Fun? That's a stretch. Lords of the Fallen manages to achieve new lows in game design, particularly with its abysmal camera system that seems intent on inducing rage to the player. Hitboxes are laughably erratic, while the physics and collision detection make navigating the environment a nightmare. Walls and fences suddenly become intangible barriers to enemies weapons, robbing you of any sense of immersion.

The new systems introduced only compounds the frustration. Prepare to be blindsided at every turn by enemies lurking in the most nonsensical hiding spots. The developers' idea of challenge boils down to inundating you with hordes of enemies and subjecting you to relentless ambushes, devoid of any strategic depth. Some enemies sometimes will spawn out of nowhere and one-shot you. It's as if they're determined to punish players for daring to engage with their game.

The 'vigor' (read: souls) I accumulate and lost due to game and camera glitches border on the absurd, I could've probably gone like 30 more levels with it. It's a testament to the game's lack of polish and attention to detail. Save yourself the headache and steer clear of this mess of a souls-like experience, put your money to good use.

This game is a bit of a mess that is carried by its co-op features and if it was only single player I would probably give it a 1.5/5. You get easily lost with the lack of map, there are frame rate, crashing and graphics issues that are far too common, and a lackluster weapon variety. The fact that only the host gets story progression and the guest can't see 95% of the loot ruins the experience and leads to one person being under-leveled unless you want to play two playthroughs.
If you think you would have fun taking down hard bosses with a friend in co-op then it's worth getting on sale, otherwise don't bother.

T̶h̶e̶ Lords Of The Fallen 2̶ development, almost a decade long, started right after the first as a sequel from the original studio CI Games. Later it was canceled, and continued by Deck 13 with the project scope changed to open-world. After being canceled again, it was lastly revived by Hexworks. All three companies are part of CI Games.
The title, rumored as Lord of the Fallen 2, on PC has the executable called LOTF2, and the final product is 100% a direct sequel. Announced as The Lords of the Fallen, before launch it was renamed to Lords of the Fallen - identical to its 2014 namesake.

The devs clearly love the Souls genre, and with 5 heavy-hitters From Software titles out in the 9 years between the two Lords of Fallen, one would have hoped they learned from them, just like From Software improved their games after each release.
With plenty to choose from, devs took the sequel status and went to town with it getting inspired only by Dark Souls 2, and although I can see some ideas being inspired by later titles, the end result was passed through the same mediocreness and frustrativeness filter before it got into the game.

Fallen "Soul"

Running on UE5, while performance has been not ideal, devs had some good calls like mixing real-time and legacy shaders. Between lumen and nanites, surrounded by a cartoony-looking skybox, the game looks quite detailed and realistic but lacks a strong art direction and sense of style. The level of detail although impressive, ends up being extra noise.

The character creation lacks many sliders and offers little choice with the defaults. It starts by merging three faces to make your own, and not allowing you to customize any of the preset components but the default. Even the eyes, instead of heterochromia the secondary color option is for the pupil, and the same as the eye by default, giving an uncanny look to these already lifeless eyes.

The UI and menus have no consistency in size or function. They're very busy, not properly aligned, and lack basic functions like sorting items, or confirmation before transactions. Lastly, there are maps to find but are just doodles of the areas, and serve no addition to exploration.

The exploration of the world falls short of understanding the format of the game they dared compare to. I could count 2 shortcuts between areas, but nothing even akin to Sekiro, let alone Dark Souls 1. Maps are covered with doors that can't be opened and will offer shortcuts that often save you less than a staircase. Filled with platforming, I was never certain I could make a jump, likely because of the closeness of the camera and lack of FOV options. The character often gets stuck, especially on nanites. The lack of linearity in the exploration is admirable, but the steep difficulty curve and NPC quests breaking from entering a map are not.
Main checkpoints are often far from each other, and although players can make their own in designated spots, a more thought-out experience with normal checkpoints over a superfluous extra mechanic would have been better.

Umbral, although an interesting idea, is entered by dying willingly or not, and only adds tedium with the constant enemy spawn and bland-washing area's aesthetics covering everything with its creepy bones and bits. Just like a Detective Vision, it forces to constantly check if there are secrets, paths in the gaps of the maps where a bridge is missing, or anywhere there is a body of water. Ways to return to the world of the living are not rare, and since it recharges your extra life, it's welcome. When remaining in Umbral too long a "terrifying" reskin of a basic enemy with 20x the health and hyper-armor will hunt you down.

Devs often chose the cheapest way to add difficulty, with perfect snipers at any distance, enemies behind corners at all times with no window to react, and areas filled to the brim with dumb enemies that will overpower you just in quantity over wits. Most of the enemies, of which there is little variety of, can't even understand your placement vertically often falling to their death trying to reach you.
A hidden bar fills when attacking enemies and will grant them hyper-armor allowing them to tank your hits and respond. While hyper-armor is not new to the souls genre, it's frequently given on specific attacks, not assigned at random, especially in a game that does not allow to cancel the animation queue.

Bosses are all forgettable and often have minor enemies with them for added difficulty in arenas that are just flat. Only the second boss, heavily inspired by Malenia from Elden Ring, is worth mentioning for being an unfair wall. Most disappointingly, many mini-bosses become normal enemies right after their fight

Armors look anonymous yet have some strong design choices, like a belt made of severed hands. All suffer from clipping elements even in full sets and the character, with normal proportions, two-handed will oftentimes have the armpit clip out.

Weapon movesets are identical between all weapons of the same family reducing weapon selection down to numbers, with at best 6-hit combos and transition attacks between one and two-handed. Dual-wielding is an option, although limited to 3 movesets.
Combos have no hit-drag, animations are not clear and there's no concept of motion value, instead increase the damage of X on each consecutive hit based on weapon type, i.e. +5 for Greatsword.
Throwables, ranged weapons and casting tools share all the same slot, forcing you to either choose one or constantly switch.
Parries won't open the enemy to an attack, instead will lower their posture, and when broken, a riposte does little to no extra damage. It's not possible to backstab at all.
Using the lantern, enemies can have their soul pulled out for a damage window but will attack immediately once finished. Useful to show them off the edges for when they return to their bodies.
Apparently, devs have listened to the feedback of veteran players on the matter of animations, which somehow led to not even including consistent fall protection when attacking like in Elden Ring, who did not even need it.

Even when it comes to the co-op, the saving grace for me, after bolstering how it had the best co-op system of the souls genre, the only good addition are not being kicked out after a boss, and the shared enemy loot. While it was nice exploring without interruptions, the client has a very tight tether to the host making "seamless" a synonym for a glamourized dark fantasy conga.

Lor-meh

With a world relying on lore, elements must have a reason to exist, and it's important to build the lore with few elements that are deeply connected.
There is no explanation for most of what you'll see, starting from the giant hand-shaped mountain - of which this title never even speaks of - to the permanent eclipse in the game.
The story of the world is told with "memories", stills of a moment, around the map, frequently with no dialogue. NPCs, usually over-acted, talk often of their objectives exclusively, adding nothing about the world they're in.
Most descriptions are locked behind a stat requirement, hiding its content and leaving only the first line available, which is a different wording of the object name. The descriptions I could read often add more to the plate instead of explaining what's there already.
This world is not speaking to you, but the final boss is, and for 5m. Uninterruptedly.

Conclusion

I can see the devs constantly updating the game, improving performance, promising more free content and QOL additions, but that will never change the overall experience.
I left much out because of the character limit, and whereas I know my review focused on the negative, I still find myself suggesting it with my reservations, because it's not bad, it's just...not good.

5.9/10

O combate tem movesets repetitivos e meio desengonçado, mas a exploração do jogo é o ponto mais forte dele com a ideia de explorar 2 mundos ao mesmo tempo, sem dúvida uma das melhores explorações do gênero.

O jogo sofreu com problemas tristes desde seu lançamento, com a performance sofrida e muitas travadinhas. Também tinha muito mob e os arqueiros eram todos snipers de elite, o que salva é q a desenvolvedores não abandonou o jogo e posso dizer q ele roda liso hoje, além de ter tido muitas melhorias na qualidade de vida, único problema grave do jogo que ainda persiste é um NG+ quebrado em relação ao balanceamento do jogo, os bosses têm cerca de 4 a 5 vezes mais HP mas é impossível vc aumentar seu output de dano mais de 2 vezes oq tu terminou a sua primeira jogada fazendo as lutas de chefe ficarem monótonas com bosses bucha de dano.

Independente dos problemas, acho q esse é o melhor Souls Like não feito pela from software tendo muito mérito próprio, e mostrando como um bom sistema de coop pode funcionar nesse jogo

Very good game, but...

- a lot of crashes
- lost a savegame because of a crash after 20h(quiet a few people with the same problem) --> support needed very long for a very unsatisfying answer
- instead of patching the crashes they seemed to be more interested to patch unimportant stuff
- later bosses partially boring
- last boss is so underwhelming - I don't know how they could have thought: Hey this is a good end fight.

I liked the 2 worlds system and after some patches it was not filled with too many enemies.

This could have been a much better game, if it came out polished. Lies of P is 2 classes better.

Me ha gustado Lords Of The Fallen, pero carga una serie de problemas de la época DS2/Bloodborne que se esperarían superados para un juego de 2023; masificación de enemigos, bosses que te encuentras como enemigos comunes en la siguiente zona, one-shots que a veces ocurren a veces no, problemas trambolicos de camara (encima en este caso esta muy cerca del pj). El mapeado es muy caótico para un juego del estilo.

Estéticamente, para mi, es un 10 y la historia, aunque manida, interesante, invita muy bien a los NG+ no solo por los 3 finales, si no por todas las quests y "nuevos" bosses relacionados a cada uno.

Disfruton a la par que frustrante.

One of the things that has worried me about FromSoftware's success with their games is that too many developers would try to ape the format at the expense of their own ideas. Lords of the Fallen is the poster child for these concerns. The umbral plane system that lets you traverse between the world of the living and the dead should have been this game's chief mechanic, but instead it feels like it's sometimes at odds, and sometimes forgotten for the sake of the game trying its best to be an annoying soulslike instead.

If anything, the game isn't committing to its weird ideas enough? For all the complaining about things like how much anxiety stuff like the consumable checkpoint system i.e. vestige seeds cause (Which would actually be fucking awesome, for the love of god please bring back some tension when exploring levels in these sorts of games), the illusion falls away when temporary checkpoint spots are so frequent, and the one place you can always teleport back to is also the place that infinitely sells seeds for not very much. It used to be higher, but people complained enough that they halved the price. Thus, there's no real consequence to just placing a checkpoint down whenever you see one.

Complaints about how you need to use the lamp to pop the umbral parasites to knock The Hushed Saint off his horse in his boss fight are also pretty funny to me, because that's exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see; Have the umbral lamp be used in a way that adds a bit of a puzzle element on top of the standard Soulslike roll-and-slash-'em-up without replacing it. Sadly, the game doesn't really do this to the same extent after; The few times it tries to after just come off as token with how little of an advantage you get from using it, or unneeded with how easy the boss is. Alternatively, where are the other umbral parasites that add some sort of buff to normal enemies besides just invincibility + regeneration? One that adds poison? One that increases their damage? No? Just on a couple of bosses? Ok then.

The dual-world system in general is also weirdly underexplored. There are a few moments where you find a pretty lengthy path in the Umbral, you dive in there, and actually find yourself with the timer ticking down, or have to use the lamp in a way that allows you to avoid fully immersing yourself into the umbral, but most of the time, it's just another part of the main path that you have to go into; Certainly not helping that the whole "avoid having to go into the umbral" puzzles I mentioned are often undercut by it just giving you an escape point right after you cross it. This is where I think the movement restrictions (i.e. only being able to walk) while holding up the umbral lamp greatly hold the opportunities presented by this gameplay back. You could present far more scenarios to strategically use the lamp to partially immerse themselves if they could fall or sprint while holding up the lamp. There are a few more neat uses, like the one time where they use it to hide a level (Revelation Depths), and a few times where you have to fight a boss in it, but said bosses are literally just normal enemies with a health bar, and a pretty crappy NPC fight. At least the last one added some incentive to backtrack to various levels to find the required items to reach him, but where's stuff like having to go into the umbral to use a shortcut, thus raising the stakes for a bit? Or using the umbral to find an alternate entrance to the level? Or a level set entirely within the Umbral, with you having to scavenge around for checkpoint spots that aren't part of it to catch your breath and rest there?

Other than that, my complaints aren't anything you haven't heard of already if you've been paying any attention to the discourse around this game; Excessive use of ganks, mediocre enemy variety with a fair few reskins (Looking at you, Harrower Dervla! Don't think I didn't catch you splitting your moveset in half to create Crimson Rectors and Proselytes.), balancing, overreliance on tracking, skating on your attacks, overtuned enemy stats, nonexistent variety in movesets within weapon classes, bosses too easy, yada yada. Still though, I'm opting to give this a step above an above average rating. The art direction, the physicality of the world, and a lot of the enemy designs certainly help to get the game on my good side. But the overall experience was pretty electrifying, warts and all, if just for how willing it is to try to make exploring levels tense again. It's willing to throw you into stressful situations. And most importantly for me, it remembered that Soulslikes aren't just action games. It managed to ignite a sense of adventure in me in a way that other Soulslikes haven't.

And just to really be a shitter, there's something appealingly ironic about the way Dark Souls and Demon Souls got attention and praise for flouting what was "conventional wisdom" in games at the time, and now, a portion (Not entirety by any means! Don't misunderstand me) of flack towards this game was for the way it flouted conventional wisdom as established within Soulslikes. At the very least, this game bothered to strike out on a pretty interesting vision of some kind. If there ends up being a Lords of the Fallen 3, or a DLC of some kind, I'll definitely be on that rickety, experimental train ride.

Alternatively, this could all just be copium on my end, and I'll have an SMT V arc the way my man Fortayee did.