Dark Souls II: Crown of the Old Iron King Review
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Introduction
Crown of the Old Iron King is the second of the three announced pieces of downloadable content for Dark Souls II. Despite having a few notable flaws, the previous DLC, Crown of the Sunken King, proved to me that From Software still isn't out of ideas for Dark Souls II, and is well aware of its shortcomings. It goes without saying, then, that I went into Crown of the Old Iron King with fairly high hopes. Where they matched? As always, I'll try to answer to that question in the full review.
Level Design
Much like its predecessor, Crown of the Old Iron King contains a single large area that is separated from the rest of the map, called Brume Tower. The method to access the DLC content is extremely similar too: a teleporting altar situated after the Iron Keep primal bonfire which connects with the DLC area. While every character can access this altar and teleport to Brume Tower, only those who own the DLC will get a key in their inventory that lets them proceed beyond the iron door that blocks the entrance to the actual level. Other players will only be able to place their summon signs to co-op in the DLC's challenge routes. My use of the plural form here wasn't a mistake: the DLC has two optional "challenge route" areas, each with its own layout and boss.
Unfortunately, this fairly generous offering suffers from the same problems that plagued Crown of the Sunken King's optional side-area: neither Iron Passage, nor the Memory of the Old Iron King are interesting, and mostly provide a challenge just by filling every corner with adversaries. Clearing these areas initially forced me to adopt an exceedingly cautious playstyle, but given neither has any interesting loot before the bosses, I ultimately ended up running past enemies in an attempt to reach the fog gate. I'm a big fan of the idea behind these challenge routes, co-op gauntlets for veterans that also offer a sneak peek of the DLC to other players, but the execution so far has been really disappointing. Crown of the Ivory King isn't out yet but at this point I'm skeptical its own take on the idea will be any better.
What I can say with certainty is that the two DLCs that have come out so far share not only many of the same flaws, but also many of the same strengths. Crown of the Old Iron King too offers a fairly large area that's rife with secret passages, detours, and shortcuts. As one might expect, given the area consists of a cluster of towers connected by huge iron chains, vertical movement is fairly important to the experience, but it's balanced in such a way that a player never has the impression of going through an uninterrupted ascent or descent. Every objective has to be conquered, sometimes in apparently counter-intuitive ways. While some of the floors are connected by ladders and drops, others locations can't be reached until automatic elevators are activated or alternative passages are discovered.
Exploration is clearly staggered into two phases. A first descent through the mostly still central tower hints at possible blocked passageways and an interconnected system of elevators that only opens once a player has found and used a key item. Once the tower hums to life and its mechanical contraptions resume working, the way to the final area and a multitude of optional ones is open. Moreso than in Crown of the Sunken King, much of the content of this DLC is optional, and sometimes very well hidden. It might be argued that the titular crown is the final objective, but I certainly can't say I felt I'd exhausted what the DLC had to offer after finding it, and I immediately teleported back to a bonfire to start checking every nook and cranny I had previously ignored.
Speaking of bonfires, Dark Souls' iconic checkpoints have been placed more sparingly this time around, and in a way that feels rational and does not clumsily invalidate shortcuts like it did in Crown of the Sunken King. The number could have arguably been cut down further, but the few that could be deemed "unnecessary" were obviously placed to save the players from having to embark on uneventful runs through emptied environments, so I can't honestly say I mind. After all, Iron Passage is already annoying as it is, and not placing a bonfire at its entrance would have just been cruel on the developers' part.
It's also worth mentioning that, like Crown of the Sunken King's Shulva, this DLC's area also has a puzzle "gimmick" to it. Brume Tower is populated by a number of Ashen Idols, statues that depict the "Child of Dark" that's influencing the area. These idols can have a variety of effects, ranging from healing the enemies surrounding them, to indefinitely resurrecting a certain enemy type in the area, and can only be destroyed by plunging a Smelter Wedge (a new DLC item) into them. Once destroyed, not only the effect of an idol ceases, but it also drops a piece of the soul of Brume Tower's intangible antagonist. These pieces can't be used by themselves, but once they've all been collected they reform the full soul, which functions effectively as a boss soul, and can be used to make a unique weapon or a unique spell, or simply as a consumable that grants a large number of souls to the character.
The placement of the Ashen Idols can be quite clever, and I feel I also have to praise the way Smelter Wedges are placed into the level. At the beginning of the area a player is presented with six of them, which is a good amount but not enough to cover all the Ashen Idols found on a straight run to the Crown of the Old Iron King, let alone all of them. Of course, it's always possible to check optional areas for more wedges, as there are enough in the level to cover all of the idols, but it's also important to prioritize the idols that give immediate trouble, while leaving the others for a later, more thorough pass on the level. All that said, I can't help but be disappointed with the concept of the Ashen Idols itself. It's too on the nose and not nearly as organic and clever as Crown of the Sunken King's level design shifting switches, which also provided opportunities for the players to turn the tables in the midst of a battle. Some of the other traps in the level can be exploited in that way, but given the Ashen Idols are clearly meant to be the main "gimmick" of the DLC, I'd have preferred to see From Software go for something more flexible and inventive.
Overall, despite having some problems with it, I really enjoyed Crown of the Old Iron King's level design. The area feels even vaster and arguably more varied than the one featured in the previous DLC, the pacing feels spot on, and it all feels organic, even though the single room are starkly differentiated and many of them could arguably be considered "setpieces" in and of themselves.
Encounter Design and Bosses
While I'm forced to admit that hollow-like type enemies work in the Souls series, I really wish they weren't revisited again for Crown of the Old Iron King. Emaciated soldiers armed with axes, spears and longbows populate the DLC, especially in its early sections. Their movement set and statistics are slightly different (these ones are more mobile and their attacks are slightly slower) but after three games and three pieces of DLC, I can't help but groan every time I see a desiccated corpse of a soldier lumbering towards me with a stupefied expression on its dead face. As with the Sanctum soldiers in Crown of the Sunken King, these soldiers too are easy to deal with in a one-on-one fight, but tend to pose more problems when you encounter two or three of them, which happens fairly often.
Other enemy types are more inspired, and attempt, with varying degrees of success, to offer mechanical challenges that weren't present in the vanilla game. Giant headless demons that spew lava intermittently from their pauldrons are admittedly silly, but they're effective at forcing a player to consider positioning, and their lava affects enemies too, so their AI and special abilities can be exploited to create favorable opportunities. Possessed floating armors still ultimately resembled the hollow enemies too much to strike me as really memorable, but the inhuman, unpredictable way they move around and attack (they can even detach their arms to extend their range) made them more interesting to fight than I'd have suspected. There is also a type of slave hollows that run away from your character while carrying barrels of black powder. Hitting them with a melee weapon is suicidal, but they can be lured near enemies and made to explode with a simple hit of a firebomb or a fire arrow. I have to admit I felt bad every time I killed one, though, as they don't really look like they deserve it.
If I had to choose a single enemy type as my favorite though, there's really one that springs to mind, perhaps due to the way the first encounter with them is designed. Grotesquely crawling soldier with no legs are first encountered in a dark hallway where it's impossible to see more than a few feet in front of your character. At first sight they are not particularly scary: they have a lunging attack, but it can be easily avoided, and their movement speed is really slow. They do, however, become much faster when they're hit by fire, and that occurrence is far from rare. First of all, the braziers that you can use to illuminate the dark hallways these enemies are found in are completely coated with oil, so just standing in the proximity of a lit one inflicts fire damage. Needless to say, it's not a good idea to hide behind one of them while these foes are approaching. Furthermore, these enemies can also blow themselves up for massive damage, and they're spaced in such a way that they'll usually hit some of their friends, chipping away at their health but buffing their speed in the process.
It doesn't end there either: once you've dispatched the first group and descended a ladder to a small circular arena dotted with unlit braziers, an invader NPC spawns to attack you. Armed with a sword that she immediately buffs with fire damage, she can easily hit the braziers in the room, lighting them in the process. I found hiding behind these braziers was a good way to chip away at her health with fire damage, but I also was aware that, if any of those crawling enemies were in the vicinity of this room, they'd have plenty of opportunities to buff themselves with fire. Once I finally dispatched the red phantom NPC, I opened one of the many doors present in the room, and lo and behold: more of those crawling enemies. Not only was this a great way to rapidly introduce a series of mechanics and playing them off each other, but it also best exemplifies the encounter design philosophy for the entirety of the DLC.
In other words, environmental hazards and traps play a huge role in combat in the DLC, and using them to your advantage is key to success, as some of the enemy placement is downright devious. Enemies are always ready to attack you from blind spots either by jumping into the fray or shooting at you from range, and it's really easy to end up overwhelmed, so, as with all of the series really, it's always best to take time to carefully assess the situation and consider all of the available options. After all, there are no imposed time limits in any of the DLC sections, and it's very rare to find an encounter where the designers didn't also place some environmental hazards that can be exploited by clever players. A couple of areas and their associated encounters felt subpar, in particular I was unimpressed with two zones in the DLC that are packed with enemies and are enveloped in a dark curse aura, but they feel like the exceptions that prove the rule, and only stick out to me because the DLC did a really good job otherwise.
I mentioned NPC invaders earlier, and the same complaint I had for Crown of the Sunken King stands here: their blatant disregard of the limits players are actually subjected to is annoying. Granted, at least in this DLC they are used to more comedic effect, and come across as a mockery of some of the most annoying player habits online, but I still wish From Software would just give us one single NPC fight that was difficult because of its really excellent AI, and not because of some gimmick. If nothing else, the AI and placement for these fights is a significant step up from the vanilla game, where NPC invaders where mostly a distraction.
Another element of the wider category of enemy design that closely mirrors the previous DLC is boss design. Just like in Crown of the Sunken King, this DLC too includes three bosses, though this time only one is needed to complete the critical path, as it's placed just before the titular crown. I suspect one of these three bosses was inserted just because the developers felt obligated to match the number of bosses in the previous DLC, as it's a slightly edited version of one of the vanilla boss fights. This isn't an exaggeration on my part, and the development team never even made an attempt to hide this: the boss has the same name and the same soul, and its appearance and moveset have been tweaked just slightly. Luckily, given it's an optional fight that guards one piece of headwear and nothing more, it can be safely skipped, but I'd rather it hadn't been implemented at all given how shoddy it is.
The other two DLC bosses sit firmly on the other side of the spectrum. They can certainly be accused of not offering something particularly original and fresh in terms of aesthetic or mechanics, they are, after all, two armored humanoid enemies. Focusing on the template they fill would be unfair, though, because they do everything else right. Their movesets are varied and well-polished, and it's clear that a great amount of work went into giving them strong personalities. While I don't want to spoil anything, it was amusing to learn that using a certain armor would enrage one of them so much that he'd jump to his phase two moveset at the beginning of the fight, and fairly useful too, as it meant I could calibrate my dodge timings and strategy around that.
Items, Gear and Spells
In terms of consumables, Crown of the Old Iron King offers exactly the same items that debuted in its predecessor, and I can't say I have changed my mind on them: they are, by and large, an unneeded addition. It fares better, however, when it comes to gear and spells. While I think Crown of the Sunken King had more interesting gear, Crown of the Old Iron King still offers an assortment of weapons, armors and rings with unique movesets and effects, though one that occasionally leans too heavily on fanservice. The new spells offered in the DLC are solid, if not particularly impressive. There are three new pyromancies that are objectively useful but feel like variations on spell types that have been explored over and over again since the vanilla release of the original Dark Souls. There is also a new hex, Recollection, which at least offers an interesting visual twist, but I can't imagine many practical uses for it.
Lore, Art and Soundtrack
The name of this DLC should be telling for anyone that played the main game. Crown of the Old Iron King clearly attempts to flesh out the history of the reign of the Old Iron King, one of the four old ones that have to be slain to advance the main quest in Dark Souls II. I personally felt the tale of Shulva's downfall was more interesting simply by virtue of being tighter and self-contained while still offering enough room for interpretation, but that's not to say there are no fascinating tidbits to be found in this DLC, as long as you're prepared to accept that the new information raises as many questions as it answers. Perhaps this is also due to the absence of friendly NPCs in the area, as From Software yet again opted to let the environment speak for itself, despite their success with the new NPCs in Dark Souls' DLC Artorias of the Abyss.
One element I found to be unequivocally better in Crown of the Old Iron King compared to its predecessor and much of the vanilla game is art. While occasionally marred by tiled textures and sparse interior design (and unfortunately it's difficult not to compare every area to the rich environments shown in Bloodborne's gameplay videos), the DLC is visually impressive, with striking use of lighting, well-composed vistas and a unique visual theme that complements the Iron Keep location in the vanilla game nicely without feeling like a rehash. I would say the soundtrack is similarly good, but to be honest there is not a lot of material to judge. There are two new tracks, one of which instantly became one of my favorite pieces of music from the entire series, while the recycled boss also gets the same track that was used in the main game, almost as if to further accentuate the disappointment.
Concluding Thoughts
Crown of the Old Iron King matched but did not exceed the expectations set by its predecessor. While the presence of yet again subpar level design in the challenge routes and some obviously rehashed content was disappointing, this DLC still confidently builds on the foundations of the main game, and provides more expansive, complex and visually striking areas with better designed challenges to go along, not to mention a couple of bosses that quickly ranked among my favorites.
