I beat Lords of the Fallen so you don't have to (Review)

watch out it's Nas coming at you with an unscripted video way God damn it I hated that too I'm sorry guys listen a lot of videos make you wait 30 minutes for the payoff and their opinion uh I'm not going to do that to you right here at the top here is the thesis of this video Lords of the Fallen is a game in two parts the first two-thirds of the game is fun it's pretty wellmade and relative ly strong overall there's like a little asterisk on that but stick with me it's probably the closest I've seen a game come to directly nailing how actual Dark Souls feels while still putting their own spin on things the second game shows up in the final third of Lords of the Fallen the final third of this game does its best to emulate the roots of its namesake of that origin title in 2014 in that playing it makes me want to jump off a bridge hey it's middle middle of the night editing Jake uh out of a morbid sense of curiosity I booted up the original 2014 Lords of the Fallen just because like I had to know like was it really as bad as I remember it being for whatever [ __ ] reason I also own it on Steam I don't really know why that is but I'm not going to question it one of the things that kills me about this is that if it wasn't a Souls like I feel like it would be a pretty okay RPG as far as the design goes like some of the enemies look pretty cool the main character looks pretty neat there's a lot of cool RPG [ __ ] going on here uh but because it is a Souls like that's kind of what they were hedging their bets on right uh it just it feels really bad there's a kind of absurd amount of startup time and a lot of the swings and animations the combat just does not feel particularly good you don't even really take very much damage from the regular enemies uh but they also don't take very much damage from you and there's no like difficulty sliders or anything this is the intended way that the devs wanted you to play the game and it's not very good again this was just out of morid curiosity so I basically only played up to the first boss uh I beat it on my first go it wasn't particularly difficult uh I chose to play as the cleric who has a like a taunt ability and the boss just completely like tunnel Visions it so you can just sit there whacking at it while it's beating up your clone this might be something where I have to uh do one of those videos where I go back and do like a how bad was it really kind of thing uh because I'm just curious like how bad does it get if the opening is this week where you know they got to really win people over how bad is the actual full full on game how bad is the final boss in this one I don't [Music] know there's not a clever way to say this either but the final boss is just lame as hell think deacons of the deep from Dark Souls 3 but he reads the Odyssey to you while you beat up his minions this guy is anticlimax personified and unless you specifically go for the other endings from the very start of the game knowing exactly how to get them this is going to be the final boss that that most people end up facing I don't particularly think this is important but just so I can alleviate some of the comments from the souls born veterans that uh fought in the trenches of Mula and like to say get good when any kind of valid criticism gets brought up for a game they enjoy let's get my qualifications out of the way as the result of an awful decision I made when I was a fledgling streamer because I liked when my community stepped on my balls a bunch I played and beat back to back to back to back with no breaks you get the picture the following game Dark Souls Dark Souls 2 dark souls 3 bloodborne SEO and then Elden ring I beat that one twice and 100% it I have also beaten my fair share of souls likes which are games that are kind of like Dark Souls I'm going to say a thing now that's going to ruffle some feathers and I uh I need you to stick with me most games that try to be like Dark Souls that are not made by from software kind of suck balls the key word there is most but I truly believe that and I think it's a relevant thing to say coming into this video because Lords of the Fallen is quite literally impossible to discuss without at least a mention of Dark Souls are there things that differentiate it in the genre sure they have the funny Lantern thing but at its core this game is very much trying to be like the souls games and they are partially successful at that but then they dick punch you're real good before you can beat the game the reason I don't typically enjoy nonr soft Souls likes is that that with from soft you get tough but fair and with a lot of souls likes you just get the tough part half-baked mechanics and stinky level design abound in the souls likee genre for the record just so I don't get angry comments about how uh actually uh I think that dis Souls W is pretty good uh I think the Neo games are great Remnant 2 is pretty fun and I've heard a lot of good things about lies of D's uh I'm going to be playing that on my twitch Channel later next month so go drop a follow there if you're interested in some uh puppet mutilation now when Lords of the Fallen got announced with that genuinely dope trailer I think I had the same reaction as everyone else that had played the original game back in 2014 which was uh [ __ ] me really to this day I still do not understand why they decided to keep the namesake and make it a franchise frankly my best guess is that the genuine outpouring of hatred from victims of the 2014 game might have given it a bit of a marketing push they wouldn't have otherwise received but who knows so Lords of the Fallen I think that this game took some of the worst parts of the souls games and left behind some of the better Parts uh for example why the [ __ ] isn't there a map in game they have Maps quote unquote that are drawings that make no sense and do not point me in the right direction at all it's 2023 and you created a sprawling ass map with tons of weird little hallways that lead nowhere and a confusing connection structure give me a map damn you look Elden ring did the right thing by using statues of America to eliminate the Boss run it's not fun having to do a gauntlet where you narrowly avoid getting your dick flattened before you even get to attempt a boss that is giving you a hard time the Lords of the Fallen decided that they really liked how far you had to run to some of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 and copied that mechanic straight out uh they they should have left that one in Dark Souls 2 to be honest with you to add to the lack of a map issue there was one point where I got stuck having beaten everything that I could find and the next area was behind this obscure door I had forgotten about seeing 10 hours earlier but because I had early access to the game and the only people playing were streamers like me uh and I was actually probably one of the furthest along streamers from the people that were popping into my chat there was no resource for me to go to I couldn't find out where to go so I spent about a full hour looking around just trying to figure out how to get to the next major area so I could start progressing the game again it was very frustrating for no good reason because it could have been alleviated by even just like the most basic of maps now before I just go in on this game let's talk about the good because believe it or not when it's not running at six frames a second or trying to test your willpower and see if you'll actually uninstalled right before you get to the final boss uh the game can be pretty good sometimes the lamp mechanic while well it does have its problems the main issue being that the enemies never stop spawning in the umbrell zone uh it's a pretty interesting and fun mechanic the devs had design in Overworld and an underworld for each map and it usually feels pretty good finding hidden skips items and general goodies with the lantern as far as the combat goes I enjoy the way they've kind of conglomerated stuff from every game that's ever had Souls under its tags on Steam there's parry's allaha second row and a block mechanic that I don't really know where to credit the origin of uh I know lies of P does this and again go follow me on Twitch we'll be streaming that soon but it kind of combines the bloodborne rally mechanic with intentional play uh because in bloodborne you get hit and then you go monkey mode slashing away to get the health back before the recoverable Health disappears in lies of PE and Lords of the Fallen the health is recoverable forever like in perpetuity as long as you don't get hit uh which means that you have to be very intentional and carefully get your hits in to recover your your health bar rather than the health bar going poof after a few seconds I like this and I think it makes for an interesting Twist on combat even if I didn't use it very much with my build uh which is probably a good time to talk about what I ran I chose one of the advanced classes and I'm not like stroking my own dick here it literally warns you before you pick it that it'll give you a harder time but I don't personally think that was true for what I ended up doing I ran the orian preacher which I turned essentially into a perpetually healing member of the Jehovah's Witness uh we were the holiest of holy men the orian preacher is supposed to be kind of a hybrid where he hits hard up close but also he has some range attacks with the radiance spells which is kind of like Faith from other Souls games earlyish on I got one of the boss weapons which is essentially a lightsaber blessed by Jesus Christ himself and I doubled up on the bless with my own enchantment spells so occasionally it would just Divine Smite my enemies for True damage I didn't have particularly High Health but if you dodge even just half decently with one spell that I found I had a much easier time with bosses even though I was technically supposed to be kind of a glass Cannon the second spell that completed my build was a passive heal that kept ticking as long as I had Mana this means that I could basically ignore any glancing blows and keep doing big damage while the heels ticked only keeping my Mana up with these little blue crack rocks so my heel could basically have infinite uptime I'm just going to be blunt with you I think my build was probably too strong for the majority of the game the only real issues I encountered were with bosses that did tick damage on me so I think uh Burns or poison that kind of messed me up a bit but then I got the constant heal spell and all of a sudden it's back on easy mode uh some other positives out of the way the combat feels good overall when you die one-on-one it's usually your fault uh but you're rarely going to die oneon-one and uh I guess when the game's running well it looks pretty good sometimes there's a lot more I could say but there's a ton of videos sucking off the things Lords of the Fallen does well and I've yet to see anyone but skill up really go in on this game in depth so I'm stepping up to the plate let's start with some minor frustrations because the the Crux of my issues with this game are compounding little things ranged attacks against you have way too much tracking you can't s side step arrows like in Dark Souls because they [ __ ] curve to you uh I get curving around but an arrow moves in a straight line that's how physics Works they don't Tokyo Drift in the air to hit their target but Lords of the Fallen seems to think that that's fine this means that you end up having to dodge roll pretty much every ranged attack which can be super annoying in the snow area uh because the arrows there explode into ice clouds so even when you dodge the arrow you can still get [ __ ] very very fun tagging onto the ranged enemies problem uh they just have too many enemies in general in some areas there were points I was dying not to a skill issue or a build issue or something else but literally just like not having enough stamina to keep swinging on the mobs of nothing enemies they throw at you this crops up in the umbrell zone more than anywhere else because they just endlessly spawn stuff uh Lords of the Fallen is obsessed with throwing 200 uninteresting enemies at you uh rather than a few more cleverly designed encounters this area in the end game is actual [ __ ] and ball torture there's enemies with absurd tracking on their attacks everything explodes including the enemies when they die uh you instantly die if you fall into the lava and there's 100 traps set up between where you are and where you have to get to for the most part it's fun exploring zones and trying to make it to where you have to go but it's not fun when there's so much stuff trying to murder you in the level that even moving slowly and methodically isn't particularly safe you are incentivized especially in the end game to just do these suicide runs to try to activate the shortcuts or find another checkpoint it wasn't really an issue for me in the early game but the closer you get to the end of the game the worst this is CI game's approach to complexity was quantity over quality and it really sucks when you go from relatively decent Encounters in the early game to whatever the [ __ ] this is I don't really know where to put this either but the rumors are true Lords of the Fallen runs like [ __ ] there were a few performance patches and it ran a good bit better when I finished the game but I had early access to the game build that they did launch with on day one uh and I played for 16 hours so I got fairly far in the game on my first uh session with it and yet again in that latter third of the game the other like 6 hours I spent in it uh it ran like ass no matter how much I tweaked the settings my running theory is that they just didn't have the time to finish this game up before for launch because there is such a noticeable drop in quality of level design enemy encounters even the bosses start becoming worse as you get into later stages of the game there's this stupid Crow boss where you have to wait 30 minutes for this orb to show up and then you get to hit it once and then you get a wait again there's nothing engaging about it and the final boss is quite literally deacons of the deep but worse I couldn't even pay attention to his L dump monologue because I still had to play the game but he doesn't even attack you what watching right now is it this is the final boss this is what you spent 24 hours working up towards words cannot explain how much I was disappointed by this absolute [ __ ] this is editing Jake uh for the second time in this video here I just wanted to throw this little tidbit in here if it feels like I was nitpicking a lot in this video about some of the mechanics like how the enemies have like too much tracking on their moves or um the level design the eny placement that kind of thing the reason I am nitpicking a little bit is because that kind of stuff is very important for this genre specifically like one of the things that I think everybody that plays Dark Souls is going to say and this I mentioned it earlier but it's tough but fair uh Elden ring has probably some of the best hit boxes uh assuming you're not playing PVP CU then you get the the lag but as far as like fighting so you know solo bosses and stuff uh it has some of the best most absolutely Fair hit boxes in any video game I've played if you jump over you know an enemy swinging attack and it like barely skims the bottom of your feet and doesn't actually hit you then you're not going to get hit and that's very important in something like this so when it feels like you know you you completely outplay an enemy you get behind them their swing's about to hit the ground and then they just magically like a 180 and then it all of a sudden hits you even though you did the thing to make them miss that feels really really bad and unrewarding and it's the kind of thing that doesn't belong in a game in the souls like genre so yeah the nitpicking is kind of warranted specifically because of the type of game that this is trying to [Music] be I'm not going to get into like game design philosophy or anything most of the game is fine as far as bosses go uh and they even had a couple bangers in there in particular P to open up the game kind of the uh the starter boss to really skill check you and uh judge cleric here towards the end of the game was actually pretty good there's a lot more that could be said about Lords of the Fallen but I have uh run out of bullet points for this unscripted video and I'm not going to waste your time I mostly just wanted to make sure there was at least one video out there providing some of the unfiltered negatives about the game uh there is definitely stuff to praise about Lords of the fallen and if they twe week the final areas in the game with patches uh if performance gets better this will be a great game to pick up on sale for like 20 bucks in a few years but not something you should buy at full price right now you can't really undo the lackluster final third of the game without a complete overhaul and I don't think they're going to do that they can improve it sure but I don't think it'll ever be good and it leaves a very bad taste in your mouth as the credits role for now thank you for watching I know that bomb Rush cyberfunk uh won the poll for the next shorter video before the video essay I'm working on goes out but I started working on that video for bomb rush and I didn't feel like I'd be doing the game Justice without my full attention so I'll probably cover that once the Kingdom Hearts video is finished uh make sure to subscribe if you haven't already I'm a One-Stop shop for game coverage where I am wildly inconsistent in the genre that I review uh I play a bit of everything and I make videos on a bit of everything you know it is it is what it is if you'd like to come tell me how correct or incorrect I am about about Lords of the fallen in person go follow my twitch Channel I frequently play in cover smaller indie games but I also typically play games off release like Lords of the Fallen or later this month I'll be doing Allan Wake 2 very excited for that that's all I've got for you now though so look forward to the upcoming videos and uh again thanks for [Music] watching I know I can play the game again isn't that [ __ ] sweet isn't that exciting I'm excited I can't wait man I hate this game I hate it I don't like why would I I hate video games video games suck actually

Channel: NotAbsolutelySure

Views: 3,771

Keywords: lords of the fallen, lords of the fallen review, lords of the fallen 2013, lords of the fallen gameplay, lords of the fallen trailer, lords of the fallen guide, lords of the fallen classes, lords of the fallen skillup, lords of the fallen 2023, lords of the fallen 2, lords of the fallen bad, lords of the fallen farm, lords of the fallen vigor farm, dark souls, soulslike, iron pineapple, sekiro, elden ring, bloodborne, lies of p, dark souls 2, dark souls 3

Id: nKiDML5gp2U

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 21 2023