Lords of the Fallen Review

Lords of the Fallen is the latest soulslike released by CI Games, the company behind the infamous title of the same name released a few years back. Now, they return to the genre with their newest take on soulslike — did they learn their lesson from its predecessor?

Starting off with the story, you play as a character chosen to wield a forbidden tool — the lamp. With this, you can travel between the realms of the living (Axiom) and the realms of the dead (Umbral), and you'll use your special powers to stop the resurrection of the tyrannical God, Adyr. This quest will take you through five different major beacons that you need to purify — such is the lampbearer's curse.

Though I genuinely enjoy the story, the storytelling is... well, for a lack of a better word, soulslike. By that, I mean that a lot of the dialogue is told in riddles, and some of the contexts you're going to need to understand the overarching narrative will be hidden in memory fragments you can find in the Umbral to listen to echoes of the past. The storytelling is a complaint I've always had with soulslikes, as the ambiguous narrative makes it difficult to care for the goal I am working towards — when I truly understood the meaning of the DARK SOULS story, it meant all the more. However, I had long since finished my first (and even seventh) playthrough by that point.

The same can be said for Lords of the Fallen, even if the story is pretty engrossing and feels less riddle-filled than FromSoftware's Shakespearean-esque writing. I didn't really understand what my goal was at the start, and it managed to elude me for hours, which isn't really that much of a negative, if you don't mind that sort of thing. I still stand that despite the quintessential nature of a narrative told in riddles for the soulslike genre, it isn't really a "good" thing.

Though the narrative won't stop you from getting to the entire point of Lords of the Fallen, and that's its gameplay. Everything you need for it to be called a soulslike is there: rolling, creating your character, panic rolling, flasks, character building, dying because you panic rolled... and though it closely resembles everything you'd need from the genre, I can't really say the team behind the game did a good job.

My biggest issue with the game encompasses my entire feelings towards the experience as a whole: it tries to be soulslike... too much. While by the book it's a perfect title to fit in due to its themes, it feels like a perfect DARK SOULS clone and enough to stand out from it, but therein lies its problems. It feels like throughout the development, HEXWORKS was scared to fall short of the genre and made a game solely based on textbook definitions of soulslike.

This isn't to say that the game didn't innovate at all — I genuinely enjoy some of the most unique things about the game the most. Umbral exploration is genuinely thrilling because it creates a sense of doom and urgency, where the longer you spend in there, the more dangerous foes you'll encounter. Mixed in with some mandatory Umbral areas, this is the tensest I've felt in a soulslike experience ever, with genuine fear and feeling like my time was really ticking by with every second I spent too long in the realm of the dead. With its exploration and unique mechanics, I really, really wanted to love Lords of the Fallen and have the perfect redemption arc after their 2014 release. But HEXWORKS didn't give themselves the opportunity to lean in on the brand that they wanted to give their game.

The easiest way to say this is that Lords of the Fallen is frankly too hard, but that's simplifying the flaws of the game too much. I don't want to reduce this review to "unfair and thus unfun" because there are moments that are genuinely thrilling and exciting; the difficulty is adequately tuned in terms of damage taken and damage dealt (at least, for the most part). Instead, what makes it so bad is actually minor issues and mistakes that slowly make it unplayable.

Let's start with the simplest of the bunch: the lack of Vestige locations (in terms of DARK SOULS fans: bonfires). There are a wide variety of areas that you'll encounter with plenty of foes that stand between you and your next safe place, but getting there really feels more like a punishment than the gameplay itself. This is partly due to the implementation of Vestige Seeds, which lets you create one of these safe havens at a flower bed — while at first I was smitten by the implementation of choosing whether I wanted to plant it or not, it lost its charm about halfway through.

HEXWORKS stops giving abundant flower beds and pretty much nullifies the existence of the Vestiges that don't require you to plant them aside from some at the beginning of each new area. The spacing out between flower beds to plant on started becoming ridiculous, and considering you have to pay 2,500 Vigor (which is your currency and experience) to buy each one, it very quickly syphons from your pockets and prevents you from levelling up. To put it into perspective, an early level costs right around the same amount, whilst later ones start costing upwards of 6,000 Vigor. The spacing out of the flower beds was problematic enough without it becoming essentially a necessity to use it every time because of the lack of Vestiges that you didn't need to plant, and I would have loved the system far more if it had been up to me to choose where these go instead, giving me the opportunity to find a safe haven amidst the hordes of foes that stand in my way.

It didn't help that I needed to buy them, but at the same time needed to use that to level up. It's not too much of a problem because, thankfully, as an RPG experience, you can grind out the Vigor you'd need to buy new ones and get as many levels as you want, but then farming becomes a necessity.

As I progressed through the environments, I found that Vigor was scarce to come across. Now, that's not to say that there weren't enemies — there's always a foe, or two, or five to fight against — but the amount of souls they drop feels negligible at best. The enemies don't drop enough of this currency/XP to compensate for the cost of new seeds, the loss of them when you die twice, the capability for you to level up, and upgrading your tools. Instead, I found that by returning to one of the earliest areas of the game (after just the second "main" boss), I got levels significantly faster than otherwise. Enemies drop right around the same amount of Vigor and I found more success returning to earlier places and clearing those than clearing the ones I was working on because — quite frankly — it wasn't enough to amount for the Vigor drain.

One of my biggest problems with Lords of the Fallen is the sheer amount of boss foes that later become common enemies you have to fight, sometimes at the same time. While there are arguments between those who love this mechanic and those who hate it, I stand somewhere in between both, where a moderate amount of this can be good, but in this case, it exceeds past levels I'm comfortable with. I know some enjoy it due to the feeling of reconquering a fight and seeing how far you've come, but the foes become significantly weaker and work more as a complex miniboss you have to fight... again, and again, and again.

This exacerbated one of the biggest problems the game has as well, which is a lack of enemy variety entirely. It may not go down to God of War (2018) level of bad, but it got to the point where no new enemies were introduced unless it was in the form of a boss that you would later refight a couple dozen times in the future. Exploring and getting to a new area lost its charm because I didn't look forward to seeing what new enemies I would encounter — I knew there would be very few new foes in favour of reskinned fights or miniboss refights.

Lords of the Fallen is also guilty of falling reliant on cheap trends that are only fun to fight against in moderation. Starting from your second area on to the end of the game, you'll find dozens of enemies hidden behind crates, walls, out of vision, baits, ranged foes, heavy-damage grabs a lá Mimics... anything you can think of, Lords of the Fallen likely did it too much. While I had a good laugh at getting ambushed or shoved off cliffs (and I found way too much enjoyment in the game by returning their kindness and shoving them off for a change), it became so common that it was repetitive. And that's what leads me to the final point: Lords of the Fallen failed to make me feel gratified... ever.

The game falls into repetitive loops, like a checkbox that needs to be completed before a certain area is considered done. Hidden foe behind a one-hit kill fall? Check. Going to the Umbral to open a shortcut to get to Axiom? Check. No Vestige points ever? Check. Refighting one of the various bosses you've fought as a common mob? Check. It stopped feeling like I was exploring any new areas and instead was stuck in a repetitive loop or replaying the same things with a slight reskin every time and an exaggerated amount of each gimmick repeatedly appearing throughout.

And this repetitiveness started to drain the fun from every area of the game. Every time I fought a boss that I knew wasn't a main one (of the big ones that you know are not going to repeat), I didn't feel that rush of gratification I should because their combos were predictable — they are supposed to be reliably killed later, after all. It removed that "soulslike" thrill of getting past a hurdle because I knew it wasn't the last time I'd have to face it. Even unique bosses would sometimes be repetitive, dull, or samey aside from a select few that had fun and exciting mechanics.

It feels like Lords of the Fallen questioned itself at every turn of the corner and forgot how to make itself genuinely fun. It felt almost like the mechanics were consistently put under question, and the team stepped back to ask, "How do we make this more 'soulslike'?" making them forget what makes an entry into the genre fun in the first place. The game punishes you for trying different playing styles that are high-risk and high-reward by diminishing the reward until it feels negligible; it forced me into old DARK SOULS habits of rolling through everything and discouraged blocking or parrying entirely. At the end of the day, I never felt like I was struggling with the fights or difficulty but instead the world-building — I consistently got lost, I couldn't find a good place to plant a Vestige Seed, and I was always fighting environmental hazards more commonly than foes.

It's a shame because, at its heart, Lords of the Fallen is such a great experience. Unlike Lies of P, it feels like a proper entry to a DARK-SOULS-esque soulslike, almost like a spiritual successor (though we already have ELDEN RING for that). But in practice, it fails through small development mistakes that make it feel almost like a passionless project — just consistently returning to the drawing board and reusing the same old tricks to make it a passable "soulslike".