this release.

Can't believe they got Yoko Taro to make one of the endings

Stormy Ascent should've stayed deleted

The hat was really cool

mmm slurpcore

Made me despise living but it's alright

I hate getting hacked in an online chatroom, I sure wish we had an anticheat

Anomalies are garbage.
More atrocious gimmick fights but in MR for your high end gear? Garbage.