This review contains spoilers
Begins off a little disappointing as it takes you out of the wide open world you’ve been used to and throws you into a much smaller area, while also stripping you of all your resources, weapons and armour (you can still use them as skins, but not for their abilities). The only things you get to keep are your upgrades and your mounts. In fact the DLC removes potions entirely, along with any mastery you gained on your stats from upgrading past the cap in story mode.
I was confused why the game would even let me keep my abilities if it was going for a soft reset. It even tries to trick you into thinking it is giving you a tutorial, which is an odd choice for a DLC that warns you it has story spoilers making it end-game content by default, by telling you the controls and making the first vault a 1 star difficulty vault (something that hasn’t been seen since the prologue). But when you play the vault you realise there’s no way this is made for newcomers. The very first vault in the DLC is on par with a high 2 star, or low 3 star vault in the main game. The thing is though that even when the vaults get to 3 stars in this DLC, the difference is negligible relative to the difference between a 1 star and a 3 star in the story.
The Vaults are also much longer here, but they don't let you save either. Now while you couldn't always save in vaults, they did allow auto-saving in the longer vaults (the ones at the end of a God's questline). Many of these ones match those in length, if not surpass it, while also being harder. It's not unusual for a vault to last for 45 minutes or more, so if you have to turn the game off for whatever reason, the power goes out, the game crashes, or if you just get bored, you lose a ton of progress.
Anyway the reason I'm talking about vaults so much is that that's ALL there is in this DLC. It's basically a vault content pack thrown into a barebones story and a barebones area. There is still some fighting, but it's also delegated to small parts inside of a vault and is never the main focus.
What made the main game so great was the blend of puzzles, action and exploration, all done in a way so that you never spent too long doing one thing. This time it's 95% puzzles, 5% action and 0% exploration. If the vaults were your favourite part of the main game, or better yet the only part you liked, then you'll probably love this. Otherwise that lack of variety can lead to burnout on puzzles really fast.
They didn't even give that same sense of progression, as despite stripping you of ALL your weapons and armour, you can only find a total of one brand new thing for each equipable item (sword/axe/bow/armour/helmet), and each one can only be upgraded once. The majority of chests in this game contain a "relic" which by themselves do nothing, but when you collect 24 you unlock a secret....vault. Yeah, another vault. To be fair that secret vault is probably the highlight of the DLC, it's just a rapid fire of creative mini games, many of which take inspiration of arcade games like Frogger or Donkey Kong.
So basically my closing opinion on this is that while the vaults in this game are fun, and have a ton of mind-teasers, I feel like too many of them in a row is just overwhelming and misses out on a huge part of the game mechanics (the entire combat system). And starting you with an almost empty equipment list just seemed pointless.
I was confused why the game would even let me keep my abilities if it was going for a soft reset. It even tries to trick you into thinking it is giving you a tutorial, which is an odd choice for a DLC that warns you it has story spoilers making it end-game content by default, by telling you the controls and making the first vault a 1 star difficulty vault (something that hasn’t been seen since the prologue). But when you play the vault you realise there’s no way this is made for newcomers. The very first vault in the DLC is on par with a high 2 star, or low 3 star vault in the main game. The thing is though that even when the vaults get to 3 stars in this DLC, the difference is negligible relative to the difference between a 1 star and a 3 star in the story.
The Vaults are also much longer here, but they don't let you save either. Now while you couldn't always save in vaults, they did allow auto-saving in the longer vaults (the ones at the end of a God's questline). Many of these ones match those in length, if not surpass it, while also being harder. It's not unusual for a vault to last for 45 minutes or more, so if you have to turn the game off for whatever reason, the power goes out, the game crashes, or if you just get bored, you lose a ton of progress.
Anyway the reason I'm talking about vaults so much is that that's ALL there is in this DLC. It's basically a vault content pack thrown into a barebones story and a barebones area. There is still some fighting, but it's also delegated to small parts inside of a vault and is never the main focus.
What made the main game so great was the blend of puzzles, action and exploration, all done in a way so that you never spent too long doing one thing. This time it's 95% puzzles, 5% action and 0% exploration. If the vaults were your favourite part of the main game, or better yet the only part you liked, then you'll probably love this. Otherwise that lack of variety can lead to burnout on puzzles really fast.
They didn't even give that same sense of progression, as despite stripping you of ALL your weapons and armour, you can only find a total of one brand new thing for each equipable item (sword/axe/bow/armour/helmet), and each one can only be upgraded once. The majority of chests in this game contain a "relic" which by themselves do nothing, but when you collect 24 you unlock a secret....vault. Yeah, another vault. To be fair that secret vault is probably the highlight of the DLC, it's just a rapid fire of creative mini games, many of which take inspiration of arcade games like Frogger or Donkey Kong.
So basically my closing opinion on this is that while the vaults in this game are fun, and have a ton of mind-teasers, I feel like too many of them in a row is just overwhelming and misses out on a huge part of the game mechanics (the entire combat system). And starting you with an almost empty equipment list just seemed pointless.