In Elden Ring I ended up doing a bunch of PVP which overlevelled me very quickly when you get 10k runes per win. The balance of challenge to level is pretty good if you dont do that but its also really easy to over level and the whole area becomes easy. I'd actually prefer it had some light level scalingYes your attacks will hurt badly, BUT if you stand there and take hits, you WILL get killed pretty quickly. Also, a friend of mine went to NewGame+ and got owned pretty easily. Yes, if you level grind the game will be easier but it's supposed to be.
Why are you guys going to make me reinstall this game just to be more accurate in my descriptions? GoW was a bore for me. I stopped playing it very early in the game because I felt the redundancy of the attacks. Perhaps that's what I felt being early in the game. I will load it up anyway just to prove my point of what I didn't like that made it a redundant combat walk through the game.
Elden Ring and GOW are my two favourites of the past few years. I find GOW took a lot of inspiration from Souls with the emphasis on behind the back camera, harder difficulty, statuses, stances, emphasis on evasion, blocking and parries. But also took a lot of the strengths from the action genre with combos and a deeper movement for each weapon