Lords Of The Fallen™ 2014

Com certeza o pior soulslike que já joguei, achava que exageravam nesse jogo, me enganei, quanto mais jogava pior ficava, as lutas com chefes é disparado a pior parte do jogo, inimigos insuportáveis, lutas extremamente maçantes e chatas e exploração meia boca. Os designs super fantasiosos das armaduras talvez seja a única coisa que me trouxe algum leve interesse durante o jogo, de resto, apenas chato.

I usually try to avoid giving negative reviews. Even when the game is mid or full of bugs and bad ideas, but at the same is still giving me fun, I prefer to give thumbs up, while pointing out inadequacies and everything that pisses me off during gameplay, without any constraints or filters. I believe thumbs down deserves only titles that are irredeemable, unsalvageable messes, that don’t have even one ounce of fun. Games are so broken at every level that cutting all of the bugs and bad ideas from it would leave us with a husk of the product. And this is one of those titles. Lords of the Fallen is a disaster of the game. No matter from which angle I am looking, I cannot find ANYTHING that could save this from pits of hell. It has zero fun, not even bare minimum of any quality, and few and far between good things are too insignificant to even create any cohesive counter-argument against pure garbage this game tries to serve players. Let’s skip obvious things, okay? This is souls-like, it has a huge amount of ideas borrowed from Dark Souls, like i-frames, stamina, health, limited healing, losing experience points after death, different types of gears, yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah… You know the drill, I know the drill, let’s proceed. Step by step, let’s dissect this disaster. You boot up the game, select loadout and magic, watch detached from the rest of the story intro and start playing. And yeah, I am going to admit — the graphics look interesting. Today it’s maybe less impressive, but it is more than serviceable, even when drifting more towards generic territory. Once again this is a fantasy game, so expect stone castles, caves, graveyards, ruined temples, catacombs… Personally I really like the art direction of armors and weapons in this game, it reminds me of Chaos warriors from Warhammer fantasy battle or 40k — you know, spikes, razors, horns, edginess, all that jazz. It looks cool, albeit, again, generic. Have you played other fantasy games before? You already know how Lords of the Fallen looks and feels. But then, someone on the dev team probably has a brain aneurysm, because they decided to put chromatic aberration on top. So everything looks blurry, out of focus and with distorted colours. Thankfully you can disable it, which I did after the first 30 minutes of gaming, because my head started to hurt and my eyes were literally sweating tears. If you are a game developer and want to put this ♥♥♥♥ in your game, be so kind, grab the keyboards and shove it in your a$$. Another cringe thing you must endure are NPC faces during conversations. I called them “empty faces” because they stare into nothingness without an ounce of emotion, and the only moving parts are their mouths. Thankfully you experience this sporadically, but this ♥♥♥♥ is like an uncanny valley for me. What you cannot disable is camera shake — every sprint, attack or dodge roll is followed by this obnoxious screen shake, so you can experience what it is like to be in the middle of the earthquake. It fck up readability of the combat. Why is this implemented? For immersion? Like I can appreciate it when I cannot see what is happening on the screen! Let’s move on. Literally. You press the button and you feel like your character is moving through the mud. Everything, literally EVERYTHING in this game is slow and clunky — moving, dodging, attacking, casting spells, even opening doors or chests feel incredibly sloooooooow. And this is the major problem vast numbers of players have with this game, especially during combat. You move like a tank, not a person, even when you have a light loadout. I didn't check timings, but in LotF light dodge-roll feels like a normal roll in Dark Souls, while normal feels like a fat roll. I can equip a two handed sword and when I press the attack button, there is like 5 seconds until my characters finish attacking. I can literally take a nap between attacks. And I need to calculate every attack in advance to hit the enemy, because I cannot correct anything on the fly. So, maybe use light weapons and armors? Nope, thanks to stupid design choices. If you are going to use light build, prepare to deal chip damage, so you can spend 10 minutes fighting one enemy, while you attack cannot interrupt them and set them off balance, while they're doing this with every hit, because your armor has not enough poise to protect you. Maybe rolling then? No, because even with light gear you still are slow, and i-frames are so small that 70% of the time you STILL GET HIT. So the only consistent tactics are getting heavy armor and trading hits with enemies. And the devs perfectly know this, because damage reduction is RIDICOULOUS. Basic enemies can deal you around 30 point damage if you have no armor, with the end game gear it will be reduced to only ...2. TWO POINTS. Every shield has highlighted on stat screen how much it can protect you from physical attacks. Majority of the shields have 100% protection, maybe less then 5 of them have 95%, two of three can tank only around 80%. And the best part? They are still useless, because if you try to hide behind them, you will have no stamina to attack, due to how much enemies deal damage to your stamina bar. The only consistent strategy here is put on the heaviest armor, don’t dodge, tank all damage and pre-swing with your heaviest weapon, because only them can set enemies off balance and therefore stop them from attacking you. And you know what? If you think this makes the game harder, you are wrong. Lords of the Fallen is not hard at all, mostly because stupid idea behind how checkpoints work. You know how in Dark Souls you use a bonfire and all your hit points and estus flask are restored, while at the same time all enemies are resurrected? Not here. Activating checkpoint will only heal you, partially restore your potions, but what is more important, IT WILL NOT RESET ENEMIES. The only instance when enemies are brought back to life is when you die or change map. So exploiting this game is super easy. You can go, fight one enemy, lose health and potions, and after defeating him, you can go back to the checkpoint and replenish your resources at nausea until you clear the entire map. WHO DESIGNED THIS CRAP? The only downside is this will reset your experience' multiplayer — basically killing every enemy makes it go higher, so you can earn even more experience, but who cares. Just go to the map’ exit, and grind enemies again, it is faster. A little more about enemies. And I am going to highlight one specific, that fully encapsulates the entire feel of combat. Those who have played this game, already know. There are these dudes with big tower shields and a sword, I don’t know their names, because I don't care. There is no consistent tactic against them. You want to roll under their attacks? Cool, you are too slow to stand up and attack them from behind before they turn towards you. Speaking of — they have literally one-frame turning speed, so forget about outmanovering them or backstabbing, they are too fast. Bashing their shields with big weapons, until they posture brake? Nope, you need to swing at them three times to break it, and you will not have stamina for the fourth attack. Magic? Well, if you are willing to run around them for a minute and half, waiting for your mana to regenerate, then please, do. The only semi-consistent tactic is to kick their shield once for a big chunk of the posture, then one or two attacks with a two handed weapon, followed immediately by a third attack so you can damage them before they regain balance and put shield up with what they can do in two seconds. <The rest of the review is in comment section. This is a long one>

Had a blast playing this

Rhogar barbarian knights from this game left a lasting impression on me.

Top 5 worst games I have ever played. Truly the bottom of the barrel tier ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I really wanted to love it, but the mediocreness is ruling the whole game unfortunately. First of all, let's appreciate a little bit that this is the first Dark Souls clone (aka souls-like) before this genre became mainstream. About the game itself, I really liked the style of the world. Everything is huge (that's what she said, haha), huge buildings, huge weapons, huge armor. It reminds me Warhammer a little bit. The graphics also very good, even in 2026. Sound quality is fine too more or less. Have mixed feelings for the combat. Back then we used to in Dark Souls that even the big weapons has kinda fast animation, well...here even the short sword has a slow animation, which makes the whole combat much slower (obviously) and that encourages you to be more thoughtful stop spamming the attack button. Also, swing a big weapon and hit an enemy with it, is VERY satisfying. In theory, that's a great idea, unfortunately there a few enemy types which ruin the whole thing. There are enemies whom really hard to hit, because either they dodge very fast, or recover very fast. You think to kick a shield enemy out his balance to attack him? Good luck with that, the player's attack animation so slow, that when you swing your weapon, the enemy already recovered and his shield blocks your attack. You think to lock on him and when he attacks, you just do a backstab? Haha you fool, he turns around immedietaly like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ super sayian. The bosses also a disappointment. 70% of them are just big, knight bosses, who are more or less fighting the same way. The other 30% are bigger monsters, more similar to Dark Souls bosses. My problem is that most of them are boring as ♥♥♥♥. I mean the way they attack you is always the same, in the same pattern too, so predictable. Some of their designs are cool though, they look really cool. The map variety is good enough. We have the castle map, the courtyard of castle map, the catacombs map, the hell looking map etc. The map design could have been better, but didn't have major problem with it. I got lost a couple of times, so it's at least not full linear. It has a story, but it's so weak and short that it doesn't need a mention. The game also has a basic dialoge system, you can talk to some NPC to find out where to go next or to get some more lore. And sometimes you can do choices, like in a regular RPG. Some of the choices actually matter in ending wise (there are three endings AFAIK), so if you like to hunt achievements, there you go. But other than that, I didn't really care about it, always felt a pointless feature. So this is it...well...almost...there is a DLC called Ancient Labyrinth. I did beat that also, but wish I didn't. It's terrible! I don't even willing to speak about it. It doesn't exist. If you want to play with this game, you can do it, it has it's moments, but leave...the DLC...alone!!!

LotF pomimo swojego wieku oraz pewnych niedoróbek, jest nadal przyzwoitą produkcją. W moim odczuciu nie jest tak trudna jak klasyczna seria soulsów, stanowi pewnego rodzaju przetarcie dla osób niewprawionych w ten rodzaj gier. Rozgrywka jest dobrze skonstruowana - świat przedstawiony nie jest specjalnie rozbudowany, lecz można się czasem zgubić (brak mapy czy nawigacji do celu); przeciwnicy występują w rozsądnej liczbie, stanowiącej wyważone wyzwanie; zaimplementowano sporą ilość przedmiotów kolekcjonerskich wraz z zagadkami środowiskowymi, co wiąże się ze sporym polem do popisu dla eksploratorów. Niestety, produkcja cierpi na dość częste błędy optymalizacji (spadki klatek w niektórych lokacjach), crashe w losowych momentach oraz nieprawidłowości w animacjach czy renderowanych obiektach. Soulsowi wyjadacze nie powinni być mimo wszystko zawiedzeni, wiele mechanik rozgrywki jest wręcz identyczna jak w protoplaście gatunku.