REVIEW – CI Games, a.k.a. City Interactive, would have been better off not making a sequel to Lords of the Fallen, which once again bears the same name as its predecessor. After going through development hell, the Polish publisher would have been better off releasing some budget FPS titles instead, even if LotF 2023 is better than LotF 2014, but it’s not much better.

A vast world awaits you in the all-new dark fantasy action-RPG, Lords of the Fallen. As one of the fabled Dark Crusaders, embark on an epic quest to overthrow Adyr, the demon god.

Fourteen hours

You can play through Lords of the Fallen in about 14 hours (it will be completely written out at the end, so LotF until then), but it will take a lot longer than that because Hexworks (they can go to hell with their capitalized name) made the mistake of thinking that making a game hard on purpose makes it a good Souls clone. Whether you choose a Knight, Werewolf, or Priest from the almost double-digit character classes, the task will not be easy. At least it looks decent. In the case of the first LotF, it has to be said that it had relatively horrible graphics. Of course, the areas of the game are connected, so the style of any of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has been applied. There is no open world, but there is an alternate world called Umbral. We saw this kind of world-switching in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver twenty-five years ago, so this rotting, dying version isn’t that big a deal, but at least it’s a way to keep going if you get stuck in the real world.

In the Umbral world there are also a lot of undead, and it is recommended to stay there because you can get a lot more power for leveling up and buying items (that is how they call the souls in this game). But still, some kind of balance should have been achieved. Or allow the player to creatively solve the challenge at hand. There’s not a lot of tactics here. And in general, there’s not the rhythm you’d see in a more polished game. It’s not very atmospheric to enter a new area and have a ton of enemies thrown at you by LotF and then, well, suffer with them. It can get incredibly boring. You could say git gud here, but what’s the point of loading the game, defeating an opponent, messing up, loading the game again, getting a little bit further, and then starting the endless loop again? Then it’s worth playing the games of Gilson B. Pontes (?) instead. At least there you die with one hit. (By the way, nobody has ever been able to play through one of his PS4 exclusive creations). If you have the good combat elements, this aspect ruins everything, and then many people will uninstall it to spend their time on something better (or more useful).

Either too hard or too easy

LotF ties the player’s hands, and even if they set up, say, a bow and arrow build, they can’t have a lot of ammo because it’s also treated as a consumable in Hexworks’ game, so it becomes thoroughly limiting in more than one case (when that happens, it’s a dead end). A lot of times it’s the same situation, where some boss fights are too easy, and other times they have an attack that barely signals, and whoops, suddenly the loading screen comes up. Then you can play cooperatively. For those who don’t have that option, well, tough. And I haven’t even mentioned the other option of the Umbral Lamp. This can be used to briefly suck the soul out of your opponent, leaving them open to attack. It’s a good idea, but in the end what’s missing is that beyond a few good ideas, there’s a lack of proper gameplay structure, coupled with sometimes interestingly poor performance, as it seems to be a bit memory hogging (lesson learned): 32 gigs of RAM in dual channel, and on a console you don’t have that option).

On Steam Deck, it runs surprisingly well, even though it’s an Unreal Engine 5 game. On the PlayStation 5, it’s worth leaving it in performance mode, as it mostly maintains 60 FPS, but in the world of Umbral, it’s not very sustainable. So, average sounds and music, forgettable story, fair graphics, banal atmosphere and unpolished gameplay. What does all this add up to? A relatively often grating, average Souls clone that even the first The Surge was better than. If such an undead creation is to be a subgenre, then the Taiwanese developed Thymesia would be the better choice, and that’s worth forgetting. It’ll definitely be one of the free games on PlayStation Plus Essential in 9-12 months’ time.

It’s a six…

Lords of the Fallen gets a six out of ten because 2014’s Lords of the Fallen would get about four and a half, maybe five out of ten. Cooperatively, it’s maybe a six and a half out of ten, maybe a benign seven for fans of the genre, but it’s not a game to buy at full price. Rather, buy Elden Ring and save the rest for food and whatnot. Lords of the Fallen shows that development hell often shows up on the bottom line. It is not impossible that CI Games’ game will fail. Bye bye for two days, or at worst one day, because you can bet that Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 will be next…

-V-

Publisher: CI Games

Developer: Hexworks

Style: Soulskike, action RPG

Release: October 13, 2023.