Lords of the Fallen Review - It's Bad

let's start with something I liked in Lords of the fallen and that's blocking and wither damage the way that it's implemented here is by far my favorite system at of any of these kinds of games and I deeply hope that Souls games adapt something like this in future entries basically in Lords of the Fallen Shields don't block 100% of physical damage no matter what Shield you're using even the best medium Shields block around 50% and the biggest weapons block a percentage comparable to that the damage that isn't blocked becomes wither damage represented by this white bar on your health bar this wither damage is the equivalent of bloodborne's rally mechanic you can get all of this health back if you are aggressive and attack the enemy but it has some adaptations that make it I think very interesting first of all as long as you're blocking the Wither damage won't go down that is you won't lose any of that withered Health but if the enemy lands a clean hit and you're not blocking all of that damage it disappears at once and takes away your opportunity of regaining it so long as you successfully block an attack you won't die you can take so much wither damage that you're at 1 HP and so long as you block the hits won't kill you the amount of Health that you get back is substantial you regain a lot of big chunks when you attack and unlike in bloodborne the Wither effect doesn't go away this means that even after finishing the current batch of enemies you might be fighting you can still regain that lost wither Health at the next encounter this is a significant change because it doesn't so much incentivize aggressive play but intelligent aggressive play there's also a Parry mechanic if you block just as the enemy hits you you'll Parry the attack the Parry will do damage to the enemy's Poise which you can see by locking on but the Parry also still makes you take wither damage in a boss fight all of this comes into play you can Parry attacks to get through the monster's Poise but since even successful parries will make you take wither damage you're spurred to both be aggressive and play cautiously you want to be aggressive so you can get that lost wither Health back but you want to be cautious because if you take a hit all that wither health will be gone it's a very nice system and it works well in practice the only problem I have with it is the sound and animation that plays when you parry an enemy correctly the Parry Sound is supposed to work as feedback it's it's supposed to let you know that you got the Parry correctly and it's supposed to make you feel good that you got the Parry but the sound that plays is this extremely wimpy I think the sound is really distracting I just got done playing Li of PE which has a similar paing mechanic and the Parry Sound on there now that's a Parry Sound that has some hair on its chest that's a stimulating sound it makes you want to get more paries just so you can hear it again as opposed to the delicate ding you hear in Lords of the Fallen another thing that I like is the way that spells and throwable items work in Lords of the Fallen this I don't just like actually I'm obsessed with this system for years I've complained about the way from software handles spells for more than years for over a decade I've been bitching about the way from software does spells I typically don't play Mage builds not because I don't like them I do like them but because I hate cycling through the Spells I hate pushing up on the directional button to get to the spell that I want and if you have a bunch of spells if you have something like six and you're pushing the button five times to get to whatever it is that you want and you have to memorize where they are I hate it I just I can't stand it I've never had a good idea of what I would want to replace it but I've always been sure that I wanted the current system to end to get replaced with something else in Lords of the Fallen you equipped your spell casting tool and then you can equip your various spells and tie them to different buttons so you hold down L2 and then push the button that corresponds with the spell that you want and it's very seamless it happens very quickly Lords of the Fallen isn't the first one to think up of a system like this it's not that unusual but I'm very enamored with it I think it would work beautifully in Elden ring this is how I imagine it would work you have a spell Catalyst in your hand and you can just tap its button and it would work normally and in this way it wouldn't inconvenience people that have gotten used to you know slotting in eight spells and mastered the skill of pushing the up directional button a bunch of times to get to the spell they want but then you could also hold down the Catalyst button and that would show you what spells you have hotkey to which buttons and let you cast whichever ones you want in whatever order you want I think it's a perfect system it does not intrude on what is already there and just adds more options to those of us that want them Lords of the f is like that in that it has a bunch of good ideas another example of its good ideas is that it lets you switch from one-handed to two-handed in the middle of a combo so if you swing your sword one-handed it'll do a series of animations depending on how many swings you're doing and if you swing the same weapon two-handed it will do a series of different animations the interesting thing is that it will hold your place so if you're swinging your weapon one-handed and then you two-hand the weapon your next swing will come out two-handed and it won't start it from the beginning it will keep your plays in the combo okay that's enough positives for now let me talk about some of the things I don't like the weapon swing speed is too fast as a comparison a straight sword in Lords of the Fallen will swing at around the speed of a dagger in Elden ring and all the weapons are like this they're a whole category faster than what is normal great swords are swung with the speed of katas big colossal weapons are swung at the speed of Claymores and worst of all these attacks don't really have any commitment to them you can roll almost immediately out of them one of the big things that popularized Dark Souls and the souls formula in general is the commitment to attack you swing your weapon and then you're stuck in that animation you cannot Dodge out of the way until the animation is completely through and if you make a mistake and attack it at the wrong moment you're probably going to get hit as a result that doesn't exist to the same degree in Lords of the Fallen it is significant L less commitment oriented attacks can be strained together very quickly and you can cancel out of them so fast and roll away that it looks like you're teleporting there's very little delay and there's no smooth transition it's very frenetic now I recognize that this is going to be a matter of some opinion I saw people complaining about lies of PE having combat that they consider to be clunky and from what I gathered what they mean when they say that the combat is clunky is that it's too high commitment for their tastes when you attack in lies of P there's a slightly longer delay before you can block or Dodge again Lords of the Fallen Elden ring and lies of P exist on a spectrum with Liza being a little bit slower than Elden ring and Lords of the Fallen being a lot faster it'll certainly come down to preference but for me I don't like this level of low commitment at all I think the combat is so manic it approaches hack and SL territory which isn't territory I want to be in and it might be part of the reason why other aspects of the game are so bad it might be negatively affecting them for example the levels have a huge amount of these worthless mob enemies everywhere they often just feel endless I have to assume one of the reasons that they chose to put this many enemies in a level is because of the incredibly fast attack speed you swing very fast and the weapons for some reason have incredible forward momentum you're teleporting like 2 feet in front of you every time you swing so traversing a level has you clearing tons and tons of these enemies and they're not hard they're rarely ever hard but there's a lot of them and even though there's a lot of them they don't vary very much you very often see the exact same enemies with occasionally you'll get a new enemy type and that is usually an enemy type that was previously a boss and the only change will be that its HP is bloated and it's not just about the number the the placement of the enemies and the encounters that are designed for them I think are also awful the there so many times when an encounter will have three to five melee enemies attacking you and then also two or more ranged enemies to bombard you at a distance at once and much of the traversal requires that you go through umbrell so if you do that I mean just add 5 or 10 other enemies that are around at all times it's frustrating to the point that I just stopped clearing enemy groups at some point and would run past them to get to where I was and then maybe start clearing them again and explore around but often not even worth it I felt I would just run past that as well that's notable because I've never done that before in any of the souls lies that I've played in any of the souls games that I've played I've never not cleared an area of enemies and explored quietly and carefully that's like my favorite thing I a cautious rooma like player that goes around in small semicircles until I'm sure that I've explored everything in the environment not so here the entire game feels like Dark Souls 2 if you if you combined the iron keep in the scholar of the first sin Edition and you mix that in with Shrine of Amala and then combined together you stretch out the experience for the duration of an entire game that's what the levels feel like to me they're miserable and I have heard from people that like Lords of the Fallen that the level design is really good and I think partially that's true if you interpret level design to me very narrowly just the physical space then yeah the physical space can be interesting in the way that it leads back into the central Hub area evoking memories from Dark Souls 1 but in the broadest sense level design also takes into account how encounters are designed how they're designed to be approached and those are just God awful it's hard to appreciate the level design of the physical space I'm traversing of picking up items and such when the game is throwing an endless stream of [ __ ] at me I constantly felt the incentive to just stop trying to explore and just run past it just run past everything and that's not the feeling that good level design is supposed to evoke in your players I also just hate how it looks I don't have the talent to paint an articulate picture of what exactly I don't like about the visuals but I think a lot of the areas are hideous I have a hard time looking at them and I mean that literally like they give me a headache there's no visual Clarity in what I'm seeing everything seems to blend into each other and it's not a graphical issue when I look at something clearly close up I can tell that the graphics on it are fine I just really hate the the environments I hate the way that they're colored I hate the way they're styled and it's strange because the enemy design is actually quite high it's very good and so is the armor design for the armor that you that you wear almost all of it is really good and high quality it's a very stark contrast between how I feel about them to how I feel about the world they live in finally the bosses the bosses are a big disappointment to me they are pitifully easy maybe as a consequence of the fast combat Tempo that I described earlier but the reason doesn't matter the fact is that these bosses are supposed to be the high note of a level you know I SLO through these levels which I consider to be an eyesore I carve my way through a hundred of the same miserable enemy types and then I finally get to the boss and I consider myself fortunate if the attempts last longer than 10 minutes before I win 10 minutes is a rarity most of the secondary bosses that are just humanoids those usually got done in one to three attempts now just to disclose I didn't beat this game I've played for around 15 hours I've killed five of the main giant bosses and about eight of the secondary bosses that double as normal enemy types so I can't vouch if this impression that I've developed continues to the end game you know it's possible that the levels the enemies and the bosses have a dramatic increase in quality at a point further than I am but I don't think I need to fully beat it to give the review that I've done I came into Lords of the fall and very hopeful I paid my own money to get this game and when I have to give up my own cash and time I'm always hoping that the experience is worthwhile I felt I needed to voice my opinion on it because not only was I disappointed but leading up to release all of the souls YouTubers that I watch and even some of them that I'm friends with gave this game glowing reviews and while I respect their opinion I don't agree so I thought it'd be valuable to leave my impression of the game as someone who was very hyped and ended up being disappointed to the point he didn't want to finish and that's the end of this video as always thank you very much for watching

Channel: Ratatoskr

Views: 169,097

Keywords:

Id: jsAQlrA2CAE

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2023