An unfortunate misstep from Team Ninja. The best thing it does is evoke games that did what Ronin is trying to do, but did it better. For the price of Ronin new you can probably find both Nioh games and Wo Long. I advise you go that route.

Side rant: Video games need to abandon narratives built around "political intrigue." I do not give a shit. Witcher 3 did it right. The political stuff is there but it's ultimately incidental. The focus of the story is on the characters. If see one more game filled with medium-shot conversations about factions and strategies and blah blah blah I'm going to rip my eyeballs out.

I can't speak to the state of this game when it hit the market last fall. I started playing it following the Master of Fate update and my experience with this game was terrific. I've played dozens of Souls-likes and -lites and LOTF feels the closest in spirit to the original Dark Souls.

Thanks to its updates, it's also one of the most accessible Souls-likes I've played. Mods that auto-level weapon drops and the ability to engage NG+ without the difficulty bump (the one place that LOTF really disappoints is its balance in NG+ difficulties) opens the game up to near endless experimentation; only Elden Ring has managed more variety and diversity in its weapons and systems.
Most of the bosses give a terrible first impression; the risk of controller throwing is quite high first time around. But having played the equivalent of about 6 playthroughs on my way to the Platinum, I can confidently say that you can – in fact – git gud at all of them. There was only one boss who I never beat without co-op help (on NG+ their health pool was fucking ridiculous). The rest I managed to beat solo – often quite handily – by my last playthrough. One criticism I still have of bosses is there’s really only a handful of ways to beat them. This is not a game that will produce endless YouTube videos of different ways to take down the big baddies.

I put nearly 200 hours into LOTF and the more I played, the more I appreciated it. The things it suffers from are not unique to it, but are problems that pervade the genre (obtuse narrative progression). I feel sorry for those who went sour on this game at the start, because in its current state Lords of the Fallen is a worthy play for fans of the genre.

Top Tier Metroidvania. Flashy combat and some of the best, most dynamic movement in the 2D space. By the end of the game it was just fun to dash and dive and sling yourself all over the game world. Major props for an elegant solution to mapping dead-ends and places to return to after upgrades.

The story has gravity and weight, and the performances lean serious instead of the typical quippy, carefree protagonist. Didn't expect such an emotional wallop from this game, but it delivered beautifully.

There's still a lot of backtracking and a ton of items and upgrades to be found, but I'm not gonna fault a game for having the same achilles heel as every other game in the genre.

Top Tier Metroidvania. Flashy combat and some of the best, most dynamic movement in the 2D space. By the end of the game it was just fun to dash and dive and sling yourself all over the game world. Major props for an elegant solution to mapping dead-ends and places to return to after upgrades.

The story has gravity and weight, and the performances lean serious instead of the typical quippy, carefree protagonist. Didn't expect such an emotional wallop from this game, but it delivered beautifully.

There's still a lot of backtracking and a ton of items and upgrades to be found, but I'm not gonna fault a game for having the same Achilles heel as every other game in the genre.

Excited by the chance to go back to the stealthy roots of the franchise after Ubisoft had multiple years to iron out the kinks of the old style, I instead found that not only has zero progress been made on the fluidity of movement in AC, but several aspects have gotten worse. Civilians panic at the slightest mouse fart, making the majority of your tools good for a single kill before bedlam erupts. And the number of times I've had to spin in a circle because I snagged on a 3-foot wall was far higher than I ever remember in previous titles. Bit of a heartbreaking disappointment, this one.