Lords of the Fallen Review

Lords of the Fallen is both a reboot and a sequel to Lords of the Fallen. That original game released all the way back in 2014, when Soulslikes were still pretty new, and it got alright reviews as people keenly sought for something to fill the gaps between FromSoftware releases, though is now viewed through whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses is.

If any of that first sentence confused you, then yes, correct, it is confusing. I’ve got no idea why Lords of the Fallen isn’t called Lords of the Fallen 2, Lords of the Fallen All Over Again, Clumsy Fallen Lords, or literally anything else. If this seems like a petty complaint, it’s only because I’m wrestling with my guilt about how much I dislike the new game. It’s eating me up inside, although that could be whatever germs my children are constantly trying to infect me with.

Much like the germs my children regularly sneeze into my face (they’re young, to be fair, so I think it’s because they love me), Lords of the Fallen is a game that first wormed its way into my system and then burned me out. Usually, if I like or dislike a game, I’ll get a rough idea of that straight away. It’s far more unusual for a game to surprise me after the intro.

Lords of the Fallen opened as a game I was genuinely intrigued by. There’s a lot to be fascinated by here. The game takes place across two planes, the living and the dead, and while in the living plane, you can use an Umbral Lamp to peer into the world of the dead to see if it holds any paths, ladders, or lack of obstacles that exist in the living world.

That concept is incredibly cool, and being able to just sort of dip your toe into the Umbral allows you to tiptoe across skeletal bridges or sneak through gates that dissolve as death takes them. You can’t tell me that’s not one of the coolest ideas going for a dual worlds setup. If you die in the living world, or if you use your lamp in a certain way, you can go to the Umbral and then adventure as you go.

While this not only adds in more pathways and also removes issues like water and fire, it also makes a lot more enemies spawn. If you spend too long in the Umbral, you’ll invoke the ire of reapers who will hunt you down and absolutely wreck you, so you need to find weird skeleton things and go back to the world of the living. Awesome stuff.

The co-op system is also incredible. All you have to do is invite someone into your game and you’re good to go. Better yet, if you die in someone else’s world, they can revive you, and you won’t get booted out after defeating a boss either. It’s just like a regular contiguous co-op mode, instead of the stop-start affair of most Soulsikes.

The magic system is interesting as well. You can equip multiple spells at a time and then push a different button to use them while wielding your catalyst. Very nifty idea, and one that would be great in other Soulslikes. I’m a big fan of it.

If I was following the advice of “if you can’t say anything nice, then say nothing at all,” then my review would end here. Actually, there’s a cool idea in the checkpointing system, where instead of just having vestiges (this game’s bonfires) regularly dotted around, there are places you can grow your own ones.

You can only have one of these at a time though, which adds a lot of stress into when to make one, especially as the items to do so are somewhat rare. The only problem is that there are a lot of shortcuts and backtracking in the game, so using a seed feels odd in most cases, and pointless in others. It has its uses, but I frequently found myself wishing there was space for a seed where there wasn’t one, and aggravated that I’d used one only to discover a shortcut back to a proper vestige a few moments later.

Of course, that’s unless it’s just before a boss. Some boss arenas are easy to see – big old room full of a big old monster – but other boss arenas have all the telegraphing of 1836, which is the year before the telegraph was invented. Now you’ve learned something, you’re welcome.

Actually, speaking of boss fights, there are some truly awful fights in Lords of the Fallen. There are a couple in the game where the visual design shines, but the combat itself is rarely exciting. Boss fights love to use invulnerability phases liberally (sometimes by having a sneaky shielding spirit in the Umbral, sometimes not), which means you end up just doing boring attacks or hunting with the lamp until you can finally strike back, only to be one-shot by a grab attack with barely any wind-up, and having to sit through the whole thing again.

It’s not like standard enemies don’t all have their own issues either. Enemies range from generic, to a basic reskin of another enemy or boss you just fought, to really cool but absurdly over-powered, to dude hiding in boxes waiting to push you off a ledge. The latter one is the best example of how Lords of the Fallen approaches difficulty; it’s not about a challenging fight, it’s about absurd nonsense that makes no sense from a world-building standpoint, and often feels incredibly cheap.

It’s exhausting, and the whole game fits that to a tee. Lords of the Fallen isn’t especially hard, it’s tiring. The story is so forgettable that it might as well not exist, and while the ideas in it have a lot of promise, they’re executed poorly. It’s uninspiring, and every time you see a glimmer of promise it’s taken from you instantly by some nonsense.