Lords of the Fallen (2023) sticks very close to the Dark Souls formula

2014’s Lords of the Fallen was one of the earlier attempts on the part of studios hoping to emulate the success of FromSoftware’s Demon’s SoulsYou can also find out more about the following: Dark Souls, the forbidding classics that formed the foundational inspiration for the “Soulslike” subgenre of action role-playing games. It was… fine? It was… fine? Lords of the Fallen The majority of reviewers thought that it was an excellent, well-executed attempt at the Souls Formula. They said the formula had been made a bit easier, more crunchy, and colorful. But, they didn’t add much to the mix.

Now we have a reboot — first announced as Lords of the Fallen, now reverting to the plain old definite-article-free version of the title. In the intervening nine years (or 1,000 years, within the game’s world), things have not gotten any more cheerful, or less in thrall to the works of Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team. There is a feeling that CI Games believes the solution to the problems with Lords of the Fallen (2014) was that it wasn’t It is enough.Dark Souls

I’m being a little unfair. Lords of the Fallen (2023) does introduce some interesting mechanical twists of its own, including a parallel worlds conceit that tips its hat to The Legend of Zelda and makes the influence of Nintendo’s games on FromSoft’s even clearer. But, based on a preview that involved playing through its first few hours, the new game — made by HexWorks, a Spanish-Romanian developer founded by CI Games for the purpose — strains hard to get as close to the structural intricacy, cautious combat, and dank, despairing vibe of the Dark Souls trilogy as it possibly can. In doing so, HexWorks bumps up against the fact that imitating FromSoft’s artistry is one thing, but capturing its essence is quite another.

HexWorks/CI Games

The One. Lords of the Fallen’s biggest jumps toward Dark Souls’s presence is immediately apparent when you launch a brand new game. You can create your character using nine archetypes. The original game had a pre-made lead character. Participants in the preview were advised to begin with one of the four melee classes (a standard knight, a barbarian type, a flail-and-crossbow-wielding Partisan, and a more dextrous infantryman); also available were an assassin, a jack-of-all-trades ranger, magic users specializing in fire and light spells, and the mysterious, fiendish Condemned class.

You can choose to be either a Dark Crusader or a Light Crusader. Both will see you battling through the cursed land on a mission to destroy the demon god Adyr. Mournstead is the title of the world, and it reflects the intense doom that pervades the entire setting. In the writing and art, HexWorks is clearly going for FromSoft’s blend of ruined high fantasy, ornate language, and epic melancholy. The fonts are also familiarly gloomy. But FromSoft’s unique tone is impossible to replicate perfectly, and the attempt in this case frequently wobbles over into metal-album-cover overkill or Renaissance-fair camp, as characters with spikes all over their helmets begin lines with “thusly” or discuss “the bestowment of this subsequent boon.” Hooks by which you can pull platforms toward you are incarnated as wailing specters; defeat a miniboss, and “Heresy purged!” is blazoned across the screen.

Dark Souls gamers will begin to feel more comfortable as they work their way through tutorials, kill the first boss in the intended manner, and pick careful paths through a semilinear interconnected world with a vertiginous level of verticality. Lords of the Fallen’s Its biggest selling point could be the fact that it retains a detailed and intricate level design, similar to Metroidvania. Demon’sDark Souls is a game that you can play in front of other people. Elden Ring’s more open approach, even if it can’t claim to operate on the same level. As tradition dictates, it provides many opportunities for comical falls off ledges during a fight.

HexWorks/CI Games

Its gimmick, however, is that the player can move between the realms of the living (Axiom) and the dead (Umbral), using the game’s key item, an Umbral Lantern. You can peek into Umbral using the lantern, and cross into it if you see a route forward not present in Axiom — a platform (made of bones and rotting flesh, of course), perhaps, or an empty lake bed. The only way to return is at predetermined points. These include the Vestiges which are bonfires. Lords of the Fallen.

Umbral also softens the difficulty level of its chosen genre — up to a point. When you die in Axiom you will be given a second chance in Umbral to beat your opponent before giving up and running from the Vestige.Lords of the Fallen’s souls). This doesn’t refresh your healing items, though, and the longer you spend in Umbral, the more Dread builds up, and the trickier things get. Enemies get tougher, and increasing numbers of zombielike creatures materialize in your path — they’re easy to kill, but their presence complicates the battlefield considerably.

Lords of the Fallen isn’t inspired, but it is a well-sorted game: responsive, playable, balanced, and fair, which in this genre is no easy feat. The combat is precise, fluid, and faster than the original game’s, located somewhere between Dark Souls’ defensiveness and Bloodborne’s aggression. My suspicion is that it’ll be most useful in more delicate and displayy casters, but I need more time to prove this.

HexWorks/CI Games

There are a few concepts that seem to be crammed in. There’s posture damage and a stagger system. There’s withered damage, which is sustained in a variety of circumstances and reduces your maximum health, not unlike Zelda – Tears of the Kingdom’s gloom, but which can be partly reclaimed if you hit your enemy first (it’s fuzzily explained, and I didn’t get my head around it during those first hours). Soul Flay — a move that uses your lantern to extract enemies’ souls from their bodies, allowing you to pile on extra damage to their incorporeal form — comes with its own resource that can only be topped up by Soul Siphoning from enemies and resource nodes. The game has stances as well as combos, backstabs and more.

It’s too early to tell how well this initially unintuitive design will gel together. But complexity like this is grist to the seasoned Soulslike player’s mill, and it’s to HexWorks’ credit that, at the very least, the complexity doesn’t overly get in the way of the moment-to-moment combat, which feels tough, consequential, and crisp. These first impressions are based on the game’s gameplay. Lords of the Fallen doesn’t have a personality of its own — not in the way Team Ninja’s takes on the genre, NiohYou can also find out more about the following: Wo Long, do, for example — but perhaps “pretty good Soulslike, for people who really like Soulslikes” is all the personality it needs.

Lords of the FallenThe game will be available on October 13th for PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X.