When I had first heard about Lords of the Fallen I couldn't wait to give it a try. I'm a huge fan of Demon’s and Dark Souls, and developers Deck13 and CI Games both openly admitted that their game was meant to be inspired by this revered series. It had a masterful blueprint for game design in its hands. The trail had been blazed. So what was the result? You can definitely feel the inspiration Dark Souls had on the developers in the controls, the systems, and the combat. What differentiates this game, so heavily inspired by its source material, is that it lacks the most rudimentary understanding of what made the Soul series such an iconic entry into modern games.
Looking back, Dark Souls is nothing all that "new". It took old practices and concepts of difficulty and death and modernized them to a contemporary audience. Instead of artificial difficulty settings, the Soul series was based on the principle that players needed to learn about their environment and their enemies to succeed. It's not the only game that does that today - it wasn’t the first game to do it and it won't be the last. That’s the main reason why the Soul series are games that are so highly praised - it's an opposition to more casual game experience that also happens to play quite well. We can argue all day whether or not the Soul series is difficult or isn't and honestly it's not a very interesting argument to have. What matters is that it played well, had a fair challenge, and stands as a testament to the modern appeal for games of the past.
When browsing through user videos for those that received Lords of the Fallen early, one person referred to the game as "clunky souls". The term is pretty much spot-on. The game feels like Dark Souls and yet feels heavier, slower, less responsive, and as a consequence of all that boring. Where Dark Souls is a game based around learning to avoid hits entirely, Lords of the Fallen would rather play the less interesting route of taking hits and giving them. Players that find themselves wanting to remove all of their armor and dodge roll throughout the game will find that it just doesn’t work that way. Enemies respond in such a way that feels like you’re constantly knocking against a tank that flinches seldom to your offensive presses and returns attacks that deplete stamina severely or knock your character down. You also don’t get enough of a trade-off advantage from removing the armor because enemies respond so quickly to your movements that you can’t get a quick attack in before they recover. The most effective way that I found to deal with enemies in the game was to overpower them. If you attack enough times with a powerful weapon you can either break their guard and mow them down or at least get a few good hits in. Essentially the gameplay boils down to attacking first, wearing enough armor to absorb that chance hit that lands before you stagger them, and rinsing and repeating that process for the entire game. There’s something far more exhilarating with dodging an attack rather than letting the armor mitigate it. I’m not saying that you can’t play these other styles successfully, but they don’t feel balanced in any sort of way that feels like you’d want to suffer through it. I also found the hit detection bizarrely off. I could occasionally hear a hit land and either the enemy wouldn’t take any damage or it would block from an angle that was obviously exposed. It was exceedingly frustrating given how drawn out certain fights could be.
The art style, much like the gameplay, is heavily borrowed from better examples and then unapologetically implemented. Everything looks like a generic fantasy world. Bosses look practically identical, locations bleed together with their color and settings, and the character armor looks like they literally copied the design of pauldrons from World of Warcraft and changed the color schemes.
The design of the world is also poor. Many of the objectives are very unclear and looking around the world to find out where to go can result in doubling over locations you've visited before. It's baffling because when you take into account how short the game is (my first playthrough clocked around 17 hours) and realize how small the map ends up being, this shouldn't be much of a problem - but it is. I can't help but wonder if this is just another inspiration that Lords of the Fallen is taking from the infamously vague Soul series - but it's hard to say. Match the world design with the environments looking all identical and this world is as confusing as it is bland.
There is an interesting souls system in Lords of the Fallen that could be worth expanding on. Unlike the Soul series, maintaining the souls (experience points) on your person grants you multipliers that allow you to collect more souls at a quicker rate. If you die, the souls gradually deplete as they remain on the ground, so urgency to return to the last place you died becomes a part of the gameplay. It would work if the map wasn’t so small. Returning to your souls is generally too easy and convenient to make any meaningful difference to this otherwise intriguing addition to the system.
There’s not much to say about Lords of the Fallen without bringing up a better example of how to do it right. Lords of the Fallen feels, well, soulless. It has no discernible style, it’s entirely outperformed by its inspirations, and any fleeting new concepts that it brings to the table are squandered by poor design choices. “Inspiration” is a difficult word for me to agree with when I think back on this game. I’d suggest that Lords of the Fallen is a shameless consumption of source material that was then then regurgitated back out to the world and became, as expected, a poorly executed mess in the process.
GRADE: D
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