Dark Souls III: Ashes of Ariandel Review (Dino Run Enthusiast)
Far and away one of the most unfair and unfun pieces of "entertainment" ever put out. A beautiful FromSoft environment once again totally sullied by overtuned enemies that either have boss tier health bars, excessive poise (in this game where the player can only ever have a maximum of NO poise), or attacks that will kill all but the most armored and overleveled players in one to two hits. Bonfires are unbelievably stingy, so if you die, be prepared to go through the wolf woods for a thirtieth time, wherein one noticing you causes it to howl and immediately draw all forty other wolves in the DLC to your exact location with no deaggro range and miniboss-level AI. Get past them? Enjoy the Millwoods or Corvians that'll true combo you to death, if they just don't just one hitter quitter you. Just another stepping stone in the philosophy of FS's "difficulty": just overwhelm the player with numbers until the dominant strategy is just run past everything because it's literally not worth the hassle of killing these 1000+ hp enemies when a single misplay has you killed and each and every one of them respawned.
The bosses suck too, one's an endurance fest that could be cool but definitely overstays its welcome (without any secondary form of healing to offset its length) and the other is a teleporting big wolf that kills you from stage left before you even see it. Basically just taking the ultra-instinct dogs in the base game and making it ten feet tall, giving it six thousand health, and having it kill you instantly. It has a phase 2 by the way, because phase 1 was somehow not annoying enough.
Further weighed down by the stupid memberberries that already infested the main game. "Remember Ariamis in DS1? Remember the scary sewer? Remember turning the statue with the contraption? Remember Priscilla?" Yeah I do, and it wasn't fun back then either.
Weapons aren't worth it either. Some are cool in concept but seem too situational to properly use. Anything with a remotely long windup, you'll probably get splatted out of. And good luck testing them against the demonic sweaty "basic enemies" that permeate the horrible areas they're found in.
Not a fan of Dark Souls 3 in general but it's at least somewhat bearable if you know what you're doing. Ashes of Ariandel is paying someone 15 smackeroos to torture you for 5 hours.