Lords of the Fallen Review

It looks like Souls and plays like Souls, but it’s not a FromSoftware game. It has the same name as the old Lords of the Fallen, but it’s a different game.

Lords of the Fallen is a soul-like action role-playing video game developed by Hexworks and published by CI Games. It is a successor to the 2014 video game of the same name and was released on 13 October 2023 for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.

The 2023 version of Lords of the Fallen isn’t a rerelease of 2014’s game, and neither is it a remake. It doesn’t cut a reboot either since that carries with it an implication of a strong familial bond between the two titles. This version can trace its convoluted and long-lived development back to the planned initially Lords of the Fallen 2.

I don’t really struggle to call this a sequel, spiritual or otherwise. It borrows elements of lore from the first game, but for all practical purposes, this could have been titled something entirely different. Perhaps it should have been.

For some reason, someone thought the name was worth keeping, which is a bit disappointing from a creative point of view. Lords of the Fallen 2023 is far better than the original and deserves to stand on its own. It’s much better than the previous one.

Lords of the Fallen is set a thousand years after the original event in a universe in which the sinister god identified as Adyr has returned, putting the future of mankind at risk. Players take on the role of the Bearer, a chosen warrior whose mission is to cleanse five tainted beacons to prevent Adyr’s ascension.

In this dark world, the beacons once stood as places of prayer for the ancient heroes known as the Judges, only for the beacons to be corrupted, and cleansing them is crucial in order to stop the influence of Adyr.

You make your character and pick a set of starter classes based on the usual combat stats like strength, dexterity, magic stuff, and magic stuff for wizards (called Radiance and Inferno); you’re dropped into a ruined kingdom. Your job is to carry a magical lamp and use its powers to cheat death and take down the evil forces of the demon god Adyr.

While Lords of the Fallen takes a lot of ideas from other games in the genre, its best and most unique feature is the use of two worlds you can switch between at any time. Axiom is the regular, physical world that most people see, while Umbral is a dark, creepy realm full of monsters and unsettling visuals, which you can access with a magic lantern.

As you fight bosses and knock enemies off ledges, you’ll have to explore both worlds, which adds a fresh twist to how you interact with the environment. For instance, you might find a broken bridge in the normal world, but switching to Umbral will reveal a strange, gray platform that lets you cross.

This mechanic changes almost everything about the game. In combat, hidden enemies become a real danger when you step into Umbral, and for exploration, it means each area has two versions. You’ll often need to go through the same section more than once to find everything you missed.

It’s clear to understand what makes Souls games so popular. It’s not just about being super hard or fighting winged female bosses. It’s about tight, skill-based combat, smart world designs, and facing off against terrifying monsters.

But Lords of the Fallen also falls into some of the genre’s worst habits, like having an overly dark atmosphere, frustrating platforming, and cheap tricks to make the game feel harder. Combat, checkpoints, leveling up, exploring, quest progress, finding lore, upgrading weapons, and level design are all taken straight from the Dark Souls playbook, with different levels of success and a few small changes here and there.

That’s totally fine, as long as you stick to the golden rule: if you’re not going to make it new, at least make it good. From there, Lords of the Fallen feels comfortably familiar, with controls and UI that are almost the same as Dark Souls.

You use light and heavy attacks, parry and manage your stamina; you heal using a limited number of flasks, level up your stats to improve weapons, and spend boss Remembrance to unlock unique gear. You move from checkpoint to checkpoint. If you die, you lose all your points, and it starts from the previous checkpoint, or you can call it a camp.

One unique addition is Wither damage; when you block, you take temporary damage that you can recover by attacking back quickly. But if you get hit again, that health is gone for good. This encourages you to play more aggressively rather than defensively, giving you a chance to get your health back what you’re about to lose.

This is Pieta, the first real boss in Lords of the Fallen. It’s pretty clear where Hexworks got their inspiration from, pulling heavily from the most popular parts of FromSoftware’s Souls games, specifically, Elden Ring’s most talked-about fight. Pieta is a perfect example of the game. The first boss fight was way harder than I thought, but as a souls-like game, this is normal.

After multiple tries and failures, I had to change some key binds as parrying with the “Shift” key is usual to me and sprinting with “V “. So after some death, I changed those key binds, and it all came together. Still, I had several failures. There is an option to ask for help from a knight, and that helped me get through the boss fight.

You’ll explore areas that check off all the classic Souls-like locations: rundown villages filled with zombie-like enemies, snowy ruins covered in ghosts, crumbling castles full of angry knights, and bloody torture chambers. The level designs are detailed and cleverly connected, with lots of hidden paths to find, but overall, the game’s progression is pretty linear.

The collectible maps offer artistic hints about where to go, which sort of helps with the sometimes confusing lack of direction and quests that rarely feel all that interesting. If you let your friend play this game in the middle of the playthrough, then he will surely think this is a Dark Souls game. The overall graphics and environment design are great, but it lacks a lot of lighting, and it’s very linear.

Where sound design is concerned, Lords of the Fallen doesn’t quite reach the same level of finesse as other games. While games like Elden Ring and Dark Souls have deeply intricate, emotionally charged music that elevates their themes, Lords of the Fallen seems to take a more understated approach.

The combat sound effects are top-notch, but at times, everything else can feel a bit flat, and the music doesn’t always complement as much as it should. Still, the ambient noise does wonders in putting the players within its world, even if, overall, the sound design isn’t quite to the standard set by its inspirations.

Unfortunately, Lords of the Fallen struggles to handle its big ideas on a technical level, as it has some pretty serious performance problems. Even with my Arc A770 16GB GPU, I frequently encountered stuttering and frame drops.

Other AAA games, like God of War Ragnarök, run smoothly on the ultra setting, especially during longer play sessions. At first, the game ran fine, but after playing for an hour, the frame dropped a lot.

It’s especially annoying when these frame drops cause you to take hits you could’ve avoided. I’m not usually one to complain about frame rates or small performance issues, but these problems were so constant that they were hard to ignore. The game has massive optimization issues.

Lords of the Fallen does have performance issues, though. It lacks that really refined sound design and polish its inspirations had. Flaws aside, this is a solid, challenging game with good combat and great exploration.