This game is fun and overall a soulslike that I find more accessible than many others in the genre. The parry and dodge mechanics seem much more forgiving than a game like Elden Ring or Dark Souls while the boss fights have been surprisingly almost TOO easy after I struggled to beat Pieta. Fortunately for me my favorite part of souls games is fighting the minions between boss fights which may sound silly as I really enjoy the combat and grind of souls games I just hate spending 5-10 minutes chunking a big health bar after memorizing an attack pattern. Thankfully it is saved by very strong combat. The fighting mechanics are fun and much more varied than similar games in the genre.

A lot of critiques I have seen of this game I find to be relatively fair critiques. The two worlds mechanic is the biggest selling point and also one of the biggest dissapointments. It sure isn't a Dishonored Time Travel or Titanfall 2 phase shift level of quality but it is mostly well done. It just begins to frustrate you once you realize that so much of the world is functionally identical except for key sections where you are clearly meant to switch worlds. There isn't any creative problem solving here it is just a method to force the player to dimension hop for a few minutes before immediately hopping back.

The critique of "too many enemies" is valid but I don't necessarily agree with it. Most of the enemies in this game are very easily dispatched and it is pretty easy to aggro only one or two enemies at a time. I feel like a lot of people are just sprinting into rooms and then getting swarmed and not being careful. Sprinting in this game has a huge aggro range and 9/10 my deaths have been due to me sprinting into a room like a dummy and then aggroing every enemy for 3 rooms around me. With all that being said I don't think it is an unfounded complaint. The devs definitely padded the difficulty by just spamming you with more enemies rather than making less enemies that were more challenging to fight. The worst examples of this are boss fights where the devs clearly knew the boss was too easy to fight so they throw ranged minions or cannon fodder at you to add difficulty. A game like Elden Ring didn't need this kind of difficulty padding because the bosses in that game stood on their own as a difficult beast to take down.

Overall I would say this game is B tier. I like it quite a lot personally but I can see how many long time souls fans will dislike it or outright hate it by the time they acquire the Pilgrims Perch key.

Estilo sem substância.

Enquanto esse jogo tem provavelmente os melhores gráficos técnicos do gênero inteiro, direção de arte fenomenal e um combate bem satisfatório, ele cai por terra em um dos dois pilares fundamentais dos jogos desse tipo.

A exploração no jogo é completamente MASSACRADA pela absoluta falta de noção dos game designers no que se refere a inimigos e densidade dos mesmos.
Tem MUITO inimigo no mapa, posicionados convenientemente nos PIORES lugares possíveis, eu nunca vi tanto arqueiro e cachorro junto, num mesmo lugar, em um soulslike. Tem mais arqueiro nesse jogo do que na parte inicial da Ringed City do DS3.
A quantidade é DEMAIS pra uma formula que foi pensada em volta do 1v1, e se os números não te sobrecarregam, o range deles vai. Eles não te perdem de vista, e se forem móveis, vão te perseguir por praticamente todo o mapa.
Eu sou daqueles que costumava limpar a área inteira antes de progredir, aqui isso simplesmente não é possível. Se tu for tentar, enquanto tu limpa, 2 arqueiros vão te ver, alertar uns cachorros, e inimigos atrás de caixas escondidas vão te gankar, e aí já era. Corre.
Sendo que tuas únicas opções são tolerar um game design terrível ou sair correndo, a maioria das pessoas, incluindo eu, preferiu simplesmente sair correndo por aí, e isso afeta diretamente a exploração. Inúmeros foram os itens e caminhos que eu perdi por simplesmente estar na pressa.
Isso é um problema estrutural, não de falta de polimento, mas de algo que foi feito pra ser assim, poderia ser arrumado com patches mas infelizmente parece que os devs não querem saber.

Uma outra falha tão grave quanto, é a falta de chefes REAIS no jogo. Foram advertidos 30 chefes. Eu devo ter perdido um ou outro, mas com certeza lutei contra a maioria, e afirmo com todas as letras: 2/3 dos chefes desse jogo NÃO SÃO CHEFES, são inimigos normais, com uma barra de vida na tela e uma musiquinha tocando de fundo.
Houve várias ocasiões em que lutei contra um chefe na luta dele, aí 10, 15 minutos depois, tava lá, ele como inimigo comum no cenário. Depois de um tempo, você já consegue até prever quem vai virar mob e quem não vai, tira o gosto de várias lutas.
As bossfights em si já são estranhas também, a maioria delas são simples, os inimigos tem pouquissimas variações e no geral, assumindo que você já conhece o gênero, não oferecem desafio de qualidade. Houve lutas de chefes PRINCIPAIS, que aparecem no trailer do jogo e tudo, que eu matei de primeira. Não acho que eu precise elaborar quanta coisa tem de errado nisso, num gênero que se propõe a ser desafiador. Vale também ressaltar que eu não me considero bom nesses jogos.
O jogo gira em torno de uma dificuldade artificial.

Existem até mesmo outros problemas que eu poderia trazer à tona, como a falta de uma trilha sonora memorável, formas baratas de te fazer morrer (ganks e a "mímica" do jogo), a opressividade excessiva do Umbral e como isso atrapalha ainda mais a exploração, performance técnica duvidosa em todas as plataformas, NG+ estúpido, coop estranho, mas acho que já foi o suficiente.

Estranhamente, porém, eu meio que apreciei as minhas ~50 horas no jogo. O combate é fluído e gostoso, a temática, de novo, pra quem gosta da linha, é FENOMENAL, o jogo é lindo de doer em praticamente todas áreas, muito falei do quão ruim é a experiência de exploração, mas o mapa em si é bom, ótimos atalhas e no geral, quando as coisas DE FATO fluem bem, é legal de jogar. Quando não fluem, é (quase sempre) só sair correndo.
Só fui realmente ficar P da vida com esses problemas, lá pelas 10 horas finais de jogo.

Creio que o jogo vá demorar uns 6 meses pra ficar verdadeiramente bom, mas só o tempo vai dizer.

Lords of the Fallen (2023) é um jogo bom, com potencial de, com pequenos ajustes, ser MUITO melhor, mas que infelizmente morreu na praia em função de estranhas decisões de game design.

Played from – to: (2023-10-17 – 2023-10-22) – PC controller.
‣ 6/10 – The only thing that has fallen is my boner.

‣ Thoughts: Coming fresh off Lies of P I immediately sensed a huge difference in quality of these souls likes in comparison. If Lies of P is as good as Bloodborne or Sekiro, The Lords of The Fallen is as good as Dark Souls II or Mortal Shell. If that shitty analogy doesn’t explain to you how I feel about this game allow me to reiterate.

The Lords of The Fallen is one of the worst souls-like games I have ever played. It fundamentally fails at almost every aspect of what makes these genre games fun and enjoyable. It has an overall cheap feel to it and just doesn’t feel right. Now is this a bad game? No, I enjoyed it because I love souls-likes, but this was a tedious and exhausting experience.

Firstly, this game is very easy. Once I got my build, not a single boss fight proved to be a challenge. The real difficulty lies in this games level design and enemy placement. It is awfully unfair. Most of the time you will be matched against multiple enemies with mixed fighting styles. They will also sit around hard to reach areas and just bully you. TLOTF loves to recycle previous mini-bosses and mix them up with the common cannon fodder. So, you will face elite enemies constantly and they will respawn each time you die. I found this to be a bland and doltish way of giving us enemy variety, because in theory there’s none. The amount of truly unique enemies you face can be counted on your hands and for a 20–30-hour game that is pathetic.

Secondly, the Umbral aspect of the game is tedious and heavily repetitive. If this was an optional way to explore levels, I would praise it but making it a necessity in almost every level is just obnoxious. Since enemies hit like trucks no matter how beefy you are, the extra life is very appreciated however, you are stripped of that most of the time due to the level design forcing you to go into Umbral mode to cross every corner.

In the end of the day, The Lords of The Fallen fails to replicate the Fromsoftware game formula and just copies its mechanics without understanding why they work so well. The interconnected level design is cute, but most shortcuts lead to nothing useful and vestiges (bonefires) are hilariously scarce. The story is hard to follow, but not in a fun way, but in a give me fucking context who’s who, instead of forcing me to watch shadow people talk in disconnected memory fragments way. TLOTF will go down as one of the more forgettable souls-likes.

This is definitely one of my favorite extremely flawed games I've ever played. At its core, Lords of the Fallen is a more than competent souls-like that had me addicted like any other game in the genre would. There is a lot going on in this game, and it is very overwhelming at first, along with just being pretty slow to start, so I would understand why the first part of the game might turn a lot of people off. Once I got going though, getting stronger, building my character how I wanted and discovering some of the later areas, I very quickly got really into the game and pretty much marathon'd it to the end.

The areas are huge, and FULL of secrets, often entire separate areas that you could easily miss that have hours of content and several bosses of their own. The game does not direct you basically ever, with so little explained that I was forced to look up quite a bit due to how easily it is to get lost in progression and have no idea where to go next. The game does fall into the 'don't tell you anything' trap of souls-likes probably more than any I've played, but luckily already there are plenty of resources out there if you get stuck to where I can generally overlook it.

There are several pretty massive flaws with this game, the most obvious and game-ruining being the technical issues that are pretty much always present, at times so bad that it will get you killed in-game. I played on Performance Mode on PS5, and have got to say it's one of the worst optimized games I've ever played on this console. Frame drops happen extremely often, textures do not load currently, sounds cut out, load times are weird, and there are a plethora of glitches and bugs throughout that are very unfortunately noticeable. Frame drops in boss fights were particularly awful, often causing me to miss-time a dodge or parry and get hit or worse. If these technical issues were not present, I can confidently say that the overall opinion on this game would be much more positive.

The game's boss fights are all pretty mediocre as well, with far too many that are just defeating regular enemies but with more health (like Elden Ring mini-bosses but less forgivable), and many that are just either boring are extremely obnoxious to fight. Hexworks also managed to make some of the most obnoxious enemy placements I've ever seen, making me absolutely lose my mind in some areas, particularly due to the seemingly infinite follow range and perfect accuracy from way too far that so many enemies have. The area design itself is really great, and the environments area beautiful, albeit a bit spoiled by the aforementioned technical issues.

Overall, though, Lords of the Fallen kept me extremely engaged from about 25% in to the end. Character upgrades are very satisfying, and once you figure out what everything does you'll see how great and in-depth it can be. Like I said earlier, there is a lot going on in this game, for better or for worse, but for the most part I found the depth to be quite positive and had a ton of fun with the Strength/Inferno build I decided to go for, particularly with the spell that is more or less just Blasphemous Blade's Taker's Flames from Elden Ring. I would very much look forward to playing a sequel or DLC to this game, and hope that as the developers work so hard on patches as they already have, people in the future will be able to enjoy the game even more. I would definitely recommend this to Souls-fans, if you think you'll be able to forgive some of the flaws.

8/10 (very generously, I just had a ton of fun with this game so I can't help it)

I don't even know what to say about this game TBH. I guess I'll give it a 3.5, but just know that it's a very low 3.5 because this shit is kinda all over the place and im rating this on a more overall level, as opposed to how I felt after I finished.

Probably the least accessible game ever, Lords of the Fallen (better known as Eldenborne: Dark Souls Dies Twice: Scholar of the First Sin) literally just assumes you already know how the other souls-likes work and doesn't bother trying to onboard new players, throwing you straight into a gauntlet of platforming and projectile spammers without so much as explaining what any of your stats mean (Souls players can figure it out obviously, non-souls players are completely left in the dark). Of course to make this fair, the damage balancing is also totally fucked for a starting area, where you just die in 2 hits to almost everything. Now personally I actually didn't find this that hard (Maybe because I am a DS2 enjoyer), and I actually kinda liked the section, but it's undeniably a horrible way to introduce people to a game and it's no wonder why so many people were immediately off put by it. Which is a shame because this game does have a lot of good stuff to offer. The levels are super dense, with tons of secrets and branching paths similar to DS1. The Umbral plane mechanic is pretty cool, essentially giving you a whole other level to explore. The combat is a little jank but mostly really solid, and there are a ton of really cool weapons to find. And for the first 15-20 hours, I was genuinely having a really good time, despite the rough edges.

But unfortunately the game just starts to fall apart in the 2nd half and it really does not justify its long runtime, with the main culprit being the very low enemy variety. If this game was only 20 hours, it would scrape by without too many complaints about the enemies, but being 30-40 hours, yeah that shit is not enough. I mean the final 2 levels literally just contain the same enemies you've been fighting since the very start of the game, with no real variation. And its clear they knew they had a problem with variety because their solution towards the end starts to become "Well IDK just put a fuck ton of them in this one small area, that counts as variety I think".

This game also loves to have "bosses" which are just big enemies with a health bar at the bottom of the screen. They're all really easy to fight and usually just end up appearing as a normal enemy literally 5 minutes later. To me that has massive "We made this game too big and need to fill space somehow" energy and its another reason why I think this should just be 10-15 hours shorter. Speaking of bosses, this game actually starts off decently with the first fight being good, and the next few being solid. Then for some inexplicable reason, the quality drops off a cliff and each boss starts to have a PITIFUL amount of health. It got to the point where I was literally able to just spam charged heavy attacks, and genuinely stunlock the bosses until they were dead (which often took less than a minute). I have no idea how the fuck this passed inspection, but it is truly baffling how poorly some of this game is balanced. Though even if they were better balanced, a lot of these bosses are just not good and the game ends with a super lame final boss which leaves a really bad taste in your mouth.

Of course the game has its fair share of technical issues too, with lots of performance drops, visual glitches, small bugs, and general jank.

IDK I wanted to like this game, and I kinda still do but I was so fucking over it during the final 5-10 hours. It's really hard to recommend to anyone who isn't a big souls fan, and honestly I don't even blame souls fans for not liking it. There is a lot of good stuff going on here, but man is it disappointing how hard they dropped the ball in some areas.

Oh yeah and the story stuff is just "What if we copied Dark Souls but made it lame, corny, and boring".

I want to preface this by saying I've not played the 2013 one, but was aware of it's short comings when held under the light of Dark Souls.

This game is fun. It's just not great. If you're a souls pilled like me, and you're not expecting Lies of P level of detail, you'll find that this game scratches that itch.

The overlaid world is amazing. I love the exploration factor when switching to the Umbral and fighting to survive in order to return to the normal world. There are a ton of little goodies when exploring which do an excellent job rewarding the player when they are curiously exploring the levels.

Why does the auto lock feature suck so much. That is a very significant problem and has given me much frustration.

Bosses, they're OK, even when considering their creative designs.

Upgrading weapons and one-hitting the fodder always feels satisfying.

let's make a Soulslike game except let's grab every idea people hated from Dark Souls 2 and make a full game out of it

what a great idea isnt it?

also Resident Evil 4 on Zeebo performs better than this on consoles, got this dropping to 12-16 fps and consistently stuttering on my XSX performance mode

it has good ideas, the crossplay and the multiplayer is fun, but very ironically despite it being a soulslike, it very much lacks a soul itself.

SO FAR I enjoy it. I really dont like that there are no weapon arts or anything making one sword different than another. I like the bosses and am trying to figure out where to go, I backtracked and found a winding path to a whole new area. I think Alex from the Angry Joe Show's rapid review is a good synopsis of what the game is. I recommend it if you are interested in burning some time in a dark souls environment.

Overall my experience was okay. The weapons are all the same. Maces do thier thing, no other interation changes the weapon. There are a LOT of weapons though. Some feel useless, others feel busted. Nothing totally mind blowing but definitely worth it on sale.

Pros
- Map design/exploração impecável
- Boss fights muito boas
- Combate excelente
- Variedade de itens, armaduras, armas e magias
- Mecânica de navegar entre dimensões muito legal

Cons
- Algumas poucas boss fights ruins
- Reciclagem imensa de inimigos
- Muitos chefes que viram inimigos comuns durante o jogo inteiro
- O jogo te vence no cansaço largando grandes quantidades de inimigos ao mesmo tempo

I’m glad souls likes are starting to be higher quality. That being said this game has its fair share of issues. Where this game really shines is the exploration, world design, and overall atmosphere. This game’s take on world design is reminiscent of dark souls 1, and in someways surpasses it. The main mechanic of there being two worlds that you can look in/travel between with the lamp is great for exploration and secret hunting. There’s also a wide selection of weapons, throwables, and magic for build variety. The boss design is very striking at times.

That’s pretty much it for the good. I enjoy dark souls 2, but the enemy count and placement is like darks souls 2 on steroids. The enemy spam, abundance of ranged enemies, and terrible enemy variety is probably the biggest thing holding this game back. If I had to guess I would say there is around 20 unique standard enemies in this game that get recycled throughout, and that absolutely does not cut it. The combat in this game is alright, but certainly doesn’t feel as refined as Fromsoft games. Don’t even get me started on the horrendous final “boss” of the game, which makes the deacons of the deep look like the pinnacle of boss design.

Overall I had fun with this game, but it is super disappointing as it could have been amazing, but just feels lazy in a lot of ways, like they made an amazing world and just filled it with mediocre junk

Visual: 9
Audio: 7
Gameplay: 5
Story: 6
Fun: 5

Overall: 6.4

I've beaten almost every single major souls-like release since 2015, i've made it a point to play one new souls-like (made by fromsoft or not) a year.

Lords of the Fallen is the only one I'm actively dropping, because of three reasons:

1. Confusing areas
I think most of my time in the game was spent actually trying to figure out where the fuck to go because the game does not give you many clues or hints as to where the fuck you are. Almost every single fast-travel system in souls-likes have features in place where it'll allow the player to know where they're going such as the location name or the region it's in. Lords of the Fallen does not do that. It instead has separate names for each bonfire that doesn't tell you where exactly it is, you just gotta go by the image to really know where you are.

2. Enemy and Boss design
The one thing a souls-like has to nail is this and quite frankly, Lords of the Fallen falls flat on its ass. Enemies are either laughably easy, mildly annoying or just flat out boring to fight. There's been numerous times where I've audibly said "Oh god, not that guy..." when I saw an elite enemy. I didn't say it because it'd be hard, I said it because I had literally just fought two others of the same kind and I'm sick and tired of it.

Bosses aren't much better either. May get better down the line but from where I got to, they were either dumb gimmick fights or just super predictable.

3. UI Design
It's 2023 and I do not know why the UI in Lords of the Fallen is so annoying to use. You have a literal legion of games to look at when it comes to designing your UI and you went for one that's trying to give you information in the most clunky and vague way possible.

Fuck this game, fuck CI games, Imma go play Lies of P instead.

Started out really fun with a fair amount of fun fights, but game peaked after the first beacon. You realise the game will just spam annoying monsters everywhere, usually hiding behind some boxes or a crevice for the rest of the game. Think Dark Souls II but exponentially worse. Having machine-gunning crossbow shooters, sometimes shooting grenades, just makes playing the game feel like trash and exploration feel like a chore.

Also found the levels to be too cryptic and all looking samey, so I usually got lost. The most common occurrence is opening a shortcut you don't know where it connects to, or receiving a key to doors you can't remember where to open. I don't care if it's "organic" or "soulful", i'd easily take Nioh's level design that has a locked shortcut next to every checkpoint because then I can roughly understand what's going on. The "dual worlds" feature, which I like, already complicates the exploration enough, no need to make it even harder.

Also liked that the boss fights had some puzzley elements, sadly there are too many fights that require you to just kill adds. Why?