For all its obvious flaws, the main campaign of Immortal: Unchained actually showed a good amount of promise in laying out a path forward for Souls-style shooters. Unfortunately, the DLC doubled down on some of the very worst gameplay elements from the main game. The whole experience is an overly hostile slog, jam-packed with enemies whose tankiness and damage output are extremely excessive (there is even one new enemy that literally can’t be killed unless you hit one specific, pixel-sized spot that is only occasionally exposed). It’s to the point where it feels like the only option is to either run or cheese your way through. Which doesn’t leave much time to take in the new levels - a shame, considering the dried out sea bed and sunken ships offer a fairly interesting new biome in a game full of generic tech hallways.

The final boss of the DLC is almost good, but suffers from two issues, one of which is basically unforgivable: the encounter starts with a very tough, wave-based fight against regular enemies that you have to repeat every time you try to kill the boss (in case it wasn’t clear, this is tedious and awful). Also, the boss himself is about 20% too fast for the game’s engine - I knew the moves and how to deal with them, but sometimes my guy simply didn’t move out of the way quickly enough. It’s deeply frustrating to have your avatar skill fail to match up with player skill.

Ultimately, this is a DLC that is discouraging more than anything else. The makers of I:U had some cool ideas about how to take Soulslike gameplay and meld it with third person shooter mechanics. Unfortunately, it appears with this DLC that the devs bought into the toxic, ‘git gud’, difficulty-fuck messaging that emanates from the worst corners of Souls fandom.