Marigold

Plays like a cracked out arcade evolution of Doom 2016. It demands a lot out of you, it has a very specific loop (with lots of different tools to accomplish that loop) and wants you to master it.

Feels best to completely ignore the narrative and lore dumping, it's mostly just annoying repetitive jokes (rip & tear, mortally challenged, etc.) and nonsensical backstory, but it hasn't quite reached the funny self-parody level in the DLCs yet.

Finding it a bit hard to separate this and the base game in my mind, mainly because this largely plays and feels like the extended endgame that the base game kind of just didn't have. You basically get thrown back in with all the tools that you spend the base game getting, and get to use them for a few hours (with a couple of extra enemy mechanics to spice it up). It's fun.

I saw some people had some issues with the Spirit enemies, and I think they might be slightly disruptive to the combat loop but most of the time they work just fine, it's another High Value Target that you need to pay attention to. They're used moderately poorly at the end, because the arena that you're in just kind of has you fighting them with almost no other monsters to engage in the rest of the combat loop with, and it shows how much the game is built on that chaotic loop. It really needs there to be a lot of monsters trying to fuck you up, or it starts to feel weird.

This is also the point where the lore goes from really annoyingly bad to enlightened funny self-parody.

Finding it really puzzling as to why this DLC is considered so divisive everywhere I read about it... I came into this thinking it was gonna be some crazy twist on the base game's mechanics, but it's really just The Ancient Gods Part 1 being refined further. It has missteps like the silly imps that exist purely to make you use the combat shotgun mod that no one likes, but like... it really is just more of the same, but harder.

The hammer was a really good addition to the combat loop, as awkward as the animation is. It provides more of a use for glory kills than as an i-frame generator. The finale is pretty mediocre, but I'm not really sure what else they could do, considering they kind of wrote themselves into a corner with the form they gave the Dark Lord.