Lords of the Fallen Review - It's Dark Souls but meh

This review was written on September 2, 2016.

I recommend buying this, but only at a sale. It's basically Dark Souls, but worse. Way worse.

Combat

The combat is unresponsive and slow. Some attacks will hit you when they shouldn't. Rolling is unreliable. The developers clearly built the game with a Strength build in mind, disregarding the Agility build. Enemies with a shield will be a pain for you if you're an Agility character, unless you use Magic. You will get hit and it's gonna hurt, because you can't use heavy armor because of the roll speed. The fact that most enemies don't stagger at all if you use an Agility weapon will not help you. Despite all that, the game is pretty easy, but you'll use magic a lot. And using magic is even more boring than Melee combat. You get used to the enemy attacks quite quickly because there are not many enemy types.

Bosses

The bosses are uncreative. They all feel the same. None of them felt threatening at all. They're all slow and they choreograph their attacks like they're in slow motion. They repeat their 3 or 4 attack types over and over again until you kill them.

Map Design

One thing they got right, I believe, is the map design. It's all interconnected, and you open up shortcuts as you progress; just like Dark Souls. I give them props for that. We need more of these map designs.

OST and Story

The soundtrack and the story are terrible. Skip every cinematic whenever possible. Nothing else to say about it.

Technical Issues

Now, my biggest gripe about the game. This game has crashed my PC at least 6 times. It consumes my CPU and GPU completely, at 100% capacity. When I first started the game, it ran like CRAP. Stuttering, low FPS, and inconsistent FPS at random points of the game. I had to spend hours trying to solve it. Testing out different graphic configurations, playing around with the driver settings, modifying .ini files. And to this day, I'm still not sure if I solved the crashes. I had to run the game at the lowest possible settings, except for Texture quality; when it shouldn't be that way, because I can even run Battlefield 1 at medium settings at over 60 FPS. Note that I'm writing this on 09/02/16, so they had PLENTY of time to solve these issues. Make sure to save everything in your computer before you start playing, and be mindful of your CPU and GPU temperatures, because this game might melt them.

Final Thoughts

I am aware that this review was very negative, but the game did manage to entertain me enough to beat it and play it for 18 hours. I can't take that away from them. If you like Dark Souls, there's a good chance that spending $15 or so in this is worth it.

Specs: i7 2600k, GTX 660 Ti, 8 GB RAM