Recent reviews by Boss From Work

If you want to play the best fromsoft DLC, go play ringed city in ds3.

Otherwise, this dlc has expansive yet unrewarding areas, because they are so empty.
The initial problems that are present in Elden Ring's base game are also quite literally magnified in this DLC. These include, but are not limited to (for brevity's sake):
1. Bosses with poor tells and or little to no punish windows after long sequences of attacks (I'm looking at Radahn, who will rarely allow the player to get away with two STRAIGHT SWORD swings and Rellana, even though I think she's a good fight).
2. Copy paste of enemies, and not even really newly introduced types...... I mean BASE GAME enemies. Plenty of re-skins too, such as the kindred of rot enemies, runebears, crucible knights etc.
and 3. Artificial difficulty in boss mechanics e.g., for Radahn's second phase, he has basically the same move set of Phase 1 but with projectile spam that forces the player to preemptively double dodge a lot of attacks. This is contrasted by another DLC's final boss named Slave Knight Gael, who literally completely changes his move set in Phase 2. Another example of this artificial difficulty is when Dancing Lion just adds AOEs to his move set as well, which ofc = fun and is a meaningful new challenge.

Idk this is just my opinion and you may disagree which is fine too, because ultimately in the grand scheme of the universe, Elden Ring, or any game in this light, truly does not matter.

I'm submitting my life to this game.