Looking at: Lords of the Fallen

Imitation...

Conversation trees are a nice addition, but they don't do much to change the game.

Ok, let's get this out of the way right now. LotF is a blatant, BLATANT attempt to ape the tough-as-nails style of the Souls series From software have previously released. We all on the same page on that? Great.

It's ballsy for a game to attempt to be another game, and it's even ballsier to try and take on a series as well loved as the Souls games. Does LotF live up to it's Eastern cousin, or is this one death not worth respawning from?

Long Winded

Plenty of armor and weapons choices allow you to customize Harkyn however you want.

The setup for LotF is that you are Harkyn, a former prisoner that's been gang-pressed into service as part of an expedition to a remote abbey. The abbey is over-run with demonic creatures known as Rhogar, and it's up to you to stop their incursion and push them back to their world, pretty much single-handily. There's some minor twists that you'll see coming a mile away, and some choices that change the outcome, but it's all fairly straight forward and delivered in such a blunt manner that it's impossible not to follow.

This sort of sets the tone for LofF's attempt to mimick the Souls series, and it's repeated failures, often spectacularly. Where the Souls games were always content to drip-feed story through the use of item description and background details, LotF fires the plot at you double barreled and makes damn sure you know what's going on through repeated use of cut-scenes and dialogue trees, two things the Souls games have almost none of.

The issue with all of this is that the story isn't good, in fact it's pretty awful. I had to look up the main character's name since they don't say it in-game for a few hours, and I couldn't even tell you any of the other character's names. Compare that to Dark Souls' roster of memorable characters like Patches, Andre the Blacksmith, or the Knight Solaire and it just falls completely flat. Even with the addition of player choice, the plot never goes anywhere interesting, and what should serve as justification for your actions just gets in the way and slows the experience down.

Slow and Steady

Bosses are truly grotesque, and show some great creepy design.

Not that the gameplay itself keeps up a good pace. LotF is an incredibly slow and tedious game to play, even when using a light equipment set. Harkyn moves like a brick shithouse, and the weapon animations are so slow you'll need to add a few seconds to whatever mental math you're working out in combat. Not all weapons, mind you, just the ones that do any damage whatsoever to the spongey enemies that plague your path. Just walking around, even in light or medium armor, felt sluggish, and it's a damn good thing the levels in LotF are so small because trying to move Harkyn across a huge open field would be a worthy test of patience.

Enemies themselves don't really help at all. They're well designed, sure, with some really grotesque looking abominations bolstering the ranks, but there's an overall lack of variety to them, and even several hours in I was still facing off against literally the first enemy in the game. Worse, is that the enemy design and combat in general seem to aim more to annoy rather then challenge. Enemies don't always alert you of their attacks, and so, so many attacks either stun-lock you or break your guard instantly. There are several enemies that instant-kill you no matter what, as well as enemies that attack using damage-over-time attacks that wear down your health. For every fair, well paced fight, there's three of so instances where the game throws a bunch of foes at you simultaneously, and the non-linear but-not-really design of the game means you can spend a lot of time and resources battling enemies that you don't need to because they're guarding a locked door reserved for several hours later.

That's the whole underlying issue with LotF, is that the whole thing is so goddamn aggravating, but with no payoff. I rarely felt good after defeating a tough enemy, and at best I'd feel exhausted and angry, not satisfied in any way. Bosses weren't challenging, they were just annoying, with some of the worst hit detection I've seen in a long time. There's a mid game boss that could bash me from across the arena, but his actual weak spot was smaller then my character's head. This wasn't an exception either, as I found hit detection to be a regular issue as my attacks flew through enemies, and things I was sure I dodged slammed into me full force.

Proper Gothic

Killing a boss does... something to Harkyn.

If there was one thing I liked about LotF, it's the art style. I'm a sucker for gothic looks, and LotF reminded me of Warhammer in the best way possible. Armor and weapon sets especially made me giddy, and I genuinely enjoyed the look and feel of the various equip-able items. It seemed like no matter what I put on Harkyn he always looked like an unstoppable badass, and that made me feel, briefly, like a badass myself.

Overall the game looks pretty decent. There's great smoke and lighting effects that help to sell to mood, and enemies look grotesque enough to make you want to kill them. The monastery itself looks proper old-school gothic, and the realm of the Roghar looks alien and frightening. Character models don't fare nearly as well, as they all look terrible, and lip synch was hilariously off, although I'm willing to be that's at least partially a translation issue from German to English.

Audio, however, doesn't help LotF at all. Weapons don't sound as weighty as they feel, especially because they're going so fucking slow it feels like they're made of bedrock. Clangs, smashes, and all other weapon sounds are just tinny and un-fulfilling. That's if they don't cut out randomly, like most of the other sound effects. It's particularly jarring when you walk through a door way and the super loud sound effect that was in the background a second ago just cuts out for no reason because you're now in a different area.

Voice work too, isn't great. There's nothing overly wrong with any of it, but it's all so bland and generic that I'm actually struggling to remember any one character that stood out. Harkyn is any gruff bald white dude voiced by Not-Nolan North/Troy Baker/Steve Blum/Roger Craig Smith. Other then that, there's a tough-as-nails action girl, some old dude, some other old dude that's obviously evil, and a host of righteous crusaders that make you want to hate them instantly.

Dialogue, like sound effects, cuts out randomly, and it reminded me in the worst way of The Witcher 2's endlessly repeating dialogue, only instead of running through an entire conversation a million times, this would be an instantaneous restart because my character moved an inch to the left of the dialogue's trigger area. Overall, LotF has some of the weakest sound design I've seen in a long time, and I eventually found myself just listening to music while playing the game, rather then suffering through the game itself.

...is the best form of flattery

The design looks like Warhammer in the best way.

I think, to a certain degree, I'm biased against LotF, because of my love and respect for the Dark Souls series. If the intentions of the developers were to just simply ape From's masterpiece, then it's a noble attempt. They even tried to change things up, like how the longer you go without using a checkpoint the higher your XP multiplier gets, creating a risk/reward system as you move forward. And, compared to most other modern RPGs, LotF at least tries to challenge you, rather then giving you the world on a silver platter, it makes you fight for your fun.

But it's a fun not worth fighting for, and it's a world not worth saving. The worst part of LotF is that playing it just made me want to go back to playing Dark Souls again. When your game is so mediocre that I'd rather just play a completely different game, then it's a game I'm going to forget about and never play again. At the end of the day, Lords of the Fallen just isn't as good, isn't as polished, and isn't nearly as enjoyable as Dark Souls is. Maybe they can solve that with the recently announced sequel, but for now this is one imitation that's not worthy of the original.