Gamers rebel against Shadow of the Erdrtree despite stellar reviews

By now, you should know what you're getting yourself into when you buy a FromSoftware game. Hours of gruelling grind and more deaths than you care to count are par for the course, and when it comes to Soulsbornes, FromSoft's are some of the hardest out there - we still have PTSD from Sekiro.

It's no different when it comes to Elden Ring's long-awaited DLC, with Shadow of the Erdtree proving to be even harder than we expected. We noted in our Shadow of the Erdtree review how FromSoft has ramped up the difficulty, with the Blackgaol Knight making your standard Elden Ring boss look easier than killing the Turtle Pope.

Shadow of the Erdtree is being review-bombed due to difficulty

Elden Ring review bombed

Proving why we can't have nice things, Shadow of the Erdtree has been review-bombed by a small number of angry gamers. While its Metacritic score is an eye-watering 95/100 from critics, the user score sits a little lower at 8.2/10. A quick scan of the reviews highlights a particular problem.

Calling out Shadow of the Erdtree's difficulty, one critic grumbled, "Unbalanced trash. Half bosses are trivial, other half are trolling you. Killing you out of the gate to prevent you from summoning. Does not deserve a high score until they learn to respect their audience."

Another said, "It's just crazy how they've screwed up the overall balancing of the game, it's a disgrace. This DLC is more frustrating than it is fun, and that's sad considering how great the base game was," and a third concluded, "Absolute joke, they made the game WAY too hard for no reason. I'm not even on ng+ but getting one-shotted by most enemies, yea less of that."

Bandai Namco tells you to 'git gud' 

The publishers are always watching, and in a new post on X (formerly Twitter), Bandai Namco tried to give you some handy hints while glossing over the difficulty issues. Bandai Namco told wannabe Tarnished to level up their Scadutree Blessing, which raises your armaments damage and damage negation by around 5% by consuming just one Scadutree Fragment.

It's clear the publisher knows Shadow of the Erdtree is hard, but unfortunately, the tweet has only highlighted this and rubbed some up the wrong way. The problem is that Shadow of the Erdtree always had to be more difficult so veteran Elden Ring players didn't simply whip through it.

Even if Bandai Namco is burying its head in the sand somewhat, the implication is that everyone involved knows how hard Shadow of the Erdtree is. If you don't like that, then sorry, this is probably not the game for you. Hidetaka Miyazaki has repeatedly said there will never be an easy mode, so unless you 'git gud', you'll have to get your Soulsborne fix elsewhere.