Facsimile souls: Lords of the Fallen

First things first, and I feel like I'm doing this a lot, Lords of the Fallen is spoken of as a clone of Dark Souls. I played a couple hours of Dark Souls in something like 2012, and found I hadn't quite gotten the hang of the xbox controller enough to enjoy it. I told myself I'd go back, once I felt like I did, and yeah that took years. I've been meaning to, but I've been rushing through a lot of games lately.

As an aside, this game has too many buttons. It amazes me, looking back on people mocking console players for babby controller sort of stuff. The xbox one controller here has something like twenty or whatever inputs, and when I first got my 360 controller I couldn't reliably hit the right button every time. There's just so many! You know how many buttons my precious Sega genesis had? A d-pad, a start button and then three. The SNES doubled that, but it didn't use the shoulder buttons often. I'm not sure when controller design blotted up to such numbers, but it's pretty impressive

Anyway, I don't strongly remember Dark Souls, but it's pretty evident right from the start that this game is attempting to copy a lot of elements of it. I mean more mechanical elements, gameplay and so forth, not stylistic choices. As such, it's sort of a RPG, although 'rolling person game' might be a better use of the acronym.

Unlike DS, Lords of the Fallen is specifically about one mang, and one mang only. Though you can customize your mang in various ways that as far as I can tell don't matter much to the experience, you play as HARKYN, a convicted criminal, possibly of the heretical iconoclast sort, possibly of the just a violent punchy man sort. Harkyn has made his way to the... Top of the world? A temple? A place where people are and it's cold? Anyway you're here to have sex with sexy ladies and dodge roll everywhere.

And there's like no ladies up here because it's a monastery. Er. Yes.


Although this game is clearly built from the pool of gaming that is and surrounds Dark Souls, it is also fair to compare it to the THQ removed from the titles game that is Space Marine. Harkyn might be capable of playing as a quick and feisty rogue, but you're almost always going to go one particular way in this game, and that's Big Bulky Man Smash Demons. Maybe you'll try rogue or whatever later, but initially large man, large shoulderpads, fight da demons.

well there is a lady

That's basically the game's story, for what it's worth: You fight demons. There's a fair amount of detailed back story, a history to man's interaction with said demons, a fallen god - the lords of the fallen are actually the lords of a fallen god, etc - but on the most part you fight demons who are big and punchy, and also there's some weird stuff about experiments...

Actually I guess I'll sort of minor spoil, because it kinda summarizes the game better. The one boss you fight does this sort of weird cutscene bit where he stabs something in a prison behind him, which you later fight. The game hasn't explained what the "thing" is, and doesn't really unless you go out of your way to do so. But it's one of the more important plot points and like... You'd think they would?

There's an entire subplot of the game, also, that just vanishes into one of the most confusing scenes. I mean like... Poochie returns to his homeplanet confusing.

The game possesses a wonderful sense of weight and deliberation, which feels great when you know what you're doing and absolutely terrible when you don't. There's a system that governs how weight works and how agile Harkyn is, and this stuff isn't exactly well explained, so sometimes things feel off and sometimes they don't. There's a huge variety of weapons and they all behave pretty differently, and their damage output can actually be very different than just the stats state. Different weapons can be very useful against specific enemies, mixing up how you fight them and how you approach them.

But still, hitting demons with a hammer or a big two-handed sword stroke feels great. It's probably the biggest dopamine hit of this game; Catching a big fat demon mid-movement and getting him with your huge sword Berserk style to finish him off is delightful. They have weight, your weapon has weight, everything feels like it's just smashing together. It's good. This part is good.

There are technically three classes in the game, but you can mix them up to form nine classes. Each class has a physical play style which generally determines your agility and weight, and then a magic style. You can't change your magic style, but you can adjust your other stats. The only real problem with this system is how little is explained. At the end of the game, for example, I was using a hammer called 'Stain' I got for doing a boss in a "special way" - more on this later - and it was 128 damage. I received a sword "Justice". Justice was like, 54 damage or something. Oh, but if I raised my strength to reach Justice's requirements, it was suddenly 151! So you have to kind of blindly throw your stats around and it's very odd.

Also, for certain enemies, you basically need a buckler to do a disarm trick, and the other two shields just can't...? It's a weird game when it comes to equipment. I used a pretty good range of weapons in the course of the game, though, so that's pretty cool. Like I said they feel different.

Visually LOTF is a good, but not great, looking game. The demonic invaders (called Rhogar) are somewhat generic 'metal and muscle' demons, but they moved well and each has a little bit of personality. They come in a fair variety, and most of them are cool to learn to fight. You're also on a snowy castle or snowy ruins. The game has tons of backtracking, both intentionally and because I got lost... muchly ... with many of the secrets requiring keys or opening doors that then open to earlier areas. In fact the starting area, the very beginning of the game, is almost right beside the end of the game.

But they won't open the door for you. This kind of level design can take some getting accustomed to, and makes re-playing the game really confusing. Areas are also repopulated over the course of the game, which can be pretty surprising the first time you run into a room and realize no that's not some chump that's three big... Oh I'm dead.

The game's music is excellent, very moody, but it doesn't seem to work quite right. There's this great track playing in the "final ascent" at the end of the game, but it kept kicking out and re-starting. I'm not sure why.

To be fair, incredible jankiness runs through this game to the point of near absurdity. There's a sort of ... Bonus round? after you finish the second boss, putting you in a poorly lit netherworld. One of the main features is you can't see what's going on, and it doesn't really make any sense, and there's a bunch of these I just stopped doing since they're bewildering, not worth the time and ugly. It just leads to my other point.

I don't remember my short time trying to play souls, but I do remember the game making sense. Lords of the Fallen doesn't ... It just doesn't make much sense. I got to the second boss and was seriously wondering  how to kill it, given I was getting him to like 75% health before he splattered me. The solution was to hump his face, which just struck me as completely counter-intuitive since his sword strokes were difficult or impossible to dodge or block. But no, you jump his face and he just doesn't use his sword all that much. The game really relies on the era we live in and looking stuff up, and it's kind of irritating.

I mean seriously, you look into a room, you see some big bad enemy... He's a giant pain in the ass with a one hit combo (at that point in medium armor - later on he didn't do much of anything). You get him down to near death and then he gets down on his knees and heals to full, then kills you. Is the solution an interrupt? Someway of breaking healing? Does he heal once? No, there's a heart in a vase you need to break. He's not even a boss, he's just some dude, and you pretty much have to look it up. It's pretty sloppy game design. I realized later the vases beat, as they contain a heart, but really... Later on these guys are just a joke, too. Once you know the gimmick, they start tossing the vases further and further away, or you fight two of them at once. But ironically this makes them into more of a joke than an important fight.

Actually, it's weird saying it but I think the jankiest element of the game that stands out is this: Each boss fight has a special condition for receiving better loot. This - traditionally, anyway - strikes me as an achievement. The game gives out achievements for various random things, but not defeating the bosses in this manner. There is an achievement for doing all twelve bosses in their special manner, but the achievement is for collecting the unique drops you get from doing it.

The game barely explains its state system and it's hard to compare weapons, look at weapons or even figure out which stats are changing where. Defense, for example, divides into a core stat but then for all the varieties of magical damage in the game, and then poise. What is poise? It never really tells you, but basically enemy attacks also do "poise" damage that hurts stamina and staggers you. And poise damage isn't all that related to how much damage you're actually taking, but you get staggered a ton in the early game.

There also camera issues and man I just... Sometimes it's like flashing back to Dreamcast Sonic level 'why would you do this'. The last boss leaves the battle arena for the usual spawn of adds crap and you can't see him, nor can you see where his attacks are going, while the camera just jerks around painfully. It's not that the camera is bad, it's that the camera isn't designed around. Yeesh. It does all the usual crud where it flops or flips, or bugs out, or whatever. Uniquely, the game's lock on system - which is really important to use - just hates if there's more than 1 enemy on screen, or if the enemies get too far, or whatever else.

Also, pardoning the last boss and the penultimate boss, the game's bosses tend to drop in difficulty as you go. The lass boss is pretty tough, but it's more camera issues and dying on phase transitions than genuine difficulty. I died the most on the second or third boss, not sure which, but I didn't even die or take damage on the one boss and the other I did in two attempts. Little odd. The first boss is awful, he can one shot you and you spend the whole fight dodging around waiting for windows to attack.

In conclusion, is Lords of the Fallen a SOULS KILLER? Pfft. Nope. Not even close. But is it still a solid, weighty fightdemons game? Yes, I quite enjoyed my time with it, other than the fact I got lost in the catacombs quite a number of times. I've read Souls players don't appreciate this game, but in my cases, I thought it fine after three years or so to give a soulsalike a try before going back to trying to play Souls again. So if you haven't played Dark Souls, this is probably a pretty reasonable pick up if you're looking to get into the genre with a somewhat easier game.

I liked Harkyn, anyway. It's weird seeing what amounts to a big, brutal biker in a medieval world picked as the hero. He's not an especially handsome dude, nor is he all that charismatic, but he just wanted to fight some demons instead of being in prison.