Finished the last of it up today.
Miles worse than the base game. It's like they decided that the Elden Beast was the pinnacle of boss design and used that as their basis for every non-humanoid fight, and even some of the humanoid ones.
Gaius, 2nd phase Mesmer, gold hippo, etc. Just the actual trashcan of Souls boss fights where it's nothing but a huge clusterfuck of camera problems, unreadable massive arena-wide attacks, non-step combo spam, etc. It ultimately doesn't even end up being especially difficult because the power scaling from the scadutree fragments is so nuts that you can chunk bosses for 20% of their health in a single jump attack, but that doesn't really lead to it being fun either. Bayle was sick at least.
Wicker giants are boring useless slogs. Abyssal woods is 100x bigger than it should have been. Both the cerulean coast and the red flower area above/near it are vast empty spaces with nearly nothing of note in them. Finger ruins are all vast empty, pointless spaces etc. Compared to the base game where every corner of every map had something to do in it.
Environments still 10/10, some of the new items are sick, overall still better than anything in the regular AAA space, but this is a pretty worrying entry in the series imo as it's a clear downgrade in ingenuity from the base game, with a lot of knobs just cranked up to 11 to make it 'hard'.
