At its best, Lords of the Fallen is aggressively mediocre and bland. At its worst, it a crap cashgrab on what soulslike offers (let's be real, its this. Just like the first game was). It takes everything it can from the successes in the genre and makes them boring or stupid. It really feels like as if the devs just made a bulleted list of keywords of what people like to see in games without a care in the world of how to implement them. Deflecting in Sekiro led to excellent combat flow and its iteration in Lies of P better fits a soulslike; too bad Lords wants you to be stunned on deflect too. Getting a dedicated jump button in Elden Ring was sick; too bad the jump is garbage in Lords and the button itself is tied to all other context dependent action (e.g., in a rush and want to climb a ladder? Too bad you're jumping now!). So on and so forth.
The only standout feature is the dual world system, but it's lame. You think there's gonna be some kind of sick dual world navigation shenanigans like in Metroid Prime 2 or something. But what really happens is you're just in the Umbral the entire time. There's no real reason to be in Axiom other than to make runbacks easier because Umbral has all the items and platforms to navigate. Even then, because of the platform issue, the runback benefit might not even apply! So the devs put all this effort for a dual world system, only to have the players use 1 of them if they want to make any meaningful progress in the game. Brilliant.
The cherry on top of all these poor implementations is the bugginess of it all. I often experience collision issues or the game not recognizing certain cues like the soulflay not working on the environment (i.e., getting progression blocked because the game can't game). I initially thought "must be me". Lo and Behold, exit and restart the game and the progression issues get fixed at that moment. I won't say this is a constant issue, but it happens frequently enough and in the worst places to create doubt as to what the game even wants. Is their a trick to this buffed enemy, or did the buffing parasite fail to load a body this time? Do I need to kill something to get this corpse loot, or did soulflay break again? IS THIS A LADDER A LADDER OR DID THE GAME FORGET HOW TO MOUNT LADDERS AGAIN. WHO KNOWS?!! This crap happening in the tutorial area is the most baffling thing and inexcusable. Playing the game of "is this a new mechanic, or is the game crapping out again" is no fun.
By extension, playing this game in general is no fun. Too bad my mental illness compels me to get the most out of my money.
EDIT: Just finished the radiant ending and here's the worst part: the game offers nothing worth seeing or doing. Nothing cool to be in awe at, nothing engaging to appreciate as an "addition to the genre", nothing. According to the boss rematch list, I'm missing 1 "actual" boss which I'm assuming is is on another ending route but I highly doubt 1 boss fight will redeem this game. So on top of everything else I said, the game is boring.
