Lords of the Fallen review: "Aspirations to be Dark Souls 4 might have been a little ambitious"

Lords of the Fallen is back! Color me more than surprised than anything; the first game released nine years ago and didn't seem to make a very significant splash in that year alone, let alone in gaming history. But nonetheless we're getting a reboot, and in a very different landscape for soulslikes than the one we had in 2014. 

The original Lords of the Fallen was an early trendsetter in replicating the Dark Souls model, back when that still seemed like a surreal and unenviable task, but now we're inundated with soulsy games, and the question is no longer "can you duplicate the success of FromSoftware", but instead "can you duplicate that success and fend off all the other entries trying to do the same." Even now, Lords of the Fallen (2023) is coming out only weeks after another major soulslike, Lies of P, so if it's going to try and make more of an impact this time around, it's going to need some elbows – and perhaps a little more ambition than than to emulate a model that even FromSoftware is trying to move beyond.

I love… Lamp?

After assembling a scowling paladin in the game's character creator, the narrative setup was laid before me. Lords of the Fallen at least starts in a straightforward manner: a mean ol' god called Adyr was banished ages ago, but now the magic velvet rope that keeps him outside the club is getting frayed, and hordes of his demon entourage have managed to sneak inside. It won't be long before Adyr himself breaks through, unless somebody can find all the special beacons and press their reset button to de-corrupt them. And as somebody who accidentally picked up a dimension-hopping, soul-stealing lantern off the corpse of somebody far more qualified, it's now up to you to do it.

All this is theoretically fine; a functional plot that can act as a launching pad for something deeper, only that second part never seemed to happen. It's a narrative that's rather impersonal, largely dependent on mystical macguffins and things we don't see, and the moments where Lords of the Fallen tries to make it feel like more is going on often fall a bit flat. Actually, maybe it's OK if the demon god comes back, suggested several NPCs with respectable, salt-of-the-earth names like 'Voidhowl the Abyssreaper', but all these comments did was remind me that I didn't really care about the outcome either way. 

Without any relatable characters to latch onto and the world stuck somewhere between Blasphemous and all the black-mana cards from Magic: The Gathering, it was difficult to get a sense of personal investment in any of it. After a while I figured it was better to just focus on splitting the next boss without really thinking about why.

The Mimic

Fortunately, boss-splitting and combat is probably Lord of the Fallen's greatest strength. There's nothing especially new here – you've got the parry emphasis from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the smack-to-regain health system from Lies of P and Bloodborne, the focus and mana spellcasting systems from Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring. Lord of the Fallen relies on proven classics, but there's still obvious effort put in. 

It all lends to a nice sense of cathartic impact when your strikes land, and the game has a surprisingly extensive range of attack patterns. As in Dark Souls, you can switch between holding a weapon in one or two hands, but now you can do it in the middle of your combo, swapping from whippy, viper-like strikes to heavy blows without slowing down. Not to mention that there's the always-satisfying ability to stagger foes and launch a devastating critical hit, driving your spear so far through their body that you can almost feel their fading heartbeat against your shoulder.

It's fairly solid stuff – which is fortunate, considering that Lords of the Fallen doesn't have much else to offer beyond the combat itself. Still, if it weren't for the regularity with which I got stuck on the landscape or had the camera suddenly go AWOL, I'd really have no notes on this front. While there's nothing hugely original as far as combat is concerned here, it does at least feel as if developer Hexworks has learned the lessons of the past and built competently, if conventionally, upon them. 

However, most soulslikes walk a narrow line between challenge and satisfaction, and while Lords of the Fallen generally hits the mark, certain areas were brutal enough as to simply become grueling chores. I'd like to use this opportunity in particular to spit at those mimic moth monsters that disguise themselves as item pickups and insta-kill you if you touch them, concealed behind a sight puzzle so frustratingly unclear that I had to contact the studio to get some sort of explanation. Yes, there was a (maddeningly obscure) solution, but the wider point is that there's a threshold where an invigorating test of skill simply goes over a cliff and becomes pointlessly cruel – and often less fun as a result.

Sunder Thy Umbral Dweller (ella, ella, ella)

Beyond the standard combat, Lords of the Fallen is cogent of its need for a standout feature in a crowded market of competing soulslikes, and this time it's a dual-worlds setup, where you can use a special lantern to travel between two layers of reality, with different rules and some variations on the layout. There's the standard world – "Axiom" – which is a despairing, entropic hellhole, and the spirit "Umbral" world, which is a despairing, entropic hellhole, but also purple and with skulls everywhere. 

The two realities shtick is Lords of the Fallen's most interesting idea, and one that's clearly been considered carefully. The Umbral is the nastier of the two realms, with more foes and deadlier monsters that appear if you spend too long there, but there's also greater rewards to be found there, as well as times you simply have to drop in to bypass an obstacle blocking your way in Axiom. Once stuck in Umbral, you then need to find a special shrine to help you get back out of purgatory before you're kicked to death by burly spirits.

All good stuff so far. Not only that, but dying anywhere in Axiom doesn't actually kill you, it just sends you to Purpletown. But if you die in Umbral, you die for real and get thrown back to the last checkpoint. Another intriguing idea! And above all else, I especially like that you can open a rift in Axiom at literally any time to peer voyeuristically into Umbral, just to see what you'd be dealing with if you did make the crossing there and then. Yet certain foes specific to Umbral will try and attack you through that little opening if you're not careful, reaching out to drag you through into the spirit realm against your will. It's all clever stuff that's implemented well; again, no major notes, even if I'd describe the whole system as more "interesting" than actually "fun".

Bundled with the two worlds gimmick comes a few spirit powers, where the traditional soulslike tendency for unclear naming practices started to annoy me. "Use your Umbral Lantern to Soulflay a foe and inflict Wither", said the in-game guide with a cheerful lack of self-awareness. Once I had stopped shouting at the screen and done some battlefield testing, it eventually turned out that this was a mechanic wherein you could briefly pull an enemy's soul out of their body and bash it for… no major gain that I could perceive. It didn't appear to be meaningfully more powerful than just hitting them normally, and didn't even work on many of the harder enemies and bosses, so Soulflaying was a tool that rarely got used unless it was a specific solution to the problem, cool as it was thematically.

Flaws of the Laden

The two-worlds mechanic may also be why the heat coming off the computer could've put the office coffee pot to shame. We were sent a Steam code, and while a couple of updates smoothed things somewhat, there was no point where the experience wasn't at least a little turbulent. Think the usual suspects: crashes, visual errors, glitches, and even on a robust desktop I was forced to turn down the graphics fairly significantly, the game's recommended benchmark putting things firmly in the "Playdoh-face" range. And that's to say nothing of when I tried it on a high-end gaming laptop, which I wouldn't have risked putting anywhere near my lap, such was the radiation coming off it.

When all is said and done, I think part of the problem is that Lords of the Fallen never quite manages to carve out its own identity. It's a bit Lies of P and a bit Nioh and a bit Blasphemous and a whole lot of FromSoftware, and even though it manages to build on some of these, I suspect all those other titles will last in my memory a lot longer than Lords of the Fallen will. It's not that it's a bad experience – I honestly don't think it is! – but there's little about it that one could consider great. 

Still, for now it's a perfectly serviceable soulslike game that occupies your hands more than your head. For those who want something to tide them over until that Elden Ring DLC finally comes out, or wanted to keep the momentum going after Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen will certainly oblige in that regard, but otherwise its clear aspirations to be Dark Souls 4 might have been a little ambitious.