Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree review: FromSoftware’s most

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree review: FromSoftware’s most ambitious expansion to date

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is quite anomalous among modern-day downloadable content. Some jaw-droppingly gorgeous areas, a huge variety of fun new weapon types, and, of course, loads of teeth-gratingly difficult boss fights make for FromSoftware’s biggest and arguably best DLC expansion to date. It’s more Elden Ring, but that is what you’ve signed up for, right?

Pros

• +Stunning environmental design
• +Amazingly fun new weapon types
• +Some of FromSoft’s best bosses to date
• +Plenty for lore heads to scratch their noggins over

Cons

• -Legacy dungeon level design is (mostly) a slight step back
• -Some truly infuriating standard enemies
• -Occasional visual oddities and performance dips

I realized something while playing through Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree; it’s been a proper long while since we’ve had an honest-to-goodness FromSoftware soulsborne expansion or installment of downloadable content (DLC). Seven whole years, to be exact, since Dark Souls 3’s The Ringed City expansion, and while that’s certainly a fondly remembered content pack, it pales in comparison to the overwhelming scope and ambition present in Shadow of the Erdtree.

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Simply put, Shadow of the Erdtree is massive. Game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has compared the size of the DLC’s map to that of the base game’s Limgrave area. This isn’t inaccurate (so long as you’re also factoring in the Weeping Peninsula and maybe even a bit of Caelid), but the sheer variety of biome design and a smattering of huge legacy dungeons make Shadow of the Erdtree feel so much larger than that aforementioned size comparison.

With that in mind, it’s also accurate to say that Shadow of the Erdtree is absolutely just ‘more Elden Ring,’ and that includes both the good and the bad. Compelling new weapon types and phenomenal level and boss design are occasionally marred by performance issues and the odd 10-string-hitting standard enemy that made me want to yeet my controller into the abyss.

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God of War review – violent, vital and more brilliant than ever

Kratos returns older and wiser, but still exhilaratingly brutal in a story that deftly intertwines family drama and mythological epic

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As the average age of video-game developers and players has crept upward, everyone has started to expect more from their characters. In the last decade, formerly two-dimensional avatars from Lara Croft to Wolfenstein’s BJ Blazkowicz have been retrofitted with backstories and motivations – with varying success.

On the face of it, Kratos, the vengeful god who powered the excellent (and gratuitously violent) God of War games of the 00s, is an absurd candidate for such humanisation. Until now, his sole character trait has been anger. He has retired to Scandinavia, is recently widowed and father to a teenaged son who knows nothing of his god-slaying, blood-soaked past in Greece. He and the boy set out to scatter his wife’s ashes from the top of a distant mountain, getting unwillingly caught up in the affairs of Norse gods along the way.

This God of War wants us to see Kratos as a person, rather than an instrument of extraordinary violence. The game not only pulls this off, but turns Kratos and his son’s journey into one of the best games of recent years: a deft intertwining of relatable familial drama and awe-inspiring mythological epic.

The combat is not as comically overblown as it once was, but this is still a very violent game, with deliberate, intense fights against creatures ranging from the frozen undead to building-sized monsters. It is exhilaratingly brutal: every hit has heft, and most enemies are a threat. You can unfurl an arsenal of attacks with bare fists, a shield and an ice-imbued axe that, once thrown, flies back into Kratos’s hand with a satisfying thunk. His son, Atreus, who blinks back tears while hunting a deer in one of the game’s first scenes, gradually becomes more accomplished with a bow and helpful in confrontations.