Lords of the Fallen Review – An Excellent Soulslike

There is a new soulslike game getting released every now and then and they are generally received with a fairly middling response from both critics as well as the general playerbase. Many found those games to be a fairly disappointing attempt at tapping into the style of gameplay made popular by FromSoftware’s Souls games. Now, we have a fresh attempt by developer Hexworks on a game that actually offers up an excellent take on the formula set forth by FromSoftware.

If it wasn’t already obvious enough, Lords of the Fallen is a Souls-styled game. Inspired quite a bit by titles like Dark Souls (and to a lesser extent, Bloodborne), the new game hopes to explore the already popular soulslike mechanics, but with a completely new coat of paint, and fresh new gameplay ideas.

When it comes to Souls-styled games, there are two major aspects that are regarded by many to be of incredible importance: combat and exploration. With combat, this game quite definitely delivers. On the most basic level, every swing with a weapon, regardless of what weapon it is, feels impactful. Animations are smooth, and as long as you get used to your weapon’s attack patterns, combat never really feels unsatisfying. And this largely comes down to the fact that this game makes it a priority to make sure that you know what’s happening.

"The combat in the game is also helped quite a bit by the presence of a large variety of weapons to play around with."

The core ideas behind the combat in the game largely revolve around things we’ve already seen with FromSoftware’s titles. Attacks are heavy actions that you really have to commit to, and you can cancel out of attacks by rolling or blocking; this means that you’re locked into what could potentially be a life-threateningly-long animation of your character swinging a large ax around, leaving you open to attacks from enemies. On the flip side, enemies are similarly committed to their attack animations, and combat often turns into a gentle dance between the player and the enemies in the area as you try to duck and weave through different attacks, waiting for an opening so that you can put the enemy down for good with your charged heavy hit.

It’s difficult to talk about the combat in the game without bringing up the lantern and its role in fights, especially when you enter the Umbral realm. While the Umbral realm has some very real downsides for your character—reduced health and the possibility of enemies getting much stronger—you also get access to a host of nifty new attack maneuvers thanks to your lantern. The freedom afforded by just throwing enemies around, into each other, or off a cliff can’t be overstated, and the ability to destroy some enemies’ shields by just shining your bright lantern in their faces is as funny as it is useful.

"Exploration in Lords of the Fallen is quite fun, thanks in no small part to just how gorgeous the game can be at times."

The combat in the game is also helped quite a bit by the presence of a large variety of weapons to play around with. As the class selection during character creation would indicate, there are a lot of different types of weapons in the game, from the quick daggers, to large, lumbering maces, and even flashier weapons like a flail. There is an incredible amount of variety present in the game, and each weapon does quite well to fill in a niche for any play style you can imagine throughout your time with the game. For context, I personally found myself getting quite attached to the large sword I got for picking the Udirangr Warwolf starter class, which I used by 2-handing for massive damage numbers.

On the defensive side of things, Lords of the Fallen doesn’t get too crazy; there’s a dodge, a block and a parry. Interestingly, Lords of the Fallen allows you to parry with just about any combination of equipment you have, so dual-wielding or 2-handing weapons doesn’t necessarily constrain you to only dodging attacks. Parrying also isn’t as powerful here as it might be in some other games, and you’ll have to land quite a few successful parries on some enemies in order to get an opening for a finishing move.

Exploration in Lords of the Fallen is quite fun, thanks in no small part to just how gorgeous the game can be at times. Hexworks has accomplished quite an impressive feat in making a game that looks as good as this. It isn’t just visual fidelity either, art direction is also incredible, especially once you start entering the Umbral realm. While the “real world” of Lords of the Fallen can look great, it can quite often feel rather generic in its depiction of a fantasy setting. The Umbral realm, however, is where all of the game’s unique and alien visuals come to life. Along with a more interesting color palette, the Umbral realm also features more interesting enemy designs, and even various aspects of the world, like a giant eye that’s blocking your path forward.

"Coupling excellent gameplay with incredible visuals and an interesting take on the “realm of the dead”, the game ends up being a unique take on the Souls-like genre."

Performance on the PC version of Lords of the Fallen was acceptable, with the game running at a steady 60 frames per second. The only downside is that my relatively mid-range system, which runs on a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU didn’t really allow me to max out some of the game’s graphic options. It is also worth noting that the game thought that it was installed on a hard drive, despite it being installed on a SATA SSD. All of these things never really became a real problem, however, and the game still managed to look fantastic despite all of the settings hovering around medium.

Writing definitely comes off as one of the weakest aspects of Lords of the Fallen. The storytelling is told in a rather uninteresting way through underwhelming cutscenes, and most of the things largely relate to things that have happened previously, told through item descriptions. The story is outright bland and features the usual, the player facing off against the forces of the bad guys, while at the same time being chased down because the lantern, you’re carrying around with you gives you some degree of power over the realm of the dead. All in all, the storytelling doesn’t really act as much of an incentive to keep exploring the world of Lords of the Fallen. Thankfully, the gameplay is more than enough to keep you going forward.

All in all, Lords of the Fallen is definitely one of the most impressive games in its genre. Coupling excellent gameplay with incredible visuals and an interesting take on the “realm of the dead”, the game ends up being a unique take on the Souls-like genre, despite it largely using the same gameplay and level design complex as its predecessors. While the game isn’t really revolutionizing the genre, it is instead acting as more of an evolution of tried and tested ideas and concepts.

This game was reviewed on the PC.