Lords of the Fallen Launches to Decent Reviews
The reboot of the 2014 ‘Lords of the Fallen’ launched today and, alongside it, the reviews were dropped. The first game was one of the first to take heavy influence from the massively popular Souls formula and, while it had its fans, it never managed to reach its potential. With an uninventive world and less than stellar combat, critics weren’t all too impressed with this release- with only 16% recommending it via OpenCritic’s metrics. Nearly a decade later, with the industry being flooded by some fantastic indie and AAA soulslikes, how does the reboot (also named ‘Lords of the Fallen’) stack up?
Well, with a strong 75 on OpenCritic and 75% of critics recommending it, this is certainly a step up from what we’ve seen from this series before. What makes this interesting, however, is that a lot of that score is made up of some very mixed reviews- with some being as low as 4/10 and some going up to 9/10. This game seems to be one that people either quite enjoy or end up actively hating. Depending on how its updated combat, level design and bosses click for you, you could end up on either end of this scale.
Image by Hexworks
One thing that most reviewers can agree on, however, is the poor performance across all platforms. From frequent frame dips to juttering in areas with more visual fidelity, there’s a lot of work needed from developer Hexworks to bring this up to snuff in a technical sense. Aside from that though, some parts of the game were praised by critics. One aspect was the dual worlds mechanic- which sees you switching between realities in the same location to see two different versions of it. This isn’t time travel, but instead a way for you to explore the levels and see them in a new light as you traverse the world. One critic from Hobby Consalas was impressed with this- as he put it in his 8/10 review:
“Despite its many problems, Lords of the Fallen has managed to conquer us by combining the soulslike of always with a mechanic as novel and interesting as the jump between worlds. If they correct their failures, we could be facing one of the great surprises of 2023 and one of the best soulslike of recent years.”
Unfortunately, however, this game was not for everyone. Eurogamer saw Lords of the Fallen as a poor attempt at a Soulslike without introducing anything really groundbreaking to draw players in. They said as such in their 4/10 review:
“Missing the elegance of FromSoftware, Lords of the Fallen is let down by Soulslike clichés and performance woes.”
Image by Hexworks
Overall, Lords of the Fallen could end up being a game that you really enjoy but, unfortunately, you could just as easily end up hating it. Depending on how well the dual worlds premise draws you in, this could be work picking up. However, especially with the current performance issues, this may be one that’s worth picking up in a sale later down the line. While an improvement on the original, this franchise could use some work to realise its potential.
