This game... this game...
Lords of the Fallen is one of the most polarizing games I've ever played and I don't mean that in any sort of way relating to its reception or controversies or anything. I purely mean that this game's mechanics, aesthetic elements, and design choices are either so unbelievably good that they're going to spoil soulslikes for you when you have to go without them or so unbelievably bad that you legitimately feel embarrassed for playing such a shoddy game.
On the good side: The umbral realm is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen in a video game. Everything from the ways it affects combat to the secrets it holds makes you feel genuinely clever whenever you manage to leverage it to your advantage and find secrets that it's holding. You feel like a planeswalking chosen warrior, a supernatural detective, and vulnerable all in one. On an emotional and gameplay level this is by far, by a country mile, the best way I've ever seen the souls formula shaken up.
The integration of ranged combat into general play is also phenomenal. I don't agree with every decision they made and still somewhat would prefer a weapon-wheel style system over binding a handful of buttons to different spells/ammo types but it is still very good for what it is. Integrating sekiro deflecting into normal combat with all 3 weapon stances (sword+board, dual wielding, two-handing) having it available at all times feels fantastic. The combat system is very comprehensive and makes trying new builds feel really good because the basics are the same even when the details are different.
Now for the negatives: Either the developers didn't have enough time or didn't have the right talent in place to make a melee action game look right. Animations are absurdly choppy, tending to have very little weight or flow to them. Enemies or even player characters swinging weapons or charging up powerful attacks looks completely wrong. Everybody has this horrible 'robotic' look to how they move, making it very difficult not only to know what the timing of attacks are to dodge or parry them in time but also to even know what attack is supposed to be coming.
One of the- ironically less egregious- examples I could give is the Ruiner enemy. They have an attack where they scrape their axe against their shield like they're buffing their shield only for... a giant fireball to fly out of the shield faster than you can react? It's not even like this attack is particularly unfair since it's pretty easy to counter once you know it's coming, but you simply have to memorize the timing and effect of it since there's no logic to how the attack works the first time you see it.
This, in my view, would basically be enough to sink the game all by itself. In most types of games you can kinda get away with bad or stilted animations but not in a melee action game where exact timing on guards and rolls is how you survive. It didn't even lead to me dying often given how easy the game tends to be with its free revive system and 8 million checkpoints- I just found it unbearably awkward to play and look at.
The game is also, frankly, just really broken overall. While magic cheeses the game that's the fault of the 5 or 6 spells that are completely broken in a way that benefits you instead of completely broken in a way that hurts you. Some spells like lucent beam are borderline unusable because their targeting causes the spell to almost exclusively fire above the enemy's head, missing and dealing no damage. Other spells like seismic slam are comically overpowered because the spell can hit way more times than intended due to the broken hitbox that gets stuck on the environment.
And finally, the game is just kinda lame? The first few hours are the best not because the content in the first few hours is higher quality but because it only takes a few hours for the game to run out of things to show and tricks to pull. Enemies that appear in the first 2 or 3 levels are genuinely almost exclusively the only enemies you will see for the entire game. There's some nuance, there's a swamp level that's entirely exclusive enemies as far as I know, but for the most part it's the same warrior dudes over and over until the very end, with a fun bonus that almost all of the enemies are reskins of one another. There's a whole lore in place where one faction is based on light magic and another is based on fire magic, but several members of their rosters are the same enemies as one another just with a light/fire reskin.
And I know I praised the umbral realm to high hell but I probably was being too generous because it's the biggest homogenizing force here. When you're in the umbral realm you will see the exact same enemies no matter where you go. It doesn't matter if you're in a crazy castle or a mine or some temple or the mountains, the only thing you'll see in the umbral realm is the exact same wraiths and moths no matter what. Maybe if the rest of the game had variety that would be fine but it just causes the monotony to be doubled down on, especially since the umbral realm tends to take what artistic variety the game had and turn it all into the same blue-grey cocoon world no matter where you go. Are you in a city? A forest? A sewer? Well now you're in a blue-grey cocoon world, same as the last level. Enjoy!
I think my ultimate conclusion on playing Lords of the Fallen is that it feels like I mostly appreciate the game as an opportunity to reflect on From Software's games. On the one hand, Lords of the Fallen reveals just how much games like Elden Ring should step up their game. Better integrated ranged combat, parrying, the withering system on blocking to keep blocking relevant while forcing aggression, it all works perfectly.
But when acknowledging that, it also forces me to think cynically about LotF, and especially LotF 2. The best things about this game are often the simplest things, little additions that work so well but are on par with what a mod can add, quality of life stuff and parrying for example. By contrast, the biggest issues with this game, bad animations and monotony, are the sort of things that are exceedingly hard to fix. They require talented developers, vast amounts of work, and finesse in making sure the work is well-conceived all at once.
So while I'll be watching LotF 2 with great interest, I won't be excited for it or expecting great things from it. My only hope is that the developers made that game and are now putting the finishing touches on it with a philosophy that they didn't do a good enough job the first time around (or I guess second time around given this game is a reboot) and need to improve on the fundamentals of animation and functionality instead of doing the same thing again.
