Lords of the Fallen – Review

For a while, the only go-to franchise for hardcore action-adventure games was the Souls series. However, there’s a new competitor in town! Lords of the Fallen is Deck 13 and CI Games’ latest creation, and while it takes a lot of inspiration from the Souls games, it has quite a few unique and great features as well!

Story

The game is situated in a dark and grim world, where sin is frowned upon. You play as Harkyn, a convicted criminal that’s locked away. The rulers of your world are looking to banish all evil from it, and this aggravates a demonic god from another realm. Soon, the Rhogar are flooding your world and reign chaos, this is the point where you’re set free from your cell and gain a chance to redeem yourself. Along with your mentor Kaslo, the journey to stop the Rhogar and achieve forgiveness begins and finally takes you to the heart of the demonic realm.

While the story and its lore are set into a very interesting world, there isn’t much done with it. You mainly focus on your main goal which is simply killing enemies and bosses and you don’t really have any side-quests. And if you do manage to find side-quests, they’re very easily forgotten since there’s no way to track them properly.

Graphics

Graphics are a major feature in most games, and Lords of the Fallen has great ones! The beautiful lighting mixed with well designed environments make for beautiful scenarios. However, since the PC version isn’t very well optimized, it’s hard to get a good frame rate on high settings, so this is something that should have received a little bit more attention. Other than that, weapons, gear and enemies are very well designed, resulting in a very pleasant experience for the eye!

Sound

The soundtrack of this game is simply amazing. It’s one of the most important things in games and this is an example where it’s been done exceptionally well. The main menu music will get you pumped up and filled with fantasy of things to come and the music in game is equally awesome. It transitions very well in combat and does a great job of supporting the dark, hostile environment the game takes place in.

Sound effects and narration are also very well done, all sound effects have been very well synced together and sound realistic. Voice acting is also very appropriate and fitting with their respective characters.

Gameplay

Of course, it’s all about gameplay, and if you’ve played the Souls series, you should feel right at home! It’s no surprise that the developers took the Souls series as an example, but instead of blatantly making a copy, they’ve enhanced quite a few features.

When first creating your new character, you’ll face your first critical decisions. Here, you can choose between 3 magic types and 3 equipment types. For the magic types you can choose between Brawling, Deception and Solace, they fit well with their respective equipment types: Warrior, Rogue and Cleric.

Brawling focuses on buffing yourself in order to deal as much damage a possible, fitting well with the Warrior as you can deliver huge blows with 2 handed weapons and heavy armor. Deception goes well with the Rogue, deceiving your enemies by making clones or sending a clone from afar to assassinate a target. At last there’s Solace, this type focuses heavily on magic and combines well with the Cleric, it contains defensive spells and healing to protect yourself.

When you start the game, you’ll be helped with a small tutorial, but veterans of the genre can skip this and head straight into action. The keybinds are pretty intuitive and don’t really require re-binding, even when playing with the controller. Your weapon can be equipped with 2 hands, dual wielded or you can use a weapon in one hand and a shield in the other. Of course there are bindings for both hands, allowing you to light attack, heavy attack, block and shield slam. Later in the game, you also get a magic gauntlet which can be used as an off-hand weapon. This gauntlet allows you to use 3 types of magic, a long-range shot, a mid-range bomb or a short-range blast.

Every weapon has its own play style and have their own attack combos. When dual wielding, you can even deal massive damage with well-timed combo’s, resulting in a hack and slash which almost always kills the enemy. Of course, killing monsters gives some rewards. They always give experience and have a chance to drop additional loot. This can range from quest items to gear or even runes.

The level-up system is a very unique one and features high risks and rewards. You can save at checkpoints which replenishes your health and potions, but you can also develop your character. Here, you can bank your found experience into attributes or spells. When you bank enough experience, you get an attribute point or spell point. Attribute points allow you to upgrade basic stats like Agility, Strength, Vitality, etc. Spell points allow you to level up and unlock new magic spells, giving you more support in battle.

However, killing monsters without banking experience gives an experience multiplier. The amount of experience you get increases as you don’t spend it, so if you don’t bank your experience for a very long time, you’ll get a lot of it! Be careful though, dying resets this multiplier and you’ll have to make it back in time to your corpse because the longer it takes you to get there, the less experience you’ll recover!

At last there’s runeforging. As said before, enemies can drop sealed runes. These can be opened in order to get all sorts of runes which you can insert into your equipment (if it has sockets!). To increase the chance of good runes, you can bet experience when opening them, which sometimes rewards you with flawless runes. Runes can drastically change your play style, as they completely change the way your gauntlet works, or you can simply increase your defensive stats by adding extra physical and magic resistance. You can also insert runes into weapons, giving them extra physical damage, fire damage, poison damage or attack power.

Conclusion

Lords of the Fallen is a very strong competitor with other games in its genre. It provides an easy entrance for new players and a welcome experience for veterans as there is quite a bit of customization present. A playthrough should take about 20 hours to complete and after that you can start over to fight stronger opponents and complete gear sets. Be warned though, the PC version is still pretty glitchy and crashes a lot, so you might want to hold off on buying it for PC just yet!

Subsonic

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