Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Review — A Colossal Farewell on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S

Stepping Into the Land of Shadow

Few expansions arrive with the kind of gravitational pull that Shadow of the Erdtree carried into 2024, and having spent well over sixty hours with it on both PS5 and Xbox Series X, we can say with confidence that FromSoftware did not blink. This is not a victory lap. It is a second campaign disguised as downloadable content, one that asks players to re-learn Elden Ring’s rhythms from the ground up while dangling some of the richest environmental storytelling the studio has ever produced.

The premise is simple on paper: Miquella, the perpetually youthful demigod, has severed his own flesh and sealed himself away in a hidden realm known as the Land of Shadow, chasing a scheme to escape the curse of eternal childhood. As the Tarnished, you follow him through a gate hidden beneath Castle Mensis, and from the moment you drop into this new map, the scale of what FromSoftware has built becomes obvious. Rolling hills give way to petrified forests, a war-torn city built into a colossal ravine, and skies stained the color of dried blood. It feels like the Lands Between’s darker, more feverish cousin — related, but unmistakably its own place.

A Map Built for Explorers, Not Tourists

What impressed us most on repeated playthroughs is how Shadow of the Erdtree resists the temptation to simply reuse the base game’s open-world formula wholesale. The map is smaller than the Lands Between in raw square footage, but it is denser, more vertical, and considerably more willing to hide its best ideas behind unassuming rock formations or collapsed bridges. Legacy dungeons here rival Leyndell in ambition; one mid-game fortress in particular loops back on itself so cleverly that we spent nearly two hours mapping shortcuts before finally reaching its boss chamber.

The console experience matters here more than in most games, because so much of the DLC’s pleasure comes from careful, patient observation of the horizon. On PS5, running in Performance Mode, the draw distance across the Shadow Keep and the Scadu Altus plateau held up impressively, with pop-in reduced to a minimum compared to the base game’s launch state. Xbox Series X delivered a near-identical experience, and Series S owners will be pleased to hear that while resolution takes a expected step down, the frame pacing consistency across the expansion’s most chaotic boss arenas remained stable in our testing.

Scadutree Fragments and the New Power Curve

The headline mechanical addition is the Scadutree Fragment system, a parallel leveling structure exclusive to the Land of Shadow that boosts damage output and damage resistance independently of your character’s Runes-based stats. It’s a clever solution to an old FromSoftware problem: how do you scale an endgame-caliber expansion for a level 150 character without either trivializing it for overleveled players or walling off underleveled ones. In practice, it means exploration is not optional busywork — it is the primary currency of survival. Skipping side areas to rush the main questline will leave you brutally underpowered against the DLC’s back-half bosses.

This design choice has been controversial among portions of the community, and we understand the frustration for players who prefer a more linear structure. But on console, where menu navigation and inventory management have historically been slower than the mouse-driven PC experience, we found the Fragment system’s simplicity — a single consumable stat boost rather than a sprawling new skill tree — kept things approachable. Sony and Microsoft controller haptics also get a subtle but appreciated workout during Fragment collection animations, with the DualSense’s adaptive triggers offering faint resistance during specific environmental interactions.

Bosses That Redefine the Franchise’s Ceiling

It would be reductive to review Shadow of the Erdtree without dwelling on its bosses, because this expansion contains what we’d argue are the two or three most mechanically demanding encounters FromSoftware has ever shipped. Messmer the Impaler is a masterclass in aggressive, multi-phase choreography that rewards precise dodge timing over shield turtling. Radahn’s reappearance late in the DLC — we’ll avoid specifics to sidestep spoilers — pushes input read speed and camera control to their absolute limits, and on a couch with a standard controller rather than a desk-mounted mouse, some players will genuinely struggle with tracking attack telegraphs during the encounter’s most hectic transitions.

This is where we’d offer our one meaningful critique: a small number of these fights lean so heavily on rapid, multi-hit combo strings that camera lock-on occasionally struggles to keep pace, particularly in tight arena spaces. It’s a minor but real friction point that affected our Xbox Series X sessions slightly more than the PS5 build, though the difference is marginal enough that most players won’t notice unless they’re actively comparing platforms.

Sound Design and Atmosphere

The audio work deserves special mention. Composer Yuka Kitamura’s score threads discordant choral swells through Messmer’s boss theme in a way that feels genuinely operatic, and the ambient sound design across the Gravesite Plain — all wind-scoured silence punctuated by distant, unidentifiable roars — does more world-building in a few minutes of walking than most games manage in entire cutscenes. Played through a proper surround setup or a good headset, directional audio cues for hidden enemies and environmental hazards are precise enough to double as a genuine gameplay tool, not just atmospheric flavor.

Comparing the Land of Shadow to the Base Game

It’s worth addressing directly how Shadow of the Erdtree stacks up against the base game’s own high watermarks, because comparisons are inevitable. The Lands Between remains larger in absolute terms, but the Land of Shadow arguably has a higher hit rate of memorable moments per square kilometer. Where the base game occasionally stretched thin between points of interest — particularly in its later regions like the Mountaintops of the Giants — the DLC rarely lets more than a few minutes pass without a new item cache, hidden NPC, or environmental oddity worth investigating. This tighter pacing suggests FromSoftware learned real lessons from community feedback about pacing fatigue in massive open worlds, and applied them directly to this expansion’s design.

The narrative delivery also feels more purposeful here than in stretches of the base campaign. Miquella’s storyline, woven through item descriptions, NPC questlines, and environmental clues scattered across the Shadow Keep, rewards the kind of patient, almost archaeological reading that FromSoftware’s fanbase has become known for. Multiple community theory threads emerged within days of release dissecting the implications of specific item flavor text, a testament to how much lore density the writing team packed into this relatively compact map.

New Weapons, Ashes of War, and Build Diversity

Beyond the main questline, Shadow of the Erdtree substantially expands build diversity through a wave of new weapons, incantations, sorceries, and Ashes of War exclusive to the expansion. Several previously underwhelming weapon categories from the base game receive meaningful new options here, and we found ourselves respeccing our build multiple times across our playthrough just to experiment with fresh combinations. A particular standout is the addition of several dual-wielding light greatsword Ashes of War that finally make certain base-game weapon types viable for aggressive playstyles, addressing a long-standing community complaint about weapon balance.

For players who have already completed the base game’s platinum trophy or full achievement list, the DLC adds a meaningful chunk of additional trophies and achievements tied to boss defeats, item collection, and questline completion, giving completionists a genuine reason to return even after finishing the main story beats.

Who Should Play This

Shadow of the Erdtree is not a good entry point for newcomers to Elden Ring — it explicitly requires significant base-game progress to even access, and its difficulty assumes a level of mechanical fluency that only comes from having already beaten several of the base game’s late-game bosses. For existing Elden Ring players wondering whether the asking price is justified, our answer is an unambiguous yes. The sheer volume of new content, combined with some of the best boss design and level architecture FromSoftware has ever produced, makes this one of the most substantial expansions released for any console RPG in recent memory.

Pros and Cons

• Pro: A genuinely massive, densely designed new region that rewards exploration at every turn.
• Pro: Some of the best boss encounters FromSoftware has ever created.
• Pro: Strong, stable console performance on both PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
• Con: The Scadutree Fragment system effectively mandates thorough exploration, which may frustrate players wanting a shorter, focused campaign.
• Con: A handful of late-game bosses lean into combo speed that can strain controller-based camera tracking.
• Con: Newcomers to the base game will find the difficulty curve unforgiving without significant prior investment.

Final Verdict

Shadow of the Erdtree is not a gentle send-off. It is FromSoftware doubling down on everything that made Elden Ring a generational touchstone, then asking whether players are ready to be tested one final time. On console hardware, the expansion runs beautifully, looks staggering in its bleakest moments, and closes out this chapter of the Lands Between with a confidence that few developers could match. It is demanding, occasionally punishing, and absolutely essential.

Score: 9.4/10 — A masterful, uncompromising expansion that stands among the best DLC ever released for a console action RPG.