gentlemen, believe me when i tell you this is one of the most overhyped games i have ever had the misfortune of playing in my entire life. i am a souls game freak; i love this shit, but i will take on anyone who says otherwise in hand-to-hand combat. please let me save you $60 by telling you the entire experience that is lords of the fallen.
after playing for 30 hours i can say i've never been baited this hard by a game before in my entire life. i waited months for this game after i first heard about it, and after beating it i wish i'd never known of it's existence. the only good thing about this game is that is pretty as fuck, except half of that credit goes to unreal engine itself. the world does look stunning, but that is literally the only positive thing i have to say about this game (the judge cleric fight was good too).
for starters, i have an extremely good pc and this game still ran like dogshit at times despite constantly tweaking the settings. this alone will filter out a ton of players who can barely run the game. one second your fps is locked to your refresh rate, then you turn around and the game turns into a stop motion picture for a few seconds. apparently they're fixing it, but the few patches they've shipped since the start have made negligible differences. i hope it gets better for others.
a dev replied to me on steam after i left a negative review, and instead of acknowledging that, he instead decided to suck himself off boasting about the 194 weapons and shields, 339 armor pieces, and the 3 different endings to the game. oh you mean the 194 weapons that have no combat arts or anything uniquely special about them? the weapons that take their class animations (spear, dagger, greatsword, etc) and copy/paste them over and over again for almost every weapon that has that type, effectively making them all the same? the armor pieces that despite having different stats seem to have almost no defensive impact at all? this game is R1 simulator for what the dev claims is 35-40 hours of gameplay, but is it REALLY that much gameplay?
no.
the game takes forever to get through for a lot of reasons. first off being the absolute disgusting amount of enemies for what is basically no reason. this game takes add spam to an entirely new level, and it makes the game so fucking boring. for over 80% of the game, you'll be fighting the same 3 enemies: a dog, a guy with two axes, and a weird snake thing with a crossbow. i am not even exaggerating, you will find these enemies within the first 2-3 hours of gameplay and you'll be killing them for the next 25+ hours, just with hp and damage scaling added on top. they will occasionally sprinkle in some other enemies, but within the first few hours of the game, you'll have seen probably 80% of the enemies you will for the rest of the game.
you will find a new area, kill a bunch of the same enemies over and over, die, then run past them to get back to where you were before because killing them all again would waste another 15 minutes of your life. obviously it’s normal in any souls-like game to run through a place you’ve already been because you know where you’re going, but you’ll end up doing this with new places because it gets so fucking monotonous to kill the same mobs in every new area. mountain area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. fire area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. snow area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. i truly wish i was exaggerating, but i am not.
the game fakes difficulty simply through the idea of, “fuck it spawn a ton of enemies.” it's not even meticulously thought out in an effort to be challenging, it's just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. every single enemy in this game is easy to kill 1v1, so they counteract this by spawning in hordes of enemies to prevent you from focusing on one at a time. if the game had good combat, okay sure, but it just doesn’t. not only is it clunky, but it’s too simple to allow you to do anything “flashy” and kill off a bunch of enemies at once. at some point if you’re being chased by too many people, it is borderline impossible to fight them because if you engage you will just manage to get stuck on one of the 7 billion different tiny artifacts that for some reason lock your character on seemingly nothing at all. i have never gotten “stuck” in a game as much as i did in lotf. there will be massive gaps that you think you can run through, only to get stuck on fucking air and die. if you don’t get stuck, be ready for the camera to decide to lock onto the guy hanging on a tree 40 feet away instead of the clusterfuck of enemies right in front of you. don’t worry though, once you die you get about 10 seconds to reflect on your mistakes before the equivalent of the “you died” text comes on screen, only to then have you wait another 10 seconds before respawning.
every encounter in this game feels like it takes place in the most cramped area imaginable. you will have so many encounters with mini-bosses on a bridge, a staircase, a hallway, or some other tiny ass area that is just so frustratingly small to fight in. you’ll end up focusing more on trying to leave yourself some room to maneuver through than actually fighting the enemy/boss itself. once you beat this “boss,” you can expect to just see them casually walking around the world as a new enemy to fight, except you won’t be actually fighting them because they’re meatshields and you’ll be too busy fucking running past everything anyway looking for the next vestige.
finding a vestige in this game was the most enjoyable part of it because of how fucking rare they are. i swear i would go over an hour in between finding them at times. there’s these flower beds where you can create your own checkpoint/bonfires which seems like a good idea, but you only get seeds from killing bosses or spending 5,000 vigor to buy them (which is a lot for the majority of the game). these seeds are a fucking precious commodity, but the flower beds are often placed in the shittiest spots and sometimes you just have to gamble whether or not you’re going to come up on a vestige soon and realize you wasted the seed. they aren’t even permanent either, so you might just place one down only to realize you don’t even need to be in that area anymore. just ran through a new area and have no heals left? luckily there’s a flower bed here to save… oh wait i don’t have a seed. let me die, go farm low level enemies, go buy a seed, then sprint past a bunch of enemies again to get back to where i was.
then there’s the bosses. honestly, most of them aren’t even that difficult which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a souls-like game. one thing most of them have in common is that they just have an assload of health and you, despite having an upgraded weapon, still always seem to do almost no damage. the fights turn into an endurance battle as opposed to being a genuine challenge. instead of “holy fucking shit this is intense” it’s just “jesus christ this is taking forever.” it’s usually the environment around you that is the hardest part to deal with, either through you getting stuck on a pebble on the ground or not being able to roll through the sedan sized gap beside the boss who for some reason always manages to back themselves into a corner of the arena.
my biggest complaint, and this is a big one, is that two of the coolest looking bosses in the entire game are fucking full on gimmick fights (not even mentioning the minor gimmicks in a lot of other fights). you just spent an hour running past enemies to find the boss? well luckily for you, this entire boss is just spawning the same enemies you’ve been fighting the entire game! to partially spoil the ending i got, the final boss of the fucking game is this insane looking god-like creature and the fight was fantastic… just kidding it’s a gimmick fight where you kill a couple glowing enemies and then the game ends and you don’t even get to fight the boss itself. i was fucking shocked when that happened. imagine deacons of the deep from ds3 or phase 1 renalla from elden ring as a final boss of a game. that’s what i experienced.
this is where the nerds show up and say, “ahem ackshully you didn’t get the full expewience of all fwee endings.” you know what? you’re right, let’s talk about that.
one of the other endings doesn’t even have a fucking final boss, it’s just the boss before the actual final boss i got, how is this any better? the “true ending” boss kind of just takes a handful of attacks from random encounters throughout the game and puts them in one boss with some new additions thrown in, so sure, there was some kind of effort there. at least you actually get to fight this one.
“oh so why didn’t you go for the true ending boss?”
you know i really would have loved to, but the best part is that i got hard locked out of the other two endings just a few hours into the game. killing a main boss opens up a beacon to be cleansed, basically the red pillars in the sky. if you cleanse even one of them, you are immediately locked out of one of the endings (inferno for sure, but some people think this locks you out umbral too). if you progress too far into the game without starting various npc questlines or miss even one of the 21 steps (not even joking), you get locked out of the other ending (umbral), forcing you into the most boring conclusion to a video game i’ve ever experienced (radiance).
oh that’s okay, i’ll just go into ng+ and get the other ending i wanted! well… remember the lack of vestiges? welp, there are no vestiges in ng+. none. no fast traveling to parts of the map other than your own custom checkpoints. i don’t even have any words for this, it’s genuinely just a fucking stupid decision. this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of what souls-like games require.
i cannot believe i even wrote all of this out of pure frustration. i genuinely could keep going and i might edit this to add more but i am just tired of giving this game space in my head. despite how angry souls games make me, i actually love them, but lotf misses the mark so many times it makes you wonder if they even knew what they were aiming for.
after playing for 30 hours i can say i've never been baited this hard by a game before in my entire life. i waited months for this game after i first heard about it, and after beating it i wish i'd never known of it's existence. the only good thing about this game is that is pretty as fuck, except half of that credit goes to unreal engine itself. the world does look stunning, but that is literally the only positive thing i have to say about this game (the judge cleric fight was good too).
for starters, i have an extremely good pc and this game still ran like dogshit at times despite constantly tweaking the settings. this alone will filter out a ton of players who can barely run the game. one second your fps is locked to your refresh rate, then you turn around and the game turns into a stop motion picture for a few seconds. apparently they're fixing it, but the few patches they've shipped since the start have made negligible differences. i hope it gets better for others.
a dev replied to me on steam after i left a negative review, and instead of acknowledging that, he instead decided to suck himself off boasting about the 194 weapons and shields, 339 armor pieces, and the 3 different endings to the game. oh you mean the 194 weapons that have no combat arts or anything uniquely special about them? the weapons that take their class animations (spear, dagger, greatsword, etc) and copy/paste them over and over again for almost every weapon that has that type, effectively making them all the same? the armor pieces that despite having different stats seem to have almost no defensive impact at all? this game is R1 simulator for what the dev claims is 35-40 hours of gameplay, but is it REALLY that much gameplay?
no.
the game takes forever to get through for a lot of reasons. first off being the absolute disgusting amount of enemies for what is basically no reason. this game takes add spam to an entirely new level, and it makes the game so fucking boring. for over 80% of the game, you'll be fighting the same 3 enemies: a dog, a guy with two axes, and a weird snake thing with a crossbow. i am not even exaggerating, you will find these enemies within the first 2-3 hours of gameplay and you'll be killing them for the next 25+ hours, just with hp and damage scaling added on top. they will occasionally sprinkle in some other enemies, but within the first few hours of the game, you'll have seen probably 80% of the enemies you will for the rest of the game.
you will find a new area, kill a bunch of the same enemies over and over, die, then run past them to get back to where you were before because killing them all again would waste another 15 minutes of your life. obviously it’s normal in any souls-like game to run through a place you’ve already been because you know where you’re going, but you’ll end up doing this with new places because it gets so fucking monotonous to kill the same mobs in every new area. mountain area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. fire area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. snow area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. i truly wish i was exaggerating, but i am not.
the game fakes difficulty simply through the idea of, “fuck it spawn a ton of enemies.” it's not even meticulously thought out in an effort to be challenging, it's just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. every single enemy in this game is easy to kill 1v1, so they counteract this by spawning in hordes of enemies to prevent you from focusing on one at a time. if the game had good combat, okay sure, but it just doesn’t. not only is it clunky, but it’s too simple to allow you to do anything “flashy” and kill off a bunch of enemies at once. at some point if you’re being chased by too many people, it is borderline impossible to fight them because if you engage you will just manage to get stuck on one of the 7 billion different tiny artifacts that for some reason lock your character on seemingly nothing at all. i have never gotten “stuck” in a game as much as i did in lotf. there will be massive gaps that you think you can run through, only to get stuck on fucking air and die. if you don’t get stuck, be ready for the camera to decide to lock onto the guy hanging on a tree 40 feet away instead of the clusterfuck of enemies right in front of you. don’t worry though, once you die you get about 10 seconds to reflect on your mistakes before the equivalent of the “you died” text comes on screen, only to then have you wait another 10 seconds before respawning.
every encounter in this game feels like it takes place in the most cramped area imaginable. you will have so many encounters with mini-bosses on a bridge, a staircase, a hallway, or some other tiny ass area that is just so frustratingly small to fight in. you’ll end up focusing more on trying to leave yourself some room to maneuver through than actually fighting the enemy/boss itself. once you beat this “boss,” you can expect to just see them casually walking around the world as a new enemy to fight, except you won’t be actually fighting them because they’re meatshields and you’ll be too busy fucking running past everything anyway looking for the next vestige.
finding a vestige in this game was the most enjoyable part of it because of how fucking rare they are. i swear i would go over an hour in between finding them at times. there’s these flower beds where you can create your own checkpoint/bonfires which seems like a good idea, but you only get seeds from killing bosses or spending 5,000 vigor to buy them (which is a lot for the majority of the game). these seeds are a fucking precious commodity, but the flower beds are often placed in the shittiest spots and sometimes you just have to gamble whether or not you’re going to come up on a vestige soon and realize you wasted the seed. they aren’t even permanent either, so you might just place one down only to realize you don’t even need to be in that area anymore. just ran through a new area and have no heals left? luckily there’s a flower bed here to save… oh wait i don’t have a seed. let me die, go farm low level enemies, go buy a seed, then sprint past a bunch of enemies again to get back to where i was.
then there’s the bosses. honestly, most of them aren’t even that difficult which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a souls-like game. one thing most of them have in common is that they just have an assload of health and you, despite having an upgraded weapon, still always seem to do almost no damage. the fights turn into an endurance battle as opposed to being a genuine challenge. instead of “holy fucking shit this is intense” it’s just “jesus christ this is taking forever.” it’s usually the environment around you that is the hardest part to deal with, either through you getting stuck on a pebble on the ground or not being able to roll through the sedan sized gap beside the boss who for some reason always manages to back themselves into a corner of the arena.
my biggest complaint, and this is a big one, is that two of the coolest looking bosses in the entire game are fucking full on gimmick fights (not even mentioning the minor gimmicks in a lot of other fights). you just spent an hour running past enemies to find the boss? well luckily for you, this entire boss is just spawning the same enemies you’ve been fighting the entire game! to partially spoil the ending i got, the final boss of the fucking game is this insane looking god-like creature and the fight was fantastic… just kidding it’s a gimmick fight where you kill a couple glowing enemies and then the game ends and you don’t even get to fight the boss itself. i was fucking shocked when that happened. imagine deacons of the deep from ds3 or phase 1 renalla from elden ring as a final boss of a game. that’s what i experienced.
this is where the nerds show up and say, “ahem ackshully you didn’t get the full expewience of all fwee endings.” you know what? you’re right, let’s talk about that.
one of the other endings doesn’t even have a fucking final boss, it’s just the boss before the actual final boss i got, how is this any better? the “true ending” boss kind of just takes a handful of attacks from random encounters throughout the game and puts them in one boss with some new additions thrown in, so sure, there was some kind of effort there. at least you actually get to fight this one.
“oh so why didn’t you go for the true ending boss?”
you know i really would have loved to, but the best part is that i got hard locked out of the other two endings just a few hours into the game. killing a main boss opens up a beacon to be cleansed, basically the red pillars in the sky. if you cleanse even one of them, you are immediately locked out of one of the endings (inferno for sure, but some people think this locks you out umbral too). if you progress too far into the game without starting various npc questlines or miss even one of the 21 steps (not even joking), you get locked out of the other ending (umbral), forcing you into the most boring conclusion to a video game i’ve ever experienced (radiance).
oh that’s okay, i’ll just go into ng+ and get the other ending i wanted! well… remember the lack of vestiges? welp, there are no vestiges in ng+. none. no fast traveling to parts of the map other than your own custom checkpoints. i don’t even have any words for this, it’s genuinely just a fucking stupid decision. this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of what souls-like games require.
i cannot believe i even wrote all of this out of pure frustration. i genuinely could keep going and i might edit this to add more but i am just tired of giving this game space in my head. despite how angry souls games make me, i actually love them, but lotf misses the mark so many times it makes you wonder if they even knew what they were aiming for.
7 Comments
Dang that's a shame, safe to assume lies of p is better?
That's probably the spiciest review I've read in my entire life
so real, can't believe John Lords baited us all.
@NOWITSREYNTIME17 i'd definitely say p is worth your time when compared to lords
rhill [developer] Posted: 14 Oct @ 2:13am
Hey there, sorry to hear you think the game price doesn't match exactly with what you were expecting. We based the price on similar games in the market, while also taking into account the title’s high quality production levels. While we anticipate a straightforward playthrough to take a minimum of 35-40 hours, this time significantly increases if you’re looking to complete every aspect of the game, from finding all of the 194 weapons and shields, 339 armor pieces and unlocking all the various achievements or complete the 3 different endings.
Hey there, sorry to hear you think the game price doesn't match exactly with what you were expecting. We based the price on similar games in the market, while also taking into account the title’s high quality production levels. While we anticipate a straightforward playthrough to take a minimum of 35-40 hours, this time significantly increases if you’re looking to complete every aspect of the game, from finding all of the 194 weapons and shields, 339 armor pieces and unlocking all the various achievements or complete the 3 different endings.
Bro really used the correct essay structure for his rant, and put more effort into this than the devs put into the game
CheesyChip
7 months ago