Dark Souls II: Crown of the Sunken King

The new area is intriguing, the enemies are tougher than ever, and the play time is just the right length to feel you’ve gotten your money’s worth, especially if you bought the season pass. Highly recommended to any Dark Souls fans.

To take a game that was supposedly complete and yet seamlessly expand it in such a way is laudable, and overall, this is a bravura performance.

If you like Dark Souls it's more new Dark Souls to explore.

It's worth taking the plunge to find the crown of the Sunken King.

A promising sign of things to come. [Oct 2014, p.74]

Crown Of The Sunken King provides Dark Souls 2 with an interesting new environment, three punishing boss fights and a host of tasty new gear. DLC at a good price that’s worth the struggle, Dark Souls 2 just got harder.

Crown of the Sunken King is optional. It doesn't evolve Dark Souls 2, it doesn't add Trophies/Achievements, you can still enjoy Dark Souls 2 without Crown of the Sunken King. But in the DLC you'll find the best level design of the whole game.

The increased level of challenge will be welcomed by those already "done" with the main game. [Issue#152, p.116]

Crown of the Sunken King is an intense DLC: the new area is well designed, the three bosses are hard to beat, and the new items interesting.

All in all, the content in Dark Souls II: Crown of the Sunken King boils down to around two hours for a playthrough, although deaths and retries have the potential to bloat that number.

Smart and cruel level design for this DLC, closer to the first Dark Soul's atmosphere than the second one. Fans will for sure love it.

Crown of the Sunken King is a high quality DLC, which gets structurally closer to the previous chapters and pushes the player to explore every inch of the new, dangerous area. It is not particularly long-lived, this is true, but it will please many fans of the series.

Hearkening back to the original Dark Souls, the expansion is impressively intricate, challenging and extremely fulfilling.

Crown of the Sunken King marks the first piece of DLC in a planned trilogy, and it's a wonderful opening chapter. It doesn't reach the heights of Dark Souls' Artorias of the Abyss and features design flaws that hold it back, but the simple bliss of more Souls content is something fans can get behind (as long as they mentally prepare themselves for death and despair).

Crown of the Sunken King's standout exploratory design and abundance of engaging enemy encounters make it a terrific adventure, though a hair short of being essential. Equally significant is that it succeeds at raising the stakes for the next installment.

DSII remains a skilled, often clever impersonation of the game everyone wanted. But I can’t see the point of teasing out its journey with ever more kings, dragons, and Havels. The more DSII overlaps with its predecessors, the less reason there is to play it at all.