gentlemen, believe me when i tell you this is one of the most overhyped games i have ever had the misfortune of playing in my entire life. i am a souls game freak; i love this shit, but i will take on anyone who says otherwise in hand-to-hand combat. please let me save you $60 by telling you the entire experience that is lords of the fallen.

after playing for 30 hours i can say i've never been baited this hard by a game before in my entire life. i waited months for this game after i first heard about it, and after beating it i wish i'd never known of it's existence. the only good thing about this game is that is pretty as fuck, except half of that credit goes to unreal engine itself. the world does look stunning, but that is literally the only positive thing i have to say about this game (the judge cleric fight was good too).

for starters, i have an extremely good pc and this game still ran like dogshit at times despite constantly tweaking the settings. this alone will filter out a ton of players who can barely run the game. one second your fps is locked to your refresh rate, then you turn around and the game turns into a stop motion picture for a few seconds. apparently they're fixing it, but the few patches they've shipped since the start have made negligible differences. i hope it gets better for others.

a dev replied to me on steam after i left a negative review, and instead of acknowledging that, he instead decided to suck himself off boasting about the 194 weapons and shields, 339 armor pieces, and the 3 different endings to the game. oh you mean the 194 weapons that have no combat arts or anything uniquely special about them? the weapons that take their class animations (spear, dagger, greatsword, etc) and copy/paste them over and over again for almost every weapon that has that type, effectively making them all the same? the armor pieces that despite having different stats seem to have almost no defensive impact at all? this game is R1 simulator for what the dev claims is 35-40 hours of gameplay, but is it REALLY that much gameplay?

no.

the game takes forever to get through for a lot of reasons. first off being the absolute disgusting amount of enemies for what is basically no reason. this game takes add spam to an entirely new level, and it makes the game so fucking boring. for over 80% of the game, you'll be fighting the same 3 enemies: a dog, a guy with two axes, and a weird snake thing with a crossbow. i am not even exaggerating, you will find these enemies within the first 2-3 hours of gameplay and you'll be killing them for the next 25+ hours, just with hp and damage scaling added on top. they will occasionally sprinkle in some other enemies, but within the first few hours of the game, you'll have seen probably 80% of the enemies you will for the rest of the game.

you will find a new area, kill a bunch of the same enemies over and over, die, then run past them to get back to where you were before because killing them all again would waste another 15 minutes of your life. obviously it’s normal in any souls-like game to run through a place you’ve already been because you know where you’re going, but you’ll end up doing this with new places because it gets so fucking monotonous to kill the same mobs in every new area. mountain area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. fire area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. snow area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. i truly wish i was exaggerating, but i am not.

the game fakes difficulty simply through the idea of, “fuck it spawn a ton of enemies.” it's not even meticulously thought out in an effort to be challenging, it's just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. every single enemy in this game is easy to kill 1v1, so they counteract this by spawning in hordes of enemies to prevent you from focusing on one at a time. if the game had good combat, okay sure, but it just doesn’t. not only is it clunky, but it’s too simple to allow you to do anything “flashy” and kill off a bunch of enemies at once. at some point if you’re being chased by too many people, it is borderline impossible to fight them because if you engage you will just manage to get stuck on one of the 7 billion different tiny artifacts that for some reason lock your character on seemingly nothing at all. i have never gotten “stuck” in a game as much as i did in lotf. there will be massive gaps that you think you can run through, only to get stuck on fucking air and die. if you don’t get stuck, be ready for the camera to decide to lock onto the guy hanging on a tree 40 feet away instead of the clusterfuck of enemies right in front of you. don’t worry though, once you die you get about 10 seconds to reflect on your mistakes before the equivalent of the “you died” text comes on screen, only to then have you wait another 10 seconds before respawning.

every encounter in this game feels like it takes place in the most cramped area imaginable. you will have so many encounters with mini-bosses on a bridge, a staircase, a hallway, or some other tiny ass area that is just so frustratingly small to fight in. you’ll end up focusing more on trying to leave yourself some room to maneuver through than actually fighting the enemy/boss itself. once you beat this “boss,” you can expect to just see them casually walking around the world as a new enemy to fight, except you won’t be actually fighting them because they’re meatshields and you’ll be too busy fucking running past everything anyway looking for the next vestige.

finding a vestige in this game was the most enjoyable part of it because of how fucking rare they are. i swear i would go over an hour in between finding them at times. there’s these flower beds where you can create your own checkpoint/bonfires which seems like a good idea, but you only get seeds from killing bosses or spending 5,000 vigor to buy them (which is a lot for the majority of the game). these seeds are a fucking precious commodity, but the flower beds are often placed in the shittiest spots and sometimes you just have to gamble whether or not you’re going to come up on a vestige soon and realize you wasted the seed. they aren’t even permanent either, so you might just place one down only to realize you don’t even need to be in that area anymore. just ran through a new area and have no heals left? luckily there’s a flower bed here to save… oh wait i don’t have a seed. let me die, go farm low level enemies, go buy a seed, then sprint past a bunch of enemies again to get back to where i was.

then there’s the bosses. honestly, most of them aren’t even that difficult which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a souls-like game. one thing most of them have in common is that they just have an assload of health and you, despite having an upgraded weapon, still always seem to do almost no damage. the fights turn into an endurance battle as opposed to being a genuine challenge. instead of “holy fucking shit this is intense” it’s just “jesus christ this is taking forever.” it’s usually the environment around you that is the hardest part to deal with, either through you getting stuck on a pebble on the ground or not being able to roll through the sedan sized gap beside the boss who for some reason always manages to back themselves into a corner of the arena.

my biggest complaint, and this is a big one, is that two of the coolest looking bosses in the entire game are fucking full on gimmick fights (not even mentioning the minor gimmicks in a lot of other fights). you just spent an hour running past enemies to find the boss? well luckily for you, this entire boss is just spawning the same enemies you’ve been fighting the entire game! to partially spoil the ending i got, the final boss of the fucking game is this insane looking god-like creature and the fight was fantastic… just kidding it’s a gimmick fight where you kill a couple glowing enemies and then the game ends and you don’t even get to fight the boss itself. i was fucking shocked when that happened. imagine deacons of the deep from ds3 or phase 1 renalla from elden ring as a final boss of a game. that’s what i experienced.

this is where the nerds show up and say, “ahem ackshully you didn’t get the full expewience of all fwee endings.” you know what? you’re right, let’s talk about that.

one of the other endings doesn’t even have a fucking final boss, it’s just the boss before the actual final boss i got, how is this any better? the “true ending” boss kind of just takes a handful of attacks from random encounters throughout the game and puts them in one boss with some new additions thrown in, so sure, there was some kind of effort there. at least you actually get to fight this one.

“oh so why didn’t you go for the true ending boss?”

you know i really would have loved to, but the best part is that i got hard locked out of the other two endings just a few hours into the game. killing a main boss opens up a beacon to be cleansed, basically the red pillars in the sky. if you cleanse even one of them, you are immediately locked out of one of the endings (inferno for sure, but some people think this locks you out umbral too). if you progress too far into the game without starting various npc questlines or miss even one of the 21 steps (not even joking), you get locked out of the other ending (umbral), forcing you into the most boring conclusion to a video game i’ve ever experienced (radiance).

oh that’s okay, i’ll just go into ng+ and get the other ending i wanted! well… remember the lack of vestiges? welp, there are no vestiges in ng+. none. no fast traveling to parts of the map other than your own custom checkpoints. i don’t even have any words for this, it’s genuinely just a fucking stupid decision. this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of what souls-like games require.

i cannot believe i even wrote all of this out of pure frustration. i genuinely could keep going and i might edit this to add more but i am just tired of giving this game space in my head. despite how angry souls games make me, i actually love them, but lotf misses the mark so many times it makes you wonder if they even knew what they were aiming for.

demo experience
The controls were an integral part of the original System Shock's lasting impression and appeal. with those removed and replaced with the same controls found in every other First person shooter/adventure game, there is no reason to play it instead of dozens of other immersive sims that do everything infinitely better. no longer can you lean in a perfect angle and shoot at the corner of the screen after detaching cursor. no longer can you manually grab and throw grenades. manually adjusting the notches of energy weapons to perfectly melt away mutants is gone as well. no longer do I feel like a cyberman battling an entire space station. just another weakling trying to get by.

The best part of Demon's Souls, to me, is the arcane and apathetic atmosphere the game is thick with throughout. The characters, the enemies, the bosses, they all are almost incomprehensible and the game hides most lore behind item descriptions, leading to an almost brain fog inducing state on the player. Demon's Souls on PS3 pulses very subtly with profound life as a developer and its world were very surely nearly wiped out. And all of that is gone here, replaced with pretty particle effects and a revamped artsyle that sucks out the utilitarian post-apocalyptica for Blizzard inspired, plasticine HOG WASH! Nothing has ever felt so cynical, truly.

On top of the thoroughly Fucked Up artsyle and ambiance, the game just sucks to play now. Nothing feels right, the signature heft to the combat feels featherweight. Hitting an enemy no longer registers properly, nor does being hit. FromSoft laid this shit all out for them, but Bluepoint apparently believes themselves above the original developers. The breaking point for me was Phalanx feeling less like the opening salvo of horrors-yet-to-come and more like any other unremarkable first boss in any number of recent, genreless "action rpg" mush games. The splotchy-squelching of Phalanx not feeling particularly ooey nor gooey made me drop the game. I was done, just such a blatant misunderstanding of the design of the fight. And the design there isn't even that great! He's a big ooze guy that goes blorsh when you hit him and somehow that's fucked beyond recognition. Hate to see what sacrilege was done to the other bosses, will do myself a favor and never touch it!

Bluepoint, hear me and hear me well, keep your paws off Metal Gear Solid or I will unleash plague upon ye!

i really just think the hunting grounds update made this game ridiculously boring, grindy and repetitive. the gameplay isn't bad at all but damn does it suck that it's made boring by the leveling done by running place to place on an island over and over.

equipment elements were completely trivialized as a result as well, meaning that you really only care about what cells a piece of equipment has instead of the protection / damage it does against a specific enemy. the only cases where it semi-matters is the legacy modes, the arena one and escalation, but even then perks are probably more powerful than bothering with elements most of the time. perhaps im not at late game though, but who would trudge through to late game when it's so lame?

and obviously theres not really much point to play this when you can afford monster hunter games. just kinda sucks cuz the potential was there back when i played in early access.

this game has some really good narrative elements that appeal to me. the philosophical elements and conflicts between the brotherhood and the templars are a good mechanism to portray an interpretation of utilitarianism and virtue ethics. i even liked the desmond sequences an amount, even if other people may find them boring. regardless, the way this game portrays the templars and assassins is more complex than it ever is during the whole ezio trilogy, where the templars are just sort of the bad authoritarian guys with no real individual perspectives and justifications for their actions. really bothers me how in this game altair takes the time to talk to his targets while ezio just says "requiesce in pace" and calls it a day, but i digress.

though, the gameplay is dated. i really cannot rate this any higher even with my appreciation of this early narrative that is far more compelling than later entries. the flag collectible system is awful, and after having lost my completionist desires for such things, it really makes me realize how much of a waste of time it was getting all those flags. aside from that, the combat is just parry and riposte with ok (but dated and repetitive) animations. the climbing is much more grounded than later entries, but it has its issues as a result.

the locations are pretty good here, there are some interesting spots and historical buildings, and each city has their own sort of structure to them that makes them varied. the kingdom is too big though honestly.

i dont think this game appeals to everyone, but it does its job for the people it does appeal to, and i appreciate it for that.