I usually try to avoid giving negative reviews. Even when the game is mid or full of bugs and bad ideas, but at the same is still giving me fun, I prefer to give thumbs up, while pointing out inadequacies and everything that pisses me off during gameplay, without any constraints or filters. I believe thumbs down deserves only titles that are irredeemable, unsalvageable messes, that don’t have even one ounce of fun. Games are so broken at every level that cutting all of the bugs and bad ideas from it would leave us with a husk of the product.
And this is one of those titles. Lords of the Fallen is a disaster of the game. No matter from which angle I am looking, I cannot find ANYTHING that could save this from pits of hell. It has zero fun, not even bare minimum of any quality, and few and far between good things are too insignificant to even create any cohesive counter-argument against pure garbage this game tries to serve players.
Let’s skip obvious things, okay? This is souls-like, it has a huge amount of ideas borrowed from Dark Souls, like i-frames, stamina, health, limited healing, losing experience points after death, different types of gears, yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah… You know the drill, I know the drill, let’s proceed. Step by step, let’s dissect this disaster.
You boot up the game, select loadout and magic, watch detached from the rest of the story intro and start playing. And yeah, I am going to admit — the graphics look interesting. Today it’s maybe less impressive, but it is more than serviceable, even when drifting more towards generic territory. Once again this is a fantasy game, so expect stone castles, caves, graveyards, ruined temples, catacombs… Personally I really like the art direction of armors and weapons in this game, it reminds me of Chaos warriors from Warhammer fantasy battle or 40k — you know, spikes, razors, horns, edginess, all that jazz. It looks cool, albeit, again, generic. Have you played other fantasy games before? You already know how Lords of the Fallen looks and feels.
But then, someone on the dev team probably has a brain aneurysm, because they decided to put chromatic aberration on top. So everything looks blurry, out of focus and with distorted colours. Thankfully you can disable it, which I did after the first 30 minutes of gaming, because my head started to hurt and my eyes were literally sweating tears. If you are a game developer and want to put this ♥♥♥♥ in your game, be so kind, grab the keyboards and shove it in your a$$. Another cringe thing you must endure are NPC faces during conversations. I called them “empty faces” because they stare into nothingness without an ounce of emotion, and the only moving parts are their mouths. Thankfully you experience this sporadically, but this ♥♥♥♥ is like an uncanny valley for me. What you cannot disable is camera shake — every sprint, attack or dodge roll is followed by this obnoxious screen shake, so you can experience what it is like to be in the middle of the earthquake. It fck up readability of the combat. Why is this implemented? For immersion? Like I can appreciate it when I cannot see what is happening on the screen!
Let’s move on. Literally. You press the button and you feel like your character is moving through the mud. Everything, literally EVERYTHING in this game is slow and clunky — moving, dodging, attacking, casting spells, even opening doors or chests feel incredibly sloooooooow. And this is the major problem vast numbers of players have with this game, especially during combat. You move like a tank, not a person, even when you have a light loadout. I didn't check timings, but in LotF light dodge-roll feels like a normal roll in Dark Souls, while normal feels like a fat roll. I can equip a two handed sword and when I press the attack button, there is like 5 seconds until my characters finish attacking. I can literally take a nap between attacks. And I need to calculate every attack in advance to hit the enemy, because I cannot correct anything on the fly.
So, maybe use light weapons and armors? Nope, thanks to stupid design choices. If you are going to use light build, prepare to deal chip damage, so you can spend 10 minutes fighting one enemy, while you attack cannot interrupt them and set them off balance, while they're doing this with every hit, because your armor has not enough poise to protect you. Maybe rolling then? No, because even with light gear you still are slow, and i-frames are so small that 70% of the time you STILL GET HIT. So the only consistent tactics are getting heavy armor and trading hits with enemies. And the devs perfectly know this, because damage reduction is RIDICOULOUS. Basic enemies can deal you around 30 point damage if you have no armor, with the end game gear it will be reduced to only ...2. TWO POINTS. Every shield has highlighted on stat screen how much it can protect you from physical attacks. Majority of the shields have 100% protection, maybe less then 5 of them have 95%, two of three can tank only around 80%. And the best part? They are still useless, because if you try to hide behind them, you will have no stamina to attack, due to how much enemies deal damage to your stamina bar. The only consistent strategy here is put on the heaviest armor, don’t dodge, tank all damage and pre-swing with your heaviest weapon, because only them can set enemies off balance and therefore stop them from attacking you.
And you know what? If you think this makes the game harder, you are wrong. Lords of the Fallen is not hard at all, mostly because stupid idea behind how checkpoints work. You know how in Dark Souls you use a bonfire and all your hit points and estus flask are restored, while at the same time all enemies are resurrected? Not here. Activating checkpoint will only heal you, partially restore your potions, but what is more important, IT WILL NOT RESET ENEMIES. The only instance when enemies are brought back to life is when you die or change map. So exploiting this game is super easy. You can go, fight one enemy, lose health and potions, and after defeating him, you can go back to the checkpoint and replenish your resources at nausea until you clear the entire map. WHO DESIGNED THIS CRAP? The only downside is this will reset your experience' multiplayer — basically killing every enemy makes it go higher, so you can earn even more experience, but who cares. Just go to the map’ exit, and grind enemies again, it is faster.
A little more about enemies. And I am going to highlight one specific, that fully encapsulates the entire feel of combat. Those who have played this game, already know. There are these dudes with big tower shields and a sword, I don’t know their names, because I don't care. There is no consistent tactic against them. You want to roll under their attacks? Cool, you are too slow to stand up and attack them from behind before they turn towards you. Speaking of — they have literally one-frame turning speed, so forget about outmanovering them or backstabbing, they are too fast. Bashing their shields with big weapons, until they posture brake? Nope, you need to swing at them three times to break it, and you will not have stamina for the fourth attack. Magic? Well, if you are willing to run around them for a minute and half, waiting for your mana to regenerate, then please, do. The only semi-consistent tactic is to kick their shield once for a big chunk of the posture, then one or two attacks with a two handed weapon, followed immediately by a third attack so you can damage them before they regain balance and put shield up with what they can do in two seconds.
<The rest of the review is in comment section. This is a long one>
