So, figured its time I did another post as we are into November and I've not done one for a while and for the whole of October, I did not do a post at all! So, to make up for that, I'm doing a review of a game I recently played and the game is the action RPG game, Lords of the Fallen, which is another Souls-like game similar to the Dark Souls series.
So, with that said let's take a look at this game and see how it compares to the acclaimed Souls games...
PREMISE
So, rather say anything about the story of the game, which for once I won't I will instead go over the premise of the game. So, the game essentially is similar to Dark Souls in that uses swords and sorceries but the twist here is that you can go between two different worlds, one which is called Axiom, which is the realm of the living and the other is Umbral, the realm of the dead. So, throughout the game your character must traverse between both worlds and fight many dangerous enemies before finally reaching your goals, which will vary depending on which ending of the game you go for.
THOUGHTS
As for the my thoughts on the game, Lords of the Fallen has a lot to live up to the high standards of the Souls games and even its counterpart, Lies of P, which has received much acclaim since its releae. However, Lords of the Fallen has not enjoyed the same level of acclaim and has left many gamers frustrated at its uneven difficulty and its technical issues, which cannot be ignored or denied as the game even a month after its initial release is still a mess on Xbox Series X, which is the console I'm playing as this version is plagued with terrible frame rate dips and even reduces the performance of the game to a slide show!
That said however, despite the criticisms of the game, I still think Lords of the Fallen is very entertaining RPG and worthy Souls-like, which has a great variety of weapons and offers decent combat, as well as a good variety of bosses that do vary in challenge. I also think the concept of the two worlds working together with Axiom and Umbral being realms you can switch between, is quite clever and offers something quite unique to make it stand out over other Souls-like games. The game of course does have some issues but I will get more into them in my flaws section of the review later on.
GAMEPLAY
As for the gameplay, I will split this section into the usual sub-sections as I always do for video game reviews.
COMBAT & WEAPONS
Starting with the combat, Lords of the Fallen uses a third person perspective similar to the Souls games and does the usual mix of regular and strong attacks, along with shield parries and even kicks, plunge attacks and critical attacks, where you can stun an enemy with a strong attack behind, which will allow you to perform a finisher attack. Similar to Bloodborne, you also have a rally system of sorts where when entering Umbral you will lose some health but on attacking enemies you can go get it back as you strike them, however if they attack you, then that white health (or withered health as its known) will disappear and you will need to use a healing item.
As for the weapons, there is plenty of variety here to choose from as the player has access to the likes of short swords, long swords, axes, spears, halberds, flails, daggers as well as bows and crossbows and you also have the option to dual wield weapons. You will also have access to catalysts that are used for casting spells and come in different varieties for casting different types of spells, which I will mention in a bit also.
AXIOM & UMBRAL REALMS
As for one of the key concepts of the game, it is split into utilising two different worlds, Axion, the realm of the living and Umbral, the realm of the dead, which the player can access the Umbral realm via their umbral lamp. And in order to progress the game, there will be times where you need to swtich between the two different realms to access areas where you might not be able to access in Axiom, you need to switch over to it Umbral to access unseen paths or climbs unseen ladders that will come apparent when you switch. There will also be what's called umbral entities in the Umbral realm, which you need to destroy as they will block you path otherwise. And although you can enter Umbral whenever you want, you can only exit umbral by finding certain exit points ot reseting yourself at a checkpoint. The Umbral realm will also have its own enemies, which appear as ghostly figures that will attack but as you remain in the realm, the enemies will become more present and stronger, so its dangerous to remain in that realm for too long. Its also worth noting that when you die in Axiom you will be transferred into the umbral realm and when you die there, that's you properly dead and you will lose your souls (or vigor as its known).
UMBRAL LAMP AND SOUL FLAYING
Another key item of the game is your umbral lamp, which will let you character traverse between the two worlds but it also can be used to gain access to platforms or unlock umbral entities that block your path. You can however also use the lamp for attacking enemies and using a technique called soul flaying, which will force an enemy briefly out of their body allowing you to attack their soul-like form, or you can even pull their form over a cliff, which when the enemy will recover its normal form, they will fall off the cliff. Nice!
RADIANT, UMBRAL AND INFERNO SPELLS
In the game, it uses three different types of magic for players that want to play as a caster, so you have the choice of radiant, umbral and inferno magic. Starting with radiant spells, they are very similar to miracles in the Souls games, where offensive spells will deal holy damage and resemble lightning and laser like beams, however you also have healing radiant spells that restore your hp. As for the umbral magic, this is more akin to like regular magic in the Souls games which has a blue light to it and is a mix of projectiles, magic weapons and weapon buffs. And lastly are the Inferno spells, which are basically pyromancies from the Souls games and again features mix of offensive projectiles and fire infused weapon buffs or damage buffs.
VESTIGES AND VESTIGE SEEDS
Another key aspect of the game are the use of its checkpoints, which are known as vestiges but they are somewhat sparsely found throughout the game and there will be long stretches of the game before you can reach your next vestige. However, as a way around this, you can use what is called vestige seeds, which you plant in areas known as flowerbeds, which will become visible when you see your umbral lamp glow. The only issue here is though, you can only plant one vestige seed at a time, so you need to be careful with your usage of them.
CHARACTER STATS
As for character stats, they are again quite similar to the Soul games, where your character has six stats to choose from to level up their character. So, the stats are strength, which you can level up to use strength based weapons, agility, which can be used to wield skill based weapons, endurance, which affects your stamina levels and equipment load. The other stats are vitality, which determines the amount of health your character has and also effects your equipment load, Radiance, which is used to increase your ability to use radiant spells and weapons and lastly there is Inferno, which is used to boost pyromancy spells as well as umbral ones. An important secondary stat also worth mentioning is called Mana, which is basically like your focus points bar in the Souls games and determines the amount of spells you can cast at one time, which can be replenished with the use of items called mana stones.
CHARACTER CLASSES
Moving onto the character classes, you will have a similar mixture to what you see in the Souls games of knight classes, warriors, sorcerers, pyromancers, hunters and the most difficult class, the condemned, which starts off with the lowest points of any class. So, you can choose between these different classes when you start the game and you can also later respec your character if you want to rejig your stats to fit your character.
XP AND VIGOR
Another aspect of the game is the use of XP (or experience points) which you will gain when you kill enemies, you will gain vigor, which is similar to souls in the Souls games, which is your currency for buying items or leveling up your character. Also similar to the Souls series, if your character dies then they will lose all their vigor and they will need to pick it up afterward they have respawned at the point where they died last, but if they fail to get it and die again, the vigor will be lost forever. Your required vigor level will also go up each time you level up your character but overall the level requirement remains quite low as I get up to 11,000 vigor per level after I had finished my first playthrough but then the vigor gained from enemies is also lower than you find in the Souls games.
ENEMIES AND BOSSES
As for the game's enemies, there is reasonable mixture of humanoid and monster enemies to be found throughout the game, which will vary in challenge from easy to downright difficult and areas can quite often become overwhelming to deal with as there plenty to be found! As for the bosses, again there is a variety of humanoid and monster bosses to fight and some of them can be very challenging whereas others can be pretty easy, which does highlight the game's somewhat inconsistent in terms of difficulty.
NPCS & SKYREST BRIDGE
And last of all, I will mention the NPCs in the game and there quite a few to be found here and there are some that will have their own quests that you can follow throughout the game. Some of the NPCs you will find are at the central hub of the game, which is known as Skyrest bridge, where you find NPCs such as Exacter Dunmire, who will give you a series of tasks to complete, Pieta, who can boost your character's healing item's potency and number of usages known as a Sanguinarix and Gerlinde, who is a blacksmith, who can upgrade your weapons.
GRAPHICS
As for the graphics, the game itself looks very impressive and it features a good mixture of environments that have plenty of good detail in their surroundings and the game also has a good colour palette as it offers some nice vivid colours in areas, which is a nice welcome to some of the more dreary coloured games out there. The character models are also pretty good in the game although they are not the very best out there as there are better ones but they are still good enough. The game however does suffer from significant performance issues on console and my Xbox Series X version, has serious frame rate dips at different areas and as the game has been patched, it runs even worse at times than it did when it was first released! So, not sure if that is to do with just poor optimisation or are the Xbox consoles just not up to the task of running this game (which does use the latest Unreal 5 engine). It most likely will be the game is just poorly optimised by its developers, which is a shame as these frame dips are pretty significant and do impact on the game's performance quite badly at times.
MUSIC
As for the game's soundtrack, it was composed by American composer Cris Velasco and Norwegian composer Knut Havenstroup Haugen and overall its a pretty good score with plenty of variety in its themes. And the score does have some standout moments such as the boss fight themes for Pieta, The Hushed Saint, the Skinstealer, the Lightreaper and the Spurned Progeny and even the main theme of the game itself is very good. So, overall I was quite impressed with the score's variety of styles and at times it sounded like I was listening to a mix of Souls games, The Matrix and even Doctor Who. So, the score is definitely one of the game's strongest aspects.
FLAWS
As for faws...yes Lords of the Fallen does have some worth mentioning.
For starters the game's difficulty level is very inconsistent at the best of times and it has to be said this game has hands down one of the HARDEST first main bosses ever in Pieta, as I was stuck on her two or three days alone! I mean this boss is way too hard for the first boss of the game and clearly the developers haven't heard of the concept of progressive difficulty and thought "Sod it! We'll just put a really tough boss first!" to mess with players.
The game is also very guilty of having way too many enemy ganks as you try as you often have to resort to running through areas, otherwise you will get massacred by a slew of enemies. And this is particularly bad in the umbral world areas where there are enemies such as reapers that carve you up or ravenous fascinators, which are basically mimics that are invisible and chunk most of your HP (if not all of it!) when try pick up what seems to be an item. So, as the game went on, I did find myself getting frustrated with the endless ganks and it was a game that managed to out Dark Souls II, Dark Souls II in its gankage.
Another of course relates to the limit checkpoints in the game as there are very few vestiges to be had in the game with only or two tops in each area. However you can of course use your vestige seeds to plant a seed in an umbral flowerbed and use that as a temporary checkpoint but you can only place one at a time and be careful that you don't run out of any as you progress although they are only 1200 vigor each, so its not too bad in that respect.
Another issue I had with the game was the disappearance of the one of the key merchants in the game, Thek-Ihir, who sells cures and resistance balms for different ailments such as poison, bleed, fire or ignite build-up as well as other useful items. However, at a certain point late on in the game, he will disappear forever and you will never be able to purchase anything from him again! So, I found this to be a really stupid decision on the developer's behalf, because it means you then need to try and form these items off specific enemies instead, which is nowhere near as handy or straight forward.
Then there are also some frustrating issues to do with the layout of the areas, as you can easily get lost in certain areas after a while and one such area for me was Forsaken Fen, which is a poison area and it took me forever to get through that area alone! I also spent alot of time running around trying to find an entrance into the Revelation Depths area, which you access via the Sunless Skein area but again the access point is far from obvious or easy to find. So, this game is definitely quite frustrating when it comes to navigating its confusing areas.
And then we have the issue of the enemy variety as there is simply not enough enemy variety in the game here and you will have seen pretty much the same enemies in each area over and over again as you progress. There are one or two new enemies included in the later areas but overall in the final areas of the game, I was just seeing the same old enemies and its a pity the developers got lazy with their choices here as more variety would have been a good thing.
Another problem is to do with one of the recent game patches where the developers decided to make the boss weapons go up to +10 yet they initially went only to +5. Now this might not sound like a big deal in itself at first but when I was using Pieta's sword (which is a great radiance weapon and one of the most popular weapons in the game) it was at +5 and after a while, it slowly dawned on me that it wasn't doing as good damage as it used to. Then I read by accident online somewhere on Youtube that Pieta's sword now goes up to +10, which baffled me and then I realised I could upgrade it past +5, which left me quite annoyed at the time. So, yeah, I felt this was a pretty pointless and annoying change from the developers, who as they go on, seem even less clued up as what to do with this game!
And lastly there are of course as I mention earlier in the graphics section, the technical issues with the game as it has some horrendous frame rate issues, where the frame rate literally at times slows down to a snailcrawl and even other times, the screen froze completely! And one of the worst glitchy areas in the game for me was the central hub, Skyrest bridge, which was frequently jittery and stuttery and quite frankly there is no excuse for releasing a game in this state and the developers really should have devoted more time to this one rather than put it out as the buggy mess it is and adopt the "we'll patch as we go!" attitude but sadly this game is just one example of a recurring theme these days with new game releases.
So, that's it for the flaws.
SUM UP
So, to sum up, Lords of the Fallen, for the most part is a very enjoyable Souls-like RPG, which offers plenty of hours of exploration, tough combat, decent boss variety and also pretty good visuals as well as fine soundtrack. The game however is plagued with technical issues, which can make it frustrating to play as can the inexhaustable enemy ganks, getting easily lost in areas as well as inconsistent difficulty with a ridiculously hard first boss, which will be a major roadblock for a lot of players to overcome.
However, if you can forgive it all its faults, then Lords of the Fallen is still worth checking out and for the most part, it remains a worthy and enjoyable Souls-like RPG.
So, I will rate Lords of the Fallen:
8 out of 10
So, that's it for now and I will be back hopefully a bit sooner next time with another post.
Until then its bye for now!
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