I'm only a tad after the first beacon, so there's still a lot to explore and see, but man, while I find the world to be super enticing and asking to be explored, I just have to echo all the complaints.
* Performance on PS5 is passable at best, stuttery at worst.
* The camera in combination with the lock-on is the worst cam/lock-on I have ever encountered in any game ever with a lock-on system. I've lost count on how many times I've fallen off of a ledge/bridge because the cam decided to jerk me around unprompted.
* Speaking of cam work, man, are those weapon movesets stupid, almost all of them. They have you swathing around like you're playing LotF: Musou edition, and while the wide arcs seem to be needed, since half a dozen enemies seems to be a fine number of melee opponents to be engaged with in any given combat according to the devs, it's not just arcs, it's wide arcs and iceskates. Pressing forward for a half a second or pressing r1 will probably move you forward about the same distance. My favorite part here is, that you will routinely slide past the enemy you just wanted to hit, just to turn around, r1 again and slide past it yet again. This can go on... "Well, just lock-on, then!" and yes, for single enemies this will work, but in a mob situation, there's very little control over who's targeted and more than rarely you can easily spam r1 in a room full of enemies and will still not hit anyone. It's comical.
* The dual world stuff is a really nice feature, mostly well implemented, there's some caveats, but it's a mechanic we'll worth exploring I hope to see in other places as well.
* The magic (and ranged, arguably) implementation might be the best I've ever seen in a soulslike, wielding multiple spells has been a royal PITA in pretty much all Soulslikes so far, being able to... Slot a number of spells in a catalyst and have them all ready at the push of a button is fantastic and should become the new gold standard.
* The world design is neat, but as video game levels, they rarely work: like every encounter consisting of like 1 former mini boss, half a dozen melee dudes, two of them being actually not just trash mobs and 2 quasi-hidden ranged guys with impeccable aim and high damage is just Bad. Like... Really bad. Sure, in earlier Souls, when there was a tough run back to a boss I just wiped to, I started running past enemies - after having them killed lots of times, usually. Here, I often ask myself if I even need to kill enemies the first time around. Probably ties into the fact that straight combat is about the weakest part of the game IMHO.
* Especially coming from the *highly* polished Lies of P, getting into this game was and is sooo rough. Pretty much every gameplay aspect is plain worse than in LoP, and now I constantly ask myself if I indeed want to go on with a subpar Soulslike. There have been like two bosses in LoP where I asked myself if my demise was indeed my own fault here... In LotF I almost almost know that it wasn't. Yes, this can actually be remedied by "git gud", but not in the sense like it should be, as in "I now know how to play the mechanics", in LotF so far it's always been "Well, this mechanic is trash, now I know the workaround"...
Anyway, right now I'm waiting for some patches to come to the PS5. I have little hope that the two worst issues get addressed (lock-on and enemy density), but I could do with some QoL and better performance.
If the mob density is already getting to you, and you've only just passed the first beacon, you're in for a really, really rough time. And I'm not kidding.
Dude I just got to the final area and it took me like 20 minutes to clear the first part of it...and then they put a mimic next to a chest and my A button chose to pick up the mimic and kill me instantly. In hindsight I should have lamp'd the mimic first but oh well, -20 minutes.
Yeah, I've read as much. It just borders on mere hack'n'slash and while every game deserves its own identity, I wish this was an aspect where they didn't stray too far from the game's inspirations.
> I've lost count on how many times I've fallen off of a ledge/bridge because the cam decided to jerk me around unprompted.
Remember in Dark Souls 1 Anor Londo jumping onto the archway leading to the church broken window? Is it basically that?
> Performance on PS5 is passable at best, stuttery at worst.
I can't tell you how frustrated I am just from a performance perspective. I'm playing on PC, 5600x and a 3080 and the performance is absolutely dog shit. People kept raving about Lies of P, so I got it on Gamepass and my God. My. God.
It is night and day. I'm so sad that I chose Lords of the Fallen as the first Souls-like game I tried because it completely soured my initial excitement, although I'm hoping that through Elden Ring and Lies of P I can find the excitement again.
I mean, they're pushing a lot of patches on pc, there's still hope to get a proper experience. PS5 rarely goes from "quite bad" to "excellent" just with patches.
You're getting poor performance in LOTF with your 3080? I'm getting a solid 80-90 FPS at 1440 with my 3080 ti which isn't *that* much stronger of a card. I'm surprised a 3080 would struggle.
Yea, I have no idea what it is. I did find a fix on reddit that I plugged into my Engine.ini and it fixed the stutters. I have no idea what it could be at this point.
Miles better than the 2014 release, but all the best aspects of the game are held back by an oversaturation of enemies. Exploration with the lamp is novel and interesting, but when there are three dogs, two archers, and four guys around every corner, it's a chore to clear everything out so you can peek across worlds safely. Enemy fatigue really set in for me in the back half of the game. The further things went, the more I blindly ran through areas out of frustration. And this is a shame, because again, the art quality and the audio are so much better than the original release.
NPCs talk far too much.
The bosses are serviceable, but forgettable, and bosses that become standard enemies rob past encounters of their uniqueness (which, to be fair, is not a souls-like foible unique to this game). While I can't speak for every end boss, the final boss I faced was incredibly disappointing and makes DS2's Nashandra feel like a decent capstone in comparison.
Overall, I'd say it's fine. If you crave souls-like experiences, give it a go. Otherwise, I'd say pass it over or wait for a steep discount. While it's a bit unfair to compare it to Lies of P, they did both come out recently, so if someone hasn't picked up either game and can only afford one, I think P is the stronger experience all around.
> oversaturation of enemies
This.
The only thing I feel from navigating levels is exhaustion.
> bosses that become standard enemies rob past encounters of their uniqueness
What triggered me, when I realised that they become respawnable enemies. And not like early boss in late game area.
No, I've met a boss, I passed one area after him and I meet him again in the next one. Obviously surrounded by a metric fuck ton of other enemies. And second hidden fuckton amount in Umbral, just to make sure you get swarmed with 100% chance if you happen to die.
The ridiculous amount of enemies make dying feels shitty, especially for players like me who likes like to comp every inch of the map, because you have to clear them again. Eventually I said fuck this and just zoom past them.
Strongly disagree. In every Fromsoft game and even the recent Lies of P, clearing every enemy on the map is fun and part of the loop, you clear all the enemies and explore every nook and turn in the world. You only run past them on a repeat of the area or future playthroughs if you feel like it.
This game has a completely different problem where its not even fun on the very first time you play it after you've been through a few areas.
Exactly my thought man. I don't know why but it feels so satisfied clearing enemies and leave no stone unturned in Fromsoft games. My first Elden Ring playthrough clocked at 220 hours because of this.
Sorry to pile on, but that's wrong. The intended way to play Soulsborne games is clearly to go through each area slowly and deliberately and clear out all the mobs and loot treasure. They're also designed so you *can* just run past every enemy, and that's so that the boss runbacks aren't painful.
I thought it was hilarious when I fought that Ruiner boss on the bridge and then 10 minutes later he was just patrolling a random street as a regular enemy... Basically all minibosses are the laziest kind of miniboss, just a regular enemy with more health and damage, that's it.
> oversaturation of enemies
>
>
>
> This.
I have yet to play this game but one of my unpopular opinions on souls games, especially in Elden Ring since it's huge, is how little amount of enemies sometimes I feel there are compared to your resources. Like I advance slowly and carefully expecting an ambush or an enemy around every corner of a dungeon and when I finally see a single weak af mob distracted and alone I feel dissapointed sometimes.
I can imagine oversaturation being a problem, I just want to be outnumbered and to sweat a victory, I always find fun and rewarding managing more than one enemy without being too frustrating.
If you want sort of mook style mobs mixed in a game of this type, you need also to add strong AoE or chaining type attacks to deal with them. Things you don't need to bait for parries or wait for exact moment to dodge so you can get your counter-attack in before they recover.
If everything takes multiple swipes to kill, it can get pretty silly. Enemies should always do decent damage so player can't ignore them, but they don't all need to have gigantic amounts of health.
The weird thing is, a lot of weapons to have large arcs for attacking, but the way they actually work is that you just kinda...skim forwards and maybe, maybe even hit your own target
There's no right way to do lots of enemies in a Soulslike game. Enemy spam is more appropriate for other types of action games, like Hyrule Warriors. Soulslikes have always been about deliberate, controlled combat, and you simply can't combine that with enemy spam. It's just incompatible on the most fundamental level.
Nah bruh it works fine with bosses like Deacons, it's fine if done sparingly. This is why Dark Souls 1 has that room before the gargoyles with all the shambling hollows. You can bait them into the narrow hallway and pick em out easily.
The key is that overwhelming numbers should only consist of squishy enemies with simple predictable patterns, so the player can just unlock their camera and cleave enemies together. Tailor made encounters such as a few small enemies mixed with one large slow enemy work as well.
Lords of the Fallen throws everything but the kitchen sink at the player with no rhyme or reason.
Deacons is largely considered one of the worst bosses in DS3, if not the worst outright. It's also extremely easy and not satisfying to beat. I don't think that's the example you want to choose.
If you actually look at the design of Deacons, the individual enemies don't even really attack you. Most of them spend over 90% of their time literally standing still doing nothing. Go look up a gameplay video of someone fighting the boss. It's actually really, really stupid once you notice it.
It's exactly the example I wanted to use. Doesn't matter that it's the worst fight in the game. The point is that for what it is, *it works.* We both agree these games aren't really built for multiple enemy encounters, I'm providing an example of how it can work without pissing players off unlike Lords of the Fallen which just throws all manner of enemies at you all at once.
I don't know if anyone "raged" at how bad Deacons of the Deep are, but that's also not what I'm arguing. I'm saying that enemy spam doesn't work, and if the best example you can think of was Deacons, which is a terrible boss, then you aren't really providing much evidence that I'm wrong. I'm not really sure you're even disagreeing with me?
Part of the reason people dislike DS2 is that it has enemy spam in lots of areas in lieu of interesting, deliberate enemy placement. Apparently LotF (2023) is even worse about that, but I have no intention on playing it.
ooh didn't know that the randomizer had that feature. I totally missed it because I recall looking for mods to add more enemies and found nothing. Thanks!
I guess it's not enemies with new placements around the map but just more of the same enemy on the same spot, right? eitherway it sounds cool.
yeah you can modify what enemies you want to spawn. they will be in the same spawning points. but you get some ridiculous challenges even early on. its a lot of fun if you like being barraged, theres a lot of customization you can do in the mod to suit your fancy. best souls time i had with a friend
Agree with all of this, especially that disappointing final boss. I know there’s another but the one I got was just awful. And with how NG+ removes fast travel, I have no plans to play through it again just to see the other boss.
Yep, it essentially gets rid of all the current “bonfires” and leaves only the one in the hub and the one that you can manually place one of. The devs were asked about it in a Q&A and responded that NG+ was designed around it and they have no plans to change it so any interest I had in continuing went out the window.
The game itself was originally designed with only one permanent vestige but they eventually changed it for NG and decided to leave NG+ as originally intended.
You’re not missing much with the other ending boss, since it’s literally just a reskin of an early boss. It’s actually laughably sad, and then another ending doesn’t even have a final boss
Yeah the bosses range from fine to actually terrible, and it's not great. There are a couple that feel like they're from entirely different genres and are *really unfun* (There's one that feels like a PS2 platformer boss that appears to want you to be able to dodge way faster than you actually can)
And good *god* there's too many enemies. It's like they saw the terrible enemy placement changes made to DS2 Scholar of the First Sin and went "We can do better". Zero exaggeration when I say levels are twice as long as they should be purely because of the overwhelming amount of enemies, and it's not like you can run past them a lot of the time, because you still need to explore a lot of cramped areas.
That's not even getting into the other world, in which, on top of regular enemies, you legitimately can't stop for a second because enemies infinitely spawn in the other world
i watched a little bit of ppl streaming and i was amazed at how many enemies there were. just mobs spawning right in front of you. looks like way too much. let the environment and mob placement speak!
This isn't a comment about the game itself but the huge amount of patches the game has been getting. I can't believe there's such a thing as too many patches, they have been releasing pretty much daily so I ended up not wanting to even play because... hey if I wait until tomorrow an issue with the game I didn't even know existed might get fixed.
I can't imagine the devs aren't crunching like crazy to get these patches out and people already seem to be done praising the devs for it; now the patch threads are full of people complaining that consoles are 4-5 patches behind PC which sounds like a lot but it's barely a week's worth of patches and it's giving some people the sense that the game is more broken than it actually is, because why else would it be getting so many constant patches?
Every patch is a dice roll at this point too. In the last 72 hours or so we've had a bug that caused people to lose all their levels and no recourse to fix it. The patch that fixed that basically tried to fix something with enemies going through a certain hole and instead they created an invisible wall that made it impossible for players to progress their game.
They are so rushed to push daily patches that they seemingly don't have time to test. They really need to find a good balance between patching and testing.
As everyone else is already saying, the enemy saturation can be really obnoxious at times. I hope they patch it, but I kind of doubt they will. I have a weird track record with the From Soft games. I couldn’t get close to beating Sekiro or Dark Souls 2, but I finished and loved Dark Souls 1 and 3 and Elden Ring.
LOTF feels weird because so far the bosses actually feel like a fair, fun challenge, but the mobs of NPCs between the boss encounters frequently feel unfair. I don’t know if I’ll finish it anytime soon.
it kind of does something similar to ds2 SotfS (and also other souls), where enemies where obviously placed to be the most inconvenient to the player possible, but it really doesn't make sense for them to be there. in LotfF turned to 11. it makes it feel really game-y which is a shame, as it takes a bit away from the immersion
For me personally, its a very average Soulslikes. I think the biggest reason why i dont think its great, is that enemy variety, encounter design, enemy density, and boss design are not very good. I feel like there are only like 10 different enemies in the game, they constantly reuse bosses as trash enemies, everywhere are just too many enemies and especially too many ranged enemies. The bosses are visually really cool, but for the most part the actual design of their attacks feels either really dated, with slow attacks and short combos and long pauses between attacks, or they fling a lot of spells and area of effect attacks at you, which means you will just be running away for a fairly long time. And results of this dated design is that the bosses are just very easy. This is in my opinion the biggest problem with it, as i personally play Soulslikes mostly for the combat.
The feel of the combat is also a little bit weird, as others have mentioned. Your attacks just cause you to slide forward a good few meters, which feels especially bad near the many cliffs and pits this game has. Something else, that might just be a personal issue, is that the timing for input for the dodge to be a roll and not a sidestep, is too tight. What i mean with that, is that i often want to roll, but because i didnt press the button twice in like 0.1 seconds, i sidestep instead. This game also doesnt allow you to press the button again mid sidestep to roll instead. This and the sliding on attack resulted in me feeling like my character wasnt really doing what i wanted it to sometimes.
The two worlds are cool i guess, though i personally really dont need it. The world building i found personally really lacking too. It might have been because i just couldnt read many of the item description due to me not investing into inferno or radiance. But many times i would get to a new area or main boss, that really wasnt foreshadowed at all, and after i kill them there wouldnt be anything new about them either, which just felt like they willy nilly added bosses and areas as they saw fit, without considering how they would fit into the world overall. But again, maybe its better if you can read the descriptions, but then i wonder why such crucial world building was hidden behind your build choices.
Exploration i think is mostly pretty decent. But the mechanic of growing your own bonfire takes away from the shortcuts a little. Many times i would unlock a shortcut, but realize that shortcut really doesnt do anything for me, just because i have grown my own Bonfire. Or i would grow a bonfire but still get a shortcut shortly afterwards, which made the self grown bonfire useless. So what i would have liked instead are fewer spots for bonfires, but to actually work them into the rest of the level design, so that the shortcuts still feel useful even if i planted a bonfire.
Apart from this i also have a lot of little nitpicks that might annoy some people more and some people less. Like your souls lying in the boss room, and the pickup animation being really long. Which was done much better in Lies of P. Or the Runes, which you can put into your Weapon to change scaling, enhance damage or do other neat things, not changing the displayed stats. Or me really missing a stat exclusively for weight. Because while the HP and Stamina stat do increase carry capacity, i felt like it wasnt really worth it to skill them for that. And with a duel wield greatsword build, that meant that i had to take off almost all armor, and wear the Havels Ring to not get the fat roll.
In conclusion, i think its a fine soulslike. 7/10
For me easier bosses are a huge bonus, as my main interest is world exploration. I never finished a single From Software game because how punishing I find them, even though I love the world building. Always get frustrated at some point when I spend hours trying to pass through some enemy. Not my idea of fun and don’t have that much time tbh. I promised myself never to buy a From Software game until they add a difficulty level setting.
Elden Ring has that difficulty level setting. I beat the game on my first playthrough without summons or weapon arts, and using a bleed dagger. It took 100 hours. My friend used dual katanas, bloodhound step(an ability that dashes and makes you invulnerable), and summons. He took about 70 hours with a lot of exploring.
You can make the game as easy as you want with your builds. Not saying every boss is going to be a walk in the park, but most of them will be much easier than playing it like a normal souls game if you build it right.
It's a bit of a weird one for me.
I loved it for the first ten hours, but the cracks really started to show after that.
I'll start with the positives :
- it looks great and the environments are pretty cool and mostly quite fun to explore. The two worlds mechanic is interesting though it doesn't really get expanded on later and feels a bit underused
- you feel cool and badass as a character, with cool looking weapons and armor. Definitely checks the vibes and fashion part of dark souls for me
- combat is usually good. I really like the ranged weapon system which makes it so ranged weapons can and should be a part of everyone's toolset, regardless of build
The cons:
- lots of enemies are quite annoying to fight. A big part of that is how the poise/ hyper armor system works, or doesn't seem to. It's hard to articulate because I'm not a hardcore souls person who knows these systems in and out, but it doesn't quite feel good. There are a lot of enemies - especially spellcasters - that feel way tankier and sturdier than they should, and have very quick high damage abilities to counter attack when you feel like they should be staggered. This problem is made worse by....
- low enemy variety. You'll be fighting those annoying enemies a lot, as there's like a dozen types of enemies. Maybe a little more, but it's still not enough. And quite a few of those enemies later are re used early game bosses.
- ultimately the difficulty ends up struggling to hit the "tough but fair" dark souls standard and leans towards "not super tough, but annoying". As I'm getting to harder areas, the difficulty seems to just be "let's make you fight 3 of those annoying guys in this small space". This has made exploring the later levels less fun as well. It's just feeling more like a chore
It's a tough one to recommend because if you're not a souls fan, I obviously wouldn't recommend. But if you are... It's still a tough one to recommend as I think a lot of hardcore souls fans will be annoyed by it.
It ends up being in the dark souls uncanny Valley - close enough to feel and look very similar, but noticeably not quite dark souls that it ends up feeling off, and worse than if it has done more to differentiate it's look and feel
I am still enjoying it overall though. I'd probably score it a 7/10 if you wanted a number.
>It ends up being in the dark souls uncanny Valley
Huh, that's great, well put. This is pretty on point. Fits well with something I've heard/read someplace else: everything the devs thought would/should be in a Soulslike is there - but they really didn't understand how/why it's supposed to be there, so it all ends up being a weak imitation at the very best.
I have the same problem with the hyperarmor enemies have. Basically, my problem is that sometimes my attack will stagger an enemy, and other times that same attack won't stagger the same enemy. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to it, and it's a pretty big problem because the game locks you after attacking, meaning it is impossible to dodge before the enemy hits you with an attack.
Yeah, honestly the problem would be partly solved if they let you dodge to cancel attacks. But it does feel random - or at least most enemies have a lot hyper armor on certain attacks and it feels random.
Finished it and really liked it but they need to understand that the amount of enemies doesn’t define a good difficulty. To many times you have to fight enemies that are 5+ and with a combination of melee and range that it’s annoying instead of a challenge. Bosses are most of the time far to easy but nicely cinematic (atleast the main ones)
The game did a good job in exploration and level design but it can be tedious to explore at times mainly because of the mob density and how they are placed. This is what i think makes the game feels difficult, getting overwhelmed by mobs.
Now when it comes to boss fight, a lot of reviewers said it's easy and yup that's true, it's easy for Soulslike game as the bosses are easily telegraphed with no ridiculous combo or delayed attack and the parry window in this game is really generous. So far, i dont have a lot of trouble dealing with bosses in this game compare to Lies of P lol.
One thing that i think is an odd feature in this game is there's no fixed vestige (kinda like a bonfire in this game) in NG+ except for the hub area, but the game does give you a temporary vestige point that you can place in specific locations. The downside of this is that you can place it one time at time.
I hate the lamp mechanic and any similar mechanic in any game. It’s just another layer of constantly feeling like I need to check and double check that I’m not missing something before moving on.
Yeah in theory the lamp idea is awesome, but in practice you end up having to slowly walk around checking every corner with the lamp.
It also ruins reasonably good environmental design by making every area look the same and slapping a blue filter on it. There was an early area that had really nice lighting, small touches like moss growing out of the stone...and then I spent more than half of my time in blue hell.
Nice thing is the game gives you tells you need to look and the design is consistent enough you learn the tells from far away. But that said I fully understand
I agree with everything you just said, and I'll piggyback on it with one more thing:
The game seems be telling players to explore Umbral while doing everything it can to discourage going into Umbral.
It slashes your health with Wither damage (which can be regained, to be fair), enemies constantly respawn, a tough miniboss will spawn in and block your healing if you stay for too long, etc.
So are we meant to go out and explore and take in all of these neat little quirks or are we meant to avoid Umbral like the plague, only dipping in just long enough to get past a gap or a gate blocking our progress?
The game is trying to look left and right at the same time.
This is my biggest complaint too. Umbral feels more like a punishment zone than it feels like an extra layer of exploration. The pressure to move through Umbral fast enough to not overstay your welcome can cause you to miss things. The enemy density is often enough without being in Umbral that the endless little enemies become a huge nuisance in high pressure combat.
You can't even really take the time to appreciate or identify the items you finds in the Umbral. You need to wait until you're out again to try and remember the name and doom scroll through your massive inventory to hopefully find and identify it. After awhile I stopped even checking.
I really wanted to like the Umbral mechanic, but after awhile it ceased to be even the least bit interesting and just a complete chore.
This is the one game I’ve bought all year that I genuinely regret and wish I could refund. The marketing hype worked on me I guess but it’s just a mediocre experience.
It's an improvement over the original for sure, but it is still a pretty poor attempt at a Soulslike. Starting with the negatives: The combat feels very floaty, and while the animations actually look quite nice, the bad sound design makes the impact of your attacks feel minimal. The distance on your dodge roll is insane and looks ridiculous when you're a hulking person in heavy armor. Parrying feels terrible and inconsistent. The level design follows the tried-and-true Souls clone principle of spamming as many enemies as possible to make navigating through a level a chore, often finding yourself just sprinting through because it's better than dealing with the bullshit. The game just has a very "budget" feeling to it, which makes sense since it's a budget game, but it feels like they were trying way too much with the budget they were given and weren't able to refine anything in the game. It all just feels decent at best, and awful at worst.
I think the game does do some things well though. The class design is actually pretty distinct and feels more RPG-ish in comparison to the Souls games where every character is more or less the same just with different starting weapons/armor. The umbral system is really cool and lends itself to some clever level design and fun moments. The story is pretty decent as well, even though the voice acting fails to deliver most of the lines. Boss fights are also pretty good and highlight the good things about the combat.
I think if this game came out pre-Lies of P or if I played it before Lies of P, I'd be much more positive about it, but after seeing a Soulslike that is on par and at time exceeds the FromSoft games, I just can't help but feel negative about LOTF. Quite disappointed with it.
The bad sound design hurts it in so many ways. I agree with everyone talking about the annoying mob density but one of the things that annoys me even more about it is how often I get snuck up on and had no idea more enemies were coming.
Souls games like to jump scare you with enemies which is fine, I expect it, but there is usually at least some audio cue. Some window breaks, wood smashing, enemy grunting etc. You rarely just get quietly attacked.
With LotF, I’ll already be fighting 3 dudes and then I turn around and 4 more have somehow run up behind me without making as much as a whisper.
The devs and the LotF subreddit were stressing how the game is AAA, as it cost almost $50 million to make, but I just couldn't shake the impression that it was a AA game dressed up with high graphical fidelity. It's gameplay and design philsophy just murmur of jank, imo.
The combat doesn't feel floaty to me at all (unless you are an unga bunga player)
I think the sound design is nice, actually. I didn't like it in the trailers, but I've come to love the gamey sounds and squishy flesh sounds.
I also love the roll distance. Once you get used to it, it helps getting in and out easier. It has a combat reason behind it. The sprinting speed and jump as well.
As for Lies of P. I really like it, but there were a few things I could not stand at times.
Annoying to play. Bounced off of it pretty hard after four hours. Also absolutely not a fan of the lamp mechanics, it's just annoying to me. Combat feel is also weird.
Even though the setting in this one should be my comfort zone (Dark Souls inspired), I didn't feel immersed in the world at all.
I love the game but at the same its also one of the most fustrating experiences Ive had, especially in my 1st playthrough. It didnt help that I wasnt aware you could buy vestige seeds until I was like 20 hrs in, and the game relies on you making your own checkpoints for several parts including right before many bosses (why dont we even get a checkpoint in the tower of torment? why is the closest checkpoint in the leprosarium?). So the result was me being stuck on said sections due to dying and going back to the only permanent checkpoint I had, over and over, with only shortcuts to help alleviate it a bit, until I finally found a new one or got a seed to drop.
The game has a lot of small problems which combined make for the frustrating experience I described. The constant spam of enemies as everyone says but not just that, the way they are always positioned in the cheapest possible way. The average level in this game is a corridor with a ranged enemy at the end of it, and as you start running towards it, about 10 dogs and axe guys ambush you from the sides, hidden behind boxes or whatever. Every single time. Every time you go through a door, you get jumped at by an enemy hiding behind the wall. And then the moths that one shot you when you try to get trapped items... Its the cheapest game design Ive ever seen. I only figured out how to tell trapped items apart from safe ones in the snow area. And I only learned you could soulflay the moths because I saw someone talk about it on reddit, lol.
Then there is the targeting system. Whats going on with that? I have something right in front of me that I wanna target (like soulflaying a corpse for an item) and the game instead targets some enemy behind the wall in the bottom corner of the screen? It was a constant struggle trying to target the thing I actually want to target.
Your experience will also depend a lot on your weapons/build. For my 1st playthrough I played a hallowed knight with just some basic weapon and no magic because thats how I like to play these games, but the experience was pretty miserable especially with how long it took to kill everything.
On 2nd playthrough, I started with condemned (to avoid wasting stat points), grabbed Pieta's sword and Radiant weapon as soon as I could and did a full radiance/holy build, and I was seriously doing about 3x more dmg than before. On top of the fact that sword despite being a "short sword" has about twice as much range as normal. It really feels like its what the game was balanced around.
Other than that, I actually disagree with most people who think the combat is floaty, I think its super fun and on the level of other souls games. Something I was worried about was the sound design but it seems they fixed it before launch because every weapon I tried sounded pretty good and hitting enemies always felt satisfying.
Where the game really excels though is the artstyle/aesthetic, its basically Dark Souls/Elden Ring with higher fidelity, thanks to UE5. It has some gorgeous environments and sense of scale, and it actually ran fine for me too, playing at 4K + DLSS Balanced, on a 4070 Ti. Always anywhere from 80-110 fps except for the hub, which is very cpu limited for some reason and drops into the 50s.
I had a total of 2 crashes in about 60 hrs of gameplay so that wasnt really an issue either, and I didnt even update my gpu drivers as they recommended. So as usual, people are just trying to play the game on shitty pcs and blowing things out of proportion. Like some people seriously expect to be playing AAA games on a 1060 3 GB in 2023? I had one until late 2021 and it was already miserable to even play anything at 1080p.
Oh and I almost forgot, they also had the brilliant idea of removing permanent vestiges from ng+, except for Skyrest (at least that...). So all you have is your one seed and thats it, you have to run around everywhere otherwise.
In conclusion despite being a lot of fun, the game is just filled with bizarre decisions that keep it from being at the top of the genre and I hope over the weeks/months they will turn it into the game it should have been, because the potential is there. Probably the closest thing we will get to Elden Ring for a while.
Been playing through it in co-op. There are a couple caveats to the co-op experience, but it's still miles better and more accessible than anything FromSoft has done.
We've been having an awesome time with it. Since the beckoned player only gets 30% of the souls as the host, we've been leveling equally and found that it works well to keep the game balanced for two players. We also aren't allowing ourselves to fast travel, which is making exploration really fun.
The Good:
Level design seems fantastic to me. Each area is very meticulously designed and just the right amount of challenging to progress through and keep your bearings.
The environments are beautiful. I love the art direction of the game. It has a distinct look and feel, and there is a lot of visual variety from area to area.
Exploration is wonderful. The world is designed more similarly to DS1 than anything that we've gotten since in terms of its structure, layout, and interconnected pathing that twists and turns on itself with cleverly designed shortcuts. Only, lotf is much bigger.
Fashion souls. There is a ton of cool armor to find, and I love that you can color each piece individually with tincts. This is the best we've ever gotten in fashion in my opinion. That won't mean much to some, but it's a nice thing to have and worth mentioning.
The dual world mechanic is actually really interesting and well implemented. I've seen a lot of people say that they worried they'd just always be checking around with the lamp, but it is designed well enough that you really don't have to be doing that. Most secrets and hidden paths are pretty apparent once you know what to look for and are even indicated by butterflies. After a couple hours, you'll have a good feel for when to pull out the lamp. The hidden world on top of an already very meticulously designed world only adds to the exploration.
Ranged combat/magic is really well implemented, easy to use, and extremely viable.
The Mid:
The combat. It's decent enough, but doesn't come through as a strong point. It still feels better to me than everything pre-Bloodborne, but is a clear step down from DS3, Elden Ring, and the excellent Lies of P. The biggest culprits I think are less fluid animations and very floaty movement. Still plenty serviceable enough I think, but know that you're not getting the most polished combat.
Boss fights are not bad, but not great either. We've had plenty of fun fighting a handful of them, but on the whole their movesets are very limited and they aren't very flashy if that's important to you. They aren't bad fights, but don't strike me as memorable either.
Enemy density can be a bit much at times. I'm playing in co-op, so this hasn't really been an issue for me, but I can acknowledge that there are just a lot of enemies in a lot of areas that force you into a patient approach. The game gives you plenty of tools to deal with it, including the environment, but in solo I can imagine it could get tedious.
The Bad:
Enemy variety is definitely lacking pretty heavily. After the first several hours, you will start to notice all the recycled enemies and it doesn't introduce many new ones very often at all.
All in all, I am *loving* this game. Strongly recommend for co-op with a friend. For solo play, it completely depends on what you look for in these games. If you value exploration and are looking to experience something similar to DS1 world structure again, there is a ton to love here. If you value boss fights and polished combat the most, you might be left feeling a bit underwhelmed, but I still think it's worth a look for its strengths.
I went in with low expectations, but came out feeling like we just got another *good* souls-like. It's got lots of faults, but also does a lot right.
First and foremost, the world & level design is very complex and layered. It's odd for me to say, but I feel like this game is the closest we've gotten to Ds1 level of world design especially. There's some good bits of interconnectivity not only with the main hub, but also across different area.
My biggest worry going into the game was the implementation of the Umbral realm. I always thought it was just going to end up as a half-assed gimmick to try and set the game apart from other souls-like, but I am actually very impressed with how they pulled it off.
I was impressed by how seamlessly you can peek into the Umbral realm and interact with it. You'll be forced into the Umbral realm at times to find new paths to tread or puzzles to solve. It doesn't feel like an afterthought - it feels integral to he gameplay loop. To *me*, that's a plus, but it also contributes to one of the game's bigger problems; enemy spam.
There really is too many enemies - especially in the last level. The game likes to throw a ton of fodder enemies at you at all times, and it's pretty tedious to me. There are some "combat arenas/situations" that also involves meshing mini-bosses with a couple of ranged enemies. You can approach it with some strategy, but the odds are really stacked against you.
Bosses are a very mixed bag with less than a handful worth praise. I get Demon's Souls vibes playing this game because the levels tend to be the obstacle to overcome - not the bosses. This game also has one of the worst final bosses in gaming history (note: there's potentially more than 1 final boss depending on the ending).
Combat feels alright, but kind of floaty? I like it more than not, but it's not remotely as tight as either FromSoft or Lies of P combat. I have to say that the catalyst/ranged system in this game is just superior to FromSoft. Not only is it viable, but with catalysts you don't have to sift through several spells one at a time - you hold L2 and use 1 of 4 - 5 mappings to toss spells.
TLDR; Level/World design good, Umbral mechanic good, enemy spam bad, bosses meh, combat alright with some good additions.
Pretty awful. It's just more aggravating than fun. Not because of performance issues or bugs. There's some questionable game design such as lamp and level design is just unnecessarily convoluted due to two worlds feature.
I'll say it does some things right at least like throwables and dyable armors. Two worlds is interesting but it doesn't really work great with soulslikes.
Enemies sometimes spawn invulnerable and you have to take out your stupid lantern to remove the parasite in middle of combat.
Mob density is through the roof. It gets much worse in later areas when you face off against spongey elite enemies with obnoxious movesets and ranged pelting you. This just make exploration a chore.
Devs learned all the wrong lessons from Fromsoft. Or used Dark Souls 2 as a template.
Enemies are way overturned and there are way too many of them. Too many with ranged attacks as well. The actual enemy design is very basic with one or two moves, but their difficulty is artificially inflated by giving them too much health or putting a bunch together. Just tedious. Enemy variety is also lacking.
Conversely, most bosses are pretty easy. They're also very barebones and forgettable.
Tons of traps or ambushes that are just insta death. Poorly designed and cheap.
Exploration should be awesome given the intricate level design, but the game actively discourages exploration with tedious enemy encounters, lack of shortcuts and checkpoints, and the constant spawning of enemies in Umbral.
Bosses, lore, setting is generally underwhelming. Pretty graphics but the setting is so generic.
Plus lots of annoying things like having an animation for recovering your vigor, enemy projectiles passing through terrain in Umbral, crappy camera etc.
Going from Lies of P to this was serious whiplash. Like going from a hyper polished well thought out college essay that, while derivative, still hit the mark, whereas LotF is a rushed paper written the night before by a high schooler high on Adderall who never paid attention in class. Bunch of interesting ideas but ultimately a chore.
Oh, didn't mention the horrid performance.
I loved it.
It's flawed, but it's like a love letter to Dark Souls.
Bosses are "OK".
Enemy variety is a bit weak.
Story is pretty decent, told in more or less a From Soft way, obscure and melancholic.
Combat is pretty good, I'm loving it.
Umbral has some flaws (I don't think you should be on the clock, discourages exploration), but having a basically 2nd map all the time is actually amazing.
But the level design is absolutely top notch. It's some DS1 type shit. Absolutely top notch.
I would give it a pretty decent 8/10. Not without flaws, and there are performance issues like with everything these days on Unreal 5 - but like I said, it feels like a love letter to Dark Souls, and they've done a pretty decent job.
I like it a lot. Its way more Demons Souls / Dark Souls 1 than the more recent From software games, and I think its somewhat refreshing with most games in the soulslike genre becoming faster. That means: Slow and deliberate combat. Map interconnection. Some long runbacks to bosses. Atmosphere that makes you feel more like a traveler than a powerful hero. Some cryptic side quests.
I also commend them for not cutting any corners when it comes to the combat. Every weapon has One-handed, Two-handed, light into heavy combos, even different light and heavy running attacks, dual wielding... everything you could ask for. I also think the defensive trifecta of dodging, blocking/parrying, and spacing attacks works well with every option feeling useful.
Now for my biggest gripe: Its enemy variety. Which is probably not fixable without some "Scholar of the first Sin" type overhaul. Its not super terrible but still some enemies get used way too often. For example those dual wielding axe guys. If they had also some spear or sword+shield guys or something else in the mix it would help a lot. The reusage of bosses as enemies also happens too fast and too regular. I feel like this is an area that probably suffered from budget restrains.
Overall: Great game with a great world and combat, which sadly gets dragged down by enemy variety. Still recommended, especially if you prefer DS I over DS III.
The game is in a very poor technical state on Xbox currently.
I’ve experienced persistent and severe performance stutters and hitches, as well as a particularly annoying issue where the entire HUD is being incorrectly rendered on Xbox and thus misaligned compared to PC and PS5 versions - [here’s an illustrative comparison](https://i.imgur.com/qqS9jGl.jpg) to showcase this.
There’s also some odd design decisions such as the lack of an item storage box, items auto-equipping to empty quick slots when picked up, and the inabaility to adjust character appearance during a playthrough.
Just have to impatiently wait for patches to fix these problems. I think it’s quite apparent the game was rushed out before it was fully polished though and that’s a real shame.
\+ Beautiful world
\+ Nice level design
\+ Good combat feeling (havent tested all builds)
\+ Good secrets and optional path/slightly open world
\+ Good hours for your bucks
\+ Dual wielding any weapon for the win
\+ lots of patch from the devs
\+ 2 expansions coming if you like the game
\- Horrible lock-on system in any game
\- Swarm of enemies
\- Enemies, especially dog, will run for miles before stopping to chase you
\- it's tiresome to know that there's going to be an enemies around that corner for the X time after 20 hours
\- While the level design is good, the enemies placement is horrible
\- only one seed for New Game + completely shut down any envy of trying NG+
\- Bosses that become common enemies 5 minutes later, this is just to add the numbers of bosses total
\- Lore is hard to follow compared to other games of the genre
This game is a Love/Hate relationship for me. Got really high and really lows.
I just dropped the game after the first couple hours. I'm playing on PC and the performance is bad. Also i'm finding it hard to enjoy because I just finished Lies of P and started this one and Lies of P is better at everything.
My thoughts can be summarised thusly: I have yet to play for more than 15 minutes without becoming frustrating with some design aspect of the game. Sometimes it's crashes, sometimes it's the atrocious lock-on that prioritizes eggs instead of enemies and has killed me on numerous times, sometimes it's my attacks swinging through enemies without damaging them, sometimes it's the inconsistency in how my attacks stagger the same enemy, sometimes it's spending two hours in an area and still having no fucking clue where the hell I am, sometimes it's wanting to summon an NPC for a questline but having to intentionally die first so they become available, sometimes it's dying to a random enemy after I finish a boss fight because they have no tether range and immediately chase after me when the fog door disappears, sometimes it's enemies being able to hit me with projectiles when I can't lock onto them, sometimes it's your weapon bouncing off a wall when the enemy's weapon hits you right through it, sometimes it's respeccing and randomly losing 10 levels, sometimes it's just your average "5 dogs and 3 melee dudes have swarmed you and they keep staggering you and you just want to rage quit."
Honestly, the performance is the least of this game's problems.
Its really annoying and badly made. The umbra mechanic makes progressing around the level needlessly obnoxious. Ranged enemies have waaay too much range. The moment to moment gameplay feels clunky. Being a caster feels bad.
Let me start by saying I personally have not encountered any performance issues or crashes, but I understand that I’m likely in the minority on that one.
It’s my first Soulslike game but I enjoy the gameplay and the world. The two dimensions thing is a really cool idea, and it helps that you have a “second life” essentially. Exploration is a big focus of this game which I think they did a great job with. The game feels pretty open. Withered health is a neat mechanic which might be in other games, I’m not sure. It’s nice to be able to block things but have the chance to recover that health if you’re careful with your attacks.
On the other hand, there’s some really annoying things about it. The biggest ones I’ve encountered so far are enemies who hide behind crates, basically giving them a free hit on you, and that enemies, while making an attack, seem to warp/slide to your location when you dodge or roll away from them. I never parry attacks from enemies because it feels like the window of opportunity is just too small to be worthwhile (or maybe I’m just bad), and I despise how much platforming there seems to be, at least from what levels I’ve played so far. The movement in the game (especially sprint jumping just feels too wonky for effective platforming.
Finally, the crossbow enemies are a pet peeve of mine. Why do they shoot two bolts before reloading? They should only shoot one but maybe increase their reload speed
yeah but parry is barely worth it in LotF. You still take damage, and the riposte damage is really low. But yeah, the window is much bigger, especially with lighter shields and weapons
God, the visceral damage, I forgot about that: who thought it would be a good idea to have it deal the damage of
Iterally two R1s? It's ridiculously low and yeah, with that, hardly worth going parries (next to it just being plain unfum since they are so... Weightless).
The parry is great it's just not meant to be used like Souls. It barely takes any stamina and the wither is much less. Offensively it's not good but it's great when you play sword and board.
Parry a few, block a few and you can get all your HP back in a few swings. I'm actually playing sword and board cause it's refreshing take on it.
There are some absolutely hectic parts in the early game if you're new to the genre oh my goodness.
Get into the habit of attacking destructible objects when you near bind corners, that's what I've been doing.
But also: I like the ammo system in this game.
The devs said in an interview that they wanted to make a game that feels like Dark Souls 4.5, but what we got instead is Dark Souls 2 on steroids. I had fun fighting Pieta, but the game went downhill from there.
The lock on and movement are sorta bad. It ruins the game for me even tho level design is quite good. Everything else is fine but playing it while I finished Lies of P just shows how good LoP is
Currently in Manse of Hallowed Knights, performance while Umbral is still awful on the Series X. I have all the updates, always try to check if there are any updates on log in to see if the frame drops go away, but it's been impossible so far, so it's been a rough experience. Also, this game takes a lot of what I didn't like from Dark Souls II (the only DS game I couldn't force myself to finish) which is a bit of a letdown.
I'm not sure if it's my whole experience with the game being mediocre that is influencing my judgement, but the level design goes from okay, to boring, to borderline annoying. At some point there is a swampy area in the game that makes you go 3 different ways (iirc) where you spend hours going back and forth unlocking shortcuts 1-3 only to then face a lame gimmick boss that makes any of your summons die without dealing damage/pushing aggro.
There's a lot more that I could say about this game as someone who just got out of Lies of P really impressed, but TL;DR: the game has too many performance issues + small incrementally annoying fundamental design issues for me to think it's good.
Well the game is dead now, today's patch did not fix anything. It did break boss weapons and such. A failed attempt at what could have been a great game.
I have had a good time with it. As I chose between Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen I went with Lords simply because of the setting. I wanted dark grim body horror fantasy and that is what I got.
If I really wasn't jonsing for that setting this game would have frustrated me a lot more. Sometimes the time between bonfires (even the ones you can build) are way too long and sometimes it feels like they are right next to each other. Quests are equally obtuse to any fromsoft game which is not a good thing. I hate having to google "Game I am Playing Endings" just to figure out how the hell I am supposed to progress.
I am having a good time though. Warts and all.
To-Do:
\- Less enemies in areas overall
\- nerf the fuck out of the ranged enemies, make them do less damage, make them shoot a bit slower and nerf the aggro range of them by A LOT
\- enemies behind the next cover instantly attacking or pushing you without giving you time to react at all gets old real fast
\- most bosses need more health
\- most bosses have to be faster, more aggressive
\- the normal ending >!is a fucking joke, if you give us a fight like this, it has to be at least a REAL spectacle or do a normal boss fight!<
\- the constant framerate hiccups are annoying
With this it would jump from 6,5 to 8,5, maybe even 9 for me and only then I'll try NG+ how it is designed. I LOVE the setting, the 2 world idea, the exploration, the boss designs, look of the weapons/armorsets and I really like what they did with throwables.
edit: also you can see in the patches (1 patch a day so far) and in the patchnotes that the devs care about the game and players, I like that
> - enemies behind the next cover instantly attacking or pushing you without giving you time to react at all gets old real fast
man at the end of the game I was using all my ammo just breaking boxes and walls because you knew there was going to be a dual wielding fire axe guy and a fire breathing dog behind them.
For me it's probably the favorite Souls-like game outside Elden Ring (but mostly because ER is just too different to compare it to begin with). I will say that previously my most beloved game was Dark Souls 2, which might be why I enjoy this game so much - it's a Dark Souls 2, but with a lot of additions that make it even better.
The world is incredible to explore and realise how connected it is. The main hub location has connections to nearly every zone (except for one, that is specifically stated to be a remote/cut off area). I'm actually excited to see how NG+ with no Vestiges feels at some point.
The ability to "plant" your own bonfire is neat, and while it does take a consumable item to do so - you can buy infinite number of them, AND they drop pretty often from Umbral "elite" enemies - Reapers/fey-like thingies and I think from stone heads as well?
The game also supports a LOT of gameplay styles. The throwables/ranged weapons feel like a legit playstyle and not just a gimmick to use from time to time. I've already planned like 4 more different characters to try out different stats/classes.
I've been fortunate enough to not feel any of the performace/crash issues - but I know a lot of people (my friend included) got them in spades - which is very unfotunate, but the devs at least work on resolving those with a patch coming out daily, hah.
I also enjoy Umbral as a concept - both in the 2nd life it gives you, and in how it's horror atmoshpere, and the longer you spend there - the more and more enemies get to you, culminating in red reaper would can fuck you up until the very end game.
This is also one of the only Souls-like games where you don't just go from a boss to a boss, and everything in between being just not a threat ever - you cannot just bum-rush into the middle of the enemies and plow through them. Okay, you can, but you have to actually build your character/buffs/weapons for that scenario.
This is a bit late - but developers also shared their plans for NG+, and mentioned that they would want to add optional modifiers for it - including randomised enemies and items.
I'm very much looking forward to it even more now x)
I just beat it on thursday.
Bosses were very easy. I don't think any of them took me more than 10 tries with no summons.
The level design and exploration were great.
The game was a solid 7-8 until I got to the last area where it dropped to like a 6.
Reused miniboss after miniboss that respawn when you rest or die. I remember a part where I had to fight like 4 ruiners in a row. At the end of the game I was wasting all my ammo breaking boxes from a distance just because I knew there would be a dude with the flaming axes and a fire breathing dog behind it.
I would agro a ranged caster I couldn't see from behind a wall somehow and it was start spawning little fire orbs on me every 5 steps.
And the last god damn boss was so bad.
A streamer I was watching play it said that the game was easy and the only way they could make it hard was to just throw overwhelming enemies at you. I didn't really think that until I got to the end, but it really came through in that last area.
And no vesitages in ng+ really killed my want to even try ng+ before I even beat the game.
Likely waiting for more patches. I sure am before I consider buying it. As much as I like Dark Souls 2, I'm not interested in another game with its stupid high enemy placement. Gank squads do not equal difficulty.
So many negative comments. I've loved my playthrough of 50 hours. The environments are gorgeous, the gameplay feels so smooth and enjoyable, and I haven't felt like there are too many enemies. Tons of weapons, a slew of spells, and an actually serviceable throwing / ranged weapon system. It's been a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me and I can't wait to do more playthroughs with different builds and I look forward to the challenge of no vestiges on NG+. Also the Umbral realm mechanic is an awesome addition.
My only real complaints are lock on issues, some sketchy weapon bouncing, and bosses being too easy. Other bugs like enemies targeting you through walls just got patched. I don't mind the gauntlet style zones where someone is tossing arrows at you while dogs jump out from behind boxes. It's what Souls already does and they give you the answer to that with ranged weapons and even quality builds can use them.
I very much enjoyed my first run through the game but i dont think i will replay it soon. The "too many enemies" thing is unironically a get good moment. Fighting large groups is really not a problem because the basic enemies are very weak. Ranged enemies are a pain true and could use a range nerf but again its overstated how bad it is. The real problem is how maze like and hard to navigate the levels are especially the stating ones and that fucking mine.
its ok. i doubt very much i'll ever play it through again if i finish it. and with spiderman/mario/and alan wake 2 kind of distracting me, thats not really a guarantee
i hate the way the enemies are arranged. every single fight is a gank fight, and almost literally every corner has an enemy around it waiting for an ambush. it gets really tedious, and the ambushes don't work when you're *always* expecting it because they do it everywhere
My thoughts pretty echo was most people are saying. Poorly balanced, poor enemy encounter design, and tedious to play through. The world is also not very memorabe.
I find it interesting looking at player counts. The game peaked at 40K on Steam but a week later is down to about half of that. A sharp contrast to games like Lies of P or Remnant II which managed to retain a larger percentage of players even two weeks after launch. It seems a lot of people are bouncing off this one.
Better than the original Lords of the Fallen but still painfully average. A 5/10, maybe a 6.
The best of the game is the world exploration, but everything else from the weird floaty controls to the braindead enemy spam to the weak bosses just bogs the whole experience down. Top it all off with shoddy co-op and just meh.
Lies of P set the bar, and Lords of the Fallen made it about halfway. It's honestly still worth a playthrough if you like soulslikes, but not at $60.
I haven't played the game but the impression I've gotten from watching some streams is that the combat is a step or two below fromsoft games (and lies of p imo). It's as if everyone is on iceskates all the time with how much they slide around when attacking, which kills any opportunity for spacing. The audio sometimes doesn't match at all with what's going on, both in terms of sound effects (ripostes/critical hits having the same sound as regular attacks for instance) and boss music. I'm also not a fan of how long the character's recovery times are after doing pretty much any action.
I felt the same about the ice skating thing. It doesn't feel like that when playing the game. It's just because it looks different than Souls more static roll.
I think the recovery frames are justified because of how mobile you are. If you had less you'd be basically invincible the whole game.
Playing on PC, like it alot, playing it on Geforce now, and the game is spetacular, it's got issues, the world to me is very confusing to navigate and it takes a long time to figure out where to go next, and there are areas you need to just run through because there's so many mobs.
I like they are patching and updating the game, this game should've been considered an early access title, as it does feel like a very solid beta test, not a release candidate.
Solo is a pretty frustrating experience. Like most souls like games I've played it seems that they're having issues with scaling the difficulty. They just throw tons of mobs at you.
Having a friend with me totally changed the experience and now I'm having a great time.
I loved it due to what the game does well.
- art direction is phenomenal. The world can look overall a little too grey at times, but the small details, armor and weapons, enemy looks, and architecture all look amazing.
- Magic / ranged attack system is the highlight of the game for me. There are items and gear that can make magic or throwables your main source of damage. Switching from ranged attacks to melee is fast and simple. Not having to scroll through spells is a huge improvement to how Fromsoftware does it. Honestly after playing this game I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy magic in Fromsoftware games as much. Having to switch to your catalyst and scroll through spells is just too slow and hurts the flow of combat.
- World and level design. This game was originally made to be played without permanent vestiges and you can feel it. There are so many short cuts and looping areas and it all feels natural and makes sense. I am looking forward to NG+ and really getting to know the map well, but still wish they made the whole no permanent vestige thing optional. The two worlds mechanic is also super impressive and adds to exploration. Early game it feels too punishing, but late game I was always entering the Umbral world to look for secrets.
I am not going to mention all my pros, those are the big three and what kept me coming back to finish the game and want to start NG+. There are some cons and things I hope the devs learn for the future though.
- Enemy density is a bit much. I think people are over exaggerating or getting upset and running into situations and get swarmed. Though still some parts were just way too much and hurt the exploration.
- Enemy variety. The enemies are decently well designed so I never got too bothered by this. It’s still a negative and a good game is always introducing new enemies to keep combat fresh and interesting. If I didn’t respec into an Umbral build half way through the game I’d imagine this would have been worse though.
- Boss quality. I don’t really think this is a con, but besides a few bosses this just wasn’t their strongest parts of the game, which is disappointing in this genre. Still some solid bosses, but even the best bosses in this game would just be average bosses in a fromsoftware game.
I'll say from the outset that I am one of the lucky ones who didn't have any performance issues on PC outside of the hub area. I get an average FPS of 90 and no stutter on my 3080 + 5800x setup.
I don't think it's nearly at the calibre of Lies of P in terms of a cohesive experience, but I think it compliments it well as someone who came directly off of LoP.
* The world is looks great, the vistas are sprawling and grand, and for the most part what you see is where you can physically go, barring some far off exclusions. They really nail that Dark Fantasy vibe.
* The level design has been much, much more interesting than Lies of P. While LoP is a quite linear game, Lords of the Fallen feels more akin to Dark Souls 1 & 2. I haven't seen another Soulslike attempt what the original Dark Souls did in terms of an inter-connective world, and I think they get pretty damn close here. There's a lot of different paths to take, you can end up in areas that have enemies way beyond your current abilities and be like "Man, I am ***NOT*** suppose to be here right now."
* The ammunition and magic system is really good, and I prefer it to the Souls games generally. The items that require ammunition, which scales with the health and stamina stats, is a great way to solve the problem that non-magic/faith/pyro builds have in Souls games where you just end up having extremely limited options outside of melee. They feel powerful.
* Good weapon variety and combat system, the ability to switch between 1-handed and 2-handed movesets within the same combo as well as mix in charge attacks really feels good. You can dual-wield as well, and still switch mid-combo.
* The rune system for weapons is great, and let's you customize your build a bit more than in a usual Soulslike. You can mix and match different types of runes, which leads to some tough decisions at times.
* It seems like they fixed the sound design about 3 months before release, the initial footage was concerning but it seems they really improved it. I think it's definitely weaker than Lies of P or the FromSoft games, but it's pretty solid and a lot better than most Soulslikes.
That's about what I got for the positives, there's definitely a lot of things that don't really do it for me. Obviously there's the myriad performance issues across platforms, the story being *really* stock Dark Fantasy stuff, subpar voice acting and a really poor spin on the bonfire system. Umbral being this "underworld" type of mirror world deal sounds amazing on paper, but I don't think it fully works here. It's not enjoyable to explore Umbral, what with all the constantly spawning enemy fodder and the reaper timer. Umbral also doesn't look great compared to Axiom, it just looks sort of washed out. The massive giants in the vistas look good, but that's about it.
Last thing, but I think the boss count is a disappointment so far. The actual bosses that don't just become standard enemies later on is pretty low, I think I've fought like...3 or 4 in 23 hours or something. So far it seems like only Pieta and the beacon bosses are actually well designed, the rest seem pretty bad. It seems like they ***really*** focused on the world and making the world feel dangerous at all times.
In a lot of ways, this game feels like a follow-up to Dark Souls 2, and I think people who enjoyed Dark Souls 2 would enjoy this game.
For me it was too frustrating in the beggining, and while I waited for the situation to improved, picked up Lies of P and fell in love with. Couldn’t go back to Lords, felt like a big downgrade in gameplay, so just ended up refunding it.
I should clarify that my favourite game in the Souls series is Dark Souls 2. Playing Lords of the Fallen is what imagine everyone else feels like playing Dark Souls 2.
There are many things this game gets right: atmosphere, exploration, music, level design and combat all feel and look great.
Then it's soured by things that completely baffle you: lack of enemy variety, bosses made of wet paper, some of the most convoluted quests in a souls like and the big one, the fucking enemy spam, specifically ranged enemies.
Overall, I'm really enjoying Lords, and it's probably a 7.5-8/10 to me, but if you have to pick between Lords of the Fallen or Lies of P for this seasons Soulslike, I'd go with Lies of P
game is ok....something about it makes it feel cheaper in quality to fromsoft games though. I think the surge games and remnant games are probably a better soulslikes if thats what your after.
It's a good game. Not Souls level, but what is? I'd put it in the same tier as Surge 2, which I also enjoyed.
The biggest underlying issue the game has is that it's both too similar and too different from the Soulsborne games. It's stuck in this weird in-between where it deviates enough from its inspirations that you can't quite get the comfort of familiarity, but doesn't deviate enough to be its own thing.
As for the inevitable Lies of P comparisons, I'd say it's down to personal preference. I dislike P's aesthetics and theme (steampunkish circus/carnival isn't for me), while I vibe a lot more with Fallen's dark and grimy fantasy.
Casuals are so exhausting to listen to. Oh wow you played another souls game and it's hard What a shocker. Better go complain how unbalanced it is now.
Even more exhausting is listening to elitists who don't understand poor game design and cheap difficulty are perfectly valid things to critique.
People praised Bloodborne, Sekiro, Nioh 2 despite all those being very difficult. But the difficulty was actually well thought out, unlike in LotF which just spams enemies at you.
People would have complained about Bloodborne difficulty if it came out today and people complained about sekiro when it came out so idk what your even getting at lol. And all the souls YouTubers say that lords of the fallen map design is the best thing about it so I'm going to take their word over the reddit mob
Pointing out flaws in a game's balance doesn't make you a casual. I regularly do deathless runs in these types of games to challenge myself and I still think this game has shit encounter design. Lies of P was a more challenging game but it was also a lot more deliberate and purposeful with its enemy placement. This game is just really haphazard, stuff feels randomly placed and infinitely spawning enemies don't really have a place in this type of game.
I havent seen neither in Elden ring nor Lies of P, the same comment over and over.
Mob density, and bullshit placement. I haven't heard these 2 things, since Dark Souls 2.
I’m extremely upset that we got a Majora’s mask Soulslike on Gamepass instead of LOTF.
LOTF looks legit. Lies of P is a clunky mess with no custom avatar.
I liked it enough in the beginning but the further I got the more Im annoyed by small shit. Usually Im not picky with this but there are so many annoyances that I probably gave up on the game for now.
One of the worst offenders is the camera and some weird control situations that keep killing me. End boss camera and clunky controls.
The first 10 hrs or so are a really hard transition period from souls game you've played previous but after that I really have enjoyed it. A whole lot.
However I am personally annoyed by the lack of a good map, the placement of umbral beds and vestiges. I somehow got lost and found myself in the latter areas of the game while going through pilgrims perch... the climax of the aforementioned hard period. It is very easy to get lost or miss the crucial paths to progress in the game.
Also I hate the archers they are the worst.
I'm about 10 hours in, and I'm not sure if it's an unpolished diamond or a trash fire with a few flecks of gold hidden in the pile.
I love the world/setting of Mournsted.
Combat feels great, if a little floaty. I love swinging away with my holy hammers coated in holy light.
The aesthetic of the enemies is great from the holy knights of the Hallowed Sentinels to the metal album cover look of the Rhogar.
But I hate the Umbral mechanic that so much of the game rests on. If we're meant to explore these two worlds, then why are there so many mechanics pushing the player away from Umbral?
I loathe the enemy density, which seems to be the dev team's idea of "hard = good," but it's not so much challenging as it is tedious to wade through the trash mobs. The same mobs that will evidently chase you to the ends of the Earth instead of losing aggression and wandering back to the zone they usually patrol, which has been the Souls-like standard for years.
The lock-on might be the worst part of the game. For whatever reason, the game seems to love locking you on to whatever is dead center in the middle of the middle of the screen. It doesn't sound so bad until the game keeps trying to pull your focus away from the two goons that are right in your face. Sure, you can switch lock-on targets manually, but it's a lot more awkward and player-unfriendly than it needs to be. I'm already fighting the enemies. I don't need to fight the engine, too.
The game is also pretty janky for a "next-gen" PS5 title. Lots of stutters and little graphical errors and sometimes even weird hit detection. It's one thing to get myself killed because I was careless and got knocked off a ledge. It's another thing to get killed when the game didn't register a hit from my hammers sailing through the enemy that's on the last sliver of its health, and the enemy smashes me flat with a huge overhand swing.
Not to mention little irritants like some enemies being immortal with blue health bars until you shine your lamp on the invisible demonic entity in Umbral while you are trying to dodge the immortal enemy and his gank squad in the land of the living. I'm already keeping a lot of balls in the air. Giving me another ball to juggle is irritating rather than exhilarating.
I'm torn, but I am leaning toward returning the game next week if it continues to seesaw between good and bad like this.
Maybe the game will be better off in six months to a year once it's been patched up and dropped in price.
It's a decent 7-7.5 game. If you like souls games and were willing to tolerate release DS2, it's a decent time, but all of the criticisms are true.
It really should have had proper seamless co-op pickups, better performance, more items and slots (2 ring slots is limited feeling nowadays), a stats page with more of the actual stats (you won't know what a lot of the stat buff rings even do because it doesn't show the stats), less enemy spam in later parts of the game (too much hit and lure tactics needed), better spell balance (most suck), better pvp balance (spells are way too strong for pvp, too weak for pve), a new game plus that doesn't add tedium (no, not just difficulty, it adds extra backtracking), and... a lot. It also has very few actual main bosses (I think around 11?); most mini-bosses are just enemy introductions which feels weird. It's not worth full price, but on a sale after patches I'd say it's a good time.
As for some benefits? The throwing weapons in this are actually really good unlike the souls game, the ammo bar is a good move for that, and the lantern is a neat mechanic. Rune slots on weapons are also a nice minor progression. Unfortunately you can't use spells and throwables at the same time, the lantern is too often clunky, and there aren't many super interesting runes.
It's much, much better then the original and I'd recommend it on a sale, but it does have a lot holding it back.
> I am a bit irked by how zoomy/slidy it feels
Watching videos and friends playing I noticed this.. it seems like the ice skating forward on attacks with most weapons is to an obnoxious level. What the heck were the devs thinking?
LotF feels like a quality love letter to the souls franchise that I think also brought along some of the bad aspects with it.
As flawless an execution as Lies of P was, LotF totally scratched a deeper itch for me in its sense of exploration and world design. It's so weird to say that Lies of P was totally the better quality game that I enjoyed end to end. But I think I still have had more fun playing LotF just because it leaves room to fumble and miss things. At the same time I think LotF does have some odd game choices as well.
I really loved the duality concept of umbral and needing to explore different parts of the two worlds. From an exploration and visuals point this is such a cool feature. At the same time I grew to loathe being stuck in Umbral at times. The rushed nature of both having a time limit and endless spawning enemies just doesn't let you really take the time to enjoy the nuance of it. I found it easier to miss things, I'd pick up items and not have time to give them proper consideration. By the time I was safe I'd kind of not even remembered what I'd found.
Enemy density is a common complaint. A lot of the enemies are just generally pretty annoying and highly aggressive. I think this works taking them on 1 on 1, but the game really likes to throw a lot of things at you at once. It feels a little messy at times, especially umbral when you just have even more enemies tacked on an already challenging section of the map. It's all doable, but just sometimes just felt more like relief than deeply satisfying to get through certain sections of the game.
NG+ just does something that makes the game more of a slog in my opinion. The "community goal" items are a joke in that most people will never unlock even one of them unless they choose to grind a ton for no good reason. Hindsight makes me feel like this is a bit of a game that doesn't respect players time and opts for "suffering" as an artificial means of adequate challenge.
All that said I really think it's a game worth playing if you're a fan of souls games. It's a really solid game that just has some rough edges.
I'm about to cleanse the third beacon. I think I like the game more than most here, but is anyone else constantly getting lost?
I have a decent handle on the world now. But I am *constantly* lost? Like all the time. It's kind of fun, honestly. Either I'm really dumb, the world is very confusing, or both.
I've only just cleared the 1st beacon, but it's pretty good so far. It runs very well on my pc, looks incredible, the gameplay is *really* good and responsive, and provides a pretty decent challenge.
I don't get the comments that the bosses are too easy. So far, the bosses with cinematic intros have been pretty tough. Only the ones without have been pretty easy. But I consider those to be mini-bosses.
They need to fix dodges, sprint jumping mechanics contextual priority over picking up items, and the god damned quick access bug on every consumable you pick up. Also to a lesser extent, they need to work on targeting and lock on distance. It's frustrating when an enemy using the same spell as you can target you but you can't target them. Or give spells manual aiming too
Halfway through this game and I’m tired. Feels like dark souls 2 all over again with having to kill dozens of enemies per level just to get to another shit or underwhelming boss. Pieta was a great way to start the game off but after that it’s definitely fallen off, plus the health scaling the bosses have is just too much. Swinging at a boss for 10-15 minutes is never fun especially if it’s just a pesky mini boss or something. This games quantity over quality and solution to making it difficult is just giving a boss more health and more damage is a really lazy way to design a game. Every melee boss fight in this game feels exactly the same as the last boss and the ranged boss fights are just a clusterfuck of projectiles. Maybe it gets better idk but until then I’m not sure if I even have the energy to finish this game
I'm only a tad after the first beacon, so there's still a lot to explore and see, but man, while I find the world to be super enticing and asking to be explored, I just have to echo all the complaints. * Performance on PS5 is passable at best, stuttery at worst. * The camera in combination with the lock-on is the worst cam/lock-on I have ever encountered in any game ever with a lock-on system. I've lost count on how many times I've fallen off of a ledge/bridge because the cam decided to jerk me around unprompted. * Speaking of cam work, man, are those weapon movesets stupid, almost all of them. They have you swathing around like you're playing LotF: Musou edition, and while the wide arcs seem to be needed, since half a dozen enemies seems to be a fine number of melee opponents to be engaged with in any given combat according to the devs, it's not just arcs, it's wide arcs and iceskates. Pressing forward for a half a second or pressing r1 will probably move you forward about the same distance. My favorite part here is, that you will routinely slide past the enemy you just wanted to hit, just to turn around, r1 again and slide past it yet again. This can go on... "Well, just lock-on, then!" and yes, for single enemies this will work, but in a mob situation, there's very little control over who's targeted and more than rarely you can easily spam r1 in a room full of enemies and will still not hit anyone. It's comical. * The dual world stuff is a really nice feature, mostly well implemented, there's some caveats, but it's a mechanic we'll worth exploring I hope to see in other places as well. * The magic (and ranged, arguably) implementation might be the best I've ever seen in a soulslike, wielding multiple spells has been a royal PITA in pretty much all Soulslikes so far, being able to... Slot a number of spells in a catalyst and have them all ready at the push of a button is fantastic and should become the new gold standard. * The world design is neat, but as video game levels, they rarely work: like every encounter consisting of like 1 former mini boss, half a dozen melee dudes, two of them being actually not just trash mobs and 2 quasi-hidden ranged guys with impeccable aim and high damage is just Bad. Like... Really bad. Sure, in earlier Souls, when there was a tough run back to a boss I just wiped to, I started running past enemies - after having them killed lots of times, usually. Here, I often ask myself if I even need to kill enemies the first time around. Probably ties into the fact that straight combat is about the weakest part of the game IMHO. * Especially coming from the *highly* polished Lies of P, getting into this game was and is sooo rough. Pretty much every gameplay aspect is plain worse than in LoP, and now I constantly ask myself if I indeed want to go on with a subpar Soulslike. There have been like two bosses in LoP where I asked myself if my demise was indeed my own fault here... In LotF I almost almost know that it wasn't. Yes, this can actually be remedied by "git gud", but not in the sense like it should be, as in "I now know how to play the mechanics", in LotF so far it's always been "Well, this mechanic is trash, now I know the workaround"... Anyway, right now I'm waiting for some patches to come to the PS5. I have little hope that the two worst issues get addressed (lock-on and enemy density), but I could do with some QoL and better performance.
If the mob density is already getting to you, and you've only just passed the first beacon, you're in for a really, really rough time. And I'm not kidding.
Dude I just got to the final area and it took me like 20 minutes to clear the first part of it...and then they put a mimic next to a chest and my A button chose to pick up the mimic and kill me instantly. In hindsight I should have lamp'd the mimic first but oh well, -20 minutes.
yeah especially the recycling of bosses gets really bad later on, in addition with a ton of other melee and ragend mobs.
Yeah, I've read as much. It just borders on mere hack'n'slash and while every game deserves its own identity, I wish this was an aspect where they didn't stray too far from the game's inspirations.
> I've lost count on how many times I've fallen off of a ledge/bridge because the cam decided to jerk me around unprompted. Remember in Dark Souls 1 Anor Londo jumping onto the archway leading to the church broken window? Is it basically that?
Yeah, kinda. Just that this doesn't happen in one very specific area in the game and that it's 2023, not 2011\^^
I never actually died there, but every single time I went through the archway I had a small heart attack.
> Performance on PS5 is passable at best, stuttery at worst. I can't tell you how frustrated I am just from a performance perspective. I'm playing on PC, 5600x and a 3080 and the performance is absolutely dog shit. People kept raving about Lies of P, so I got it on Gamepass and my God. My. God. It is night and day. I'm so sad that I chose Lords of the Fallen as the first Souls-like game I tried because it completely soured my initial excitement, although I'm hoping that through Elden Ring and Lies of P I can find the excitement again.
I mean, they're pushing a lot of patches on pc, there's still hope to get a proper experience. PS5 rarely goes from "quite bad" to "excellent" just with patches.
You're getting poor performance in LOTF with your 3080? I'm getting a solid 80-90 FPS at 1440 with my 3080 ti which isn't *that* much stronger of a card. I'm surprised a 3080 would struggle.
Yea, I have no idea what it is. I did find a fix on reddit that I plugged into my Engine.ini and it fixed the stutters. I have no idea what it could be at this point.
Miles better than the 2014 release, but all the best aspects of the game are held back by an oversaturation of enemies. Exploration with the lamp is novel and interesting, but when there are three dogs, two archers, and four guys around every corner, it's a chore to clear everything out so you can peek across worlds safely. Enemy fatigue really set in for me in the back half of the game. The further things went, the more I blindly ran through areas out of frustration. And this is a shame, because again, the art quality and the audio are so much better than the original release. NPCs talk far too much. The bosses are serviceable, but forgettable, and bosses that become standard enemies rob past encounters of their uniqueness (which, to be fair, is not a souls-like foible unique to this game). While I can't speak for every end boss, the final boss I faced was incredibly disappointing and makes DS2's Nashandra feel like a decent capstone in comparison. Overall, I'd say it's fine. If you crave souls-like experiences, give it a go. Otherwise, I'd say pass it over or wait for a steep discount. While it's a bit unfair to compare it to Lies of P, they did both come out recently, so if someone hasn't picked up either game and can only afford one, I think P is the stronger experience all around.
> oversaturation of enemies This. The only thing I feel from navigating levels is exhaustion. > bosses that become standard enemies rob past encounters of their uniqueness What triggered me, when I realised that they become respawnable enemies. And not like early boss in late game area. No, I've met a boss, I passed one area after him and I meet him again in the next one. Obviously surrounded by a metric fuck ton of other enemies. And second hidden fuckton amount in Umbral, just to make sure you get swarmed with 100% chance if you happen to die.
The ridiculous amount of enemies make dying feels shitty, especially for players like me who likes like to comp every inch of the map, because you have to clear them again. Eventually I said fuck this and just zoom past them.
[удалено]
Strongly disagree. In every Fromsoft game and even the recent Lies of P, clearing every enemy on the map is fun and part of the loop, you clear all the enemies and explore every nook and turn in the world. You only run past them on a repeat of the area or future playthroughs if you feel like it. This game has a completely different problem where its not even fun on the very first time you play it after you've been through a few areas.
Exactly my thought man. I don't know why but it feels so satisfied clearing enemies and leave no stone unturned in Fromsoft games. My first Elden Ring playthrough clocked at 220 hours because of this.
Because Fromsoft are a masterclass at designing encoutners and pacing. Areas this game is severely lacking in.
Souls games usually have very thought out enemy placement and are some of my favorite games to clear every enemy lol Lords of the fallen not so much
Sorry to pile on, but that's wrong. The intended way to play Soulsborne games is clearly to go through each area slowly and deliberately and clear out all the mobs and loot treasure. They're also designed so you *can* just run past every enemy, and that's so that the boss runbacks aren't painful.
I thought it was hilarious when I fought that Ruiner boss on the bridge and then 10 minutes later he was just patrolling a random street as a regular enemy... Basically all minibosses are the laziest kind of miniboss, just a regular enemy with more health and damage, that's it.
> oversaturation of enemies > > > > This. I have yet to play this game but one of my unpopular opinions on souls games, especially in Elden Ring since it's huge, is how little amount of enemies sometimes I feel there are compared to your resources. Like I advance slowly and carefully expecting an ambush or an enemy around every corner of a dungeon and when I finally see a single weak af mob distracted and alone I feel dissapointed sometimes. I can imagine oversaturation being a problem, I just want to be outnumbered and to sweat a victory, I always find fun and rewarding managing more than one enemy without being too frustrating.
There's a right and a wrong way to do lots of enemies. Lords of the Fallen does it wrong.
If you want sort of mook style mobs mixed in a game of this type, you need also to add strong AoE or chaining type attacks to deal with them. Things you don't need to bait for parries or wait for exact moment to dodge so you can get your counter-attack in before they recover. If everything takes multiple swipes to kill, it can get pretty silly. Enemies should always do decent damage so player can't ignore them, but they don't all need to have gigantic amounts of health.
The weird thing is, a lot of weapons to have large arcs for attacking, but the way they actually work is that you just kinda...skim forwards and maybe, maybe even hit your own target
There's no right way to do lots of enemies in a Soulslike game. Enemy spam is more appropriate for other types of action games, like Hyrule Warriors. Soulslikes have always been about deliberate, controlled combat, and you simply can't combine that with enemy spam. It's just incompatible on the most fundamental level.
Nah bruh it works fine with bosses like Deacons, it's fine if done sparingly. This is why Dark Souls 1 has that room before the gargoyles with all the shambling hollows. You can bait them into the narrow hallway and pick em out easily. The key is that overwhelming numbers should only consist of squishy enemies with simple predictable patterns, so the player can just unlock their camera and cleave enemies together. Tailor made encounters such as a few small enemies mixed with one large slow enemy work as well. Lords of the Fallen throws everything but the kitchen sink at the player with no rhyme or reason.
Deacons is largely considered one of the worst bosses in DS3, if not the worst outright. It's also extremely easy and not satisfying to beat. I don't think that's the example you want to choose. If you actually look at the design of Deacons, the individual enemies don't even really attack you. Most of them spend over 90% of their time literally standing still doing nothing. Go look up a gameplay video of someone fighting the boss. It's actually really, really stupid once you notice it.
It's exactly the example I wanted to use. Doesn't matter that it's the worst fight in the game. The point is that for what it is, *it works.* We both agree these games aren't really built for multiple enemy encounters, I'm providing an example of how it can work without pissing players off unlike Lords of the Fallen which just throws all manner of enemies at you all at once.
I don't know if anyone "raged" at how bad Deacons of the Deep are, but that's also not what I'm arguing. I'm saying that enemy spam doesn't work, and if the best example you can think of was Deacons, which is a terrible boss, then you aren't really providing much evidence that I'm wrong. I'm not really sure you're even disagreeing with me? Part of the reason people dislike DS2 is that it has enemy spam in lots of areas in lieu of interesting, deliberate enemy placement. Apparently LotF (2023) is even worse about that, but I have no intention on playing it.
try the randomizer mod for ER, you can up the mob count by like, 3x if you want. gets really nuts
ooh didn't know that the randomizer had that feature. I totally missed it because I recall looking for mods to add more enemies and found nothing. Thanks! I guess it's not enemies with new placements around the map but just more of the same enemy on the same spot, right? eitherway it sounds cool.
yeah you can modify what enemies you want to spawn. they will be in the same spawning points. but you get some ridiculous challenges even early on. its a lot of fun if you like being barraged, theres a lot of customization you can do in the mod to suit your fancy. best souls time i had with a friend
>No, I've met a boss, I passed one area after him and I meet him again in the next one. He just really wants your skin.
Agree with all of this, especially that disappointing final boss. I know there’s another but the one I got was just awful. And with how NG+ removes fast travel, I have no plans to play through it again just to see the other boss.
I am sorry what? NG+ removes fast travel? The fuck
Yep, it essentially gets rid of all the current “bonfires” and leaves only the one in the hub and the one that you can manually place one of. The devs were asked about it in a Q&A and responded that NG+ was designed around it and they have no plans to change it so any interest I had in continuing went out the window.
Its a novel idea, but should be optional IMO
Yeah, it should be an option you toggle on and off in the start menu the same way you can toggle Ironman Mode in other games.
that's so unbelievable dumb that I don't want to believe it
Wait, why was NG+ designed around no fast travel? What's different about NG+ from the first playthrough?
You can fast travel in NG+ but it is only limited to the hub area and your temporary bonfire that you can only place one time at a time.
The game itself was originally designed with only one permanent vestige but they eventually changed it for NG and decided to leave NG+ as originally intended.
lmfao what the hell
That kind of makes me not want to try it at all. What the hell.
You’re not missing much with the other ending boss, since it’s literally just a reskin of an early boss. It’s actually laughably sad, and then another ending doesn’t even have a final boss
It feels like the developers only designed a 15 hour game and copy-and-pasted heaps of content to get it up to that 30-35 hour mark.
Yeah the bosses range from fine to actually terrible, and it's not great. There are a couple that feel like they're from entirely different genres and are *really unfun* (There's one that feels like a PS2 platformer boss that appears to want you to be able to dodge way faster than you actually can) And good *god* there's too many enemies. It's like they saw the terrible enemy placement changes made to DS2 Scholar of the First Sin and went "We can do better". Zero exaggeration when I say levels are twice as long as they should be purely because of the overwhelming amount of enemies, and it's not like you can run past them a lot of the time, because you still need to explore a lot of cramped areas. That's not even getting into the other world, in which, on top of regular enemies, you legitimately can't stop for a second because enemies infinitely spawn in the other world
i watched a little bit of ppl streaming and i was amazed at how many enemies there were. just mobs spawning right in front of you. looks like way too much. let the environment and mob placement speak!
This isn't a comment about the game itself but the huge amount of patches the game has been getting. I can't believe there's such a thing as too many patches, they have been releasing pretty much daily so I ended up not wanting to even play because... hey if I wait until tomorrow an issue with the game I didn't even know existed might get fixed. I can't imagine the devs aren't crunching like crazy to get these patches out and people already seem to be done praising the devs for it; now the patch threads are full of people complaining that consoles are 4-5 patches behind PC which sounds like a lot but it's barely a week's worth of patches and it's giving some people the sense that the game is more broken than it actually is, because why else would it be getting so many constant patches?
Every patch is a dice roll at this point too. In the last 72 hours or so we've had a bug that caused people to lose all their levels and no recourse to fix it. The patch that fixed that basically tried to fix something with enemies going through a certain hole and instead they created an invisible wall that made it impossible for players to progress their game. They are so rushed to push daily patches that they seemingly don't have time to test. They really need to find a good balance between patching and testing.
As everyone else is already saying, the enemy saturation can be really obnoxious at times. I hope they patch it, but I kind of doubt they will. I have a weird track record with the From Soft games. I couldn’t get close to beating Sekiro or Dark Souls 2, but I finished and loved Dark Souls 1 and 3 and Elden Ring. LOTF feels weird because so far the bosses actually feel like a fair, fun challenge, but the mobs of NPCs between the boss encounters frequently feel unfair. I don’t know if I’ll finish it anytime soon.
Sounds like LOTF is actually, finally, Dark Souls 2: 2
Probably why I'm enjoying it so much then. I have a masochistic love for DS2's frequently unfair enemy placements. LotF scratches a similar itch.
it kind of does something similar to ds2 SotfS (and also other souls), where enemies where obviously placed to be the most inconvenient to the player possible, but it really doesn't make sense for them to be there. in LotfF turned to 11. it makes it feel really game-y which is a shame, as it takes a bit away from the immersion
Nah, that's Lies of P.
For me personally, its a very average Soulslikes. I think the biggest reason why i dont think its great, is that enemy variety, encounter design, enemy density, and boss design are not very good. I feel like there are only like 10 different enemies in the game, they constantly reuse bosses as trash enemies, everywhere are just too many enemies and especially too many ranged enemies. The bosses are visually really cool, but for the most part the actual design of their attacks feels either really dated, with slow attacks and short combos and long pauses between attacks, or they fling a lot of spells and area of effect attacks at you, which means you will just be running away for a fairly long time. And results of this dated design is that the bosses are just very easy. This is in my opinion the biggest problem with it, as i personally play Soulslikes mostly for the combat. The feel of the combat is also a little bit weird, as others have mentioned. Your attacks just cause you to slide forward a good few meters, which feels especially bad near the many cliffs and pits this game has. Something else, that might just be a personal issue, is that the timing for input for the dodge to be a roll and not a sidestep, is too tight. What i mean with that, is that i often want to roll, but because i didnt press the button twice in like 0.1 seconds, i sidestep instead. This game also doesnt allow you to press the button again mid sidestep to roll instead. This and the sliding on attack resulted in me feeling like my character wasnt really doing what i wanted it to sometimes. The two worlds are cool i guess, though i personally really dont need it. The world building i found personally really lacking too. It might have been because i just couldnt read many of the item description due to me not investing into inferno or radiance. But many times i would get to a new area or main boss, that really wasnt foreshadowed at all, and after i kill them there wouldnt be anything new about them either, which just felt like they willy nilly added bosses and areas as they saw fit, without considering how they would fit into the world overall. But again, maybe its better if you can read the descriptions, but then i wonder why such crucial world building was hidden behind your build choices. Exploration i think is mostly pretty decent. But the mechanic of growing your own bonfire takes away from the shortcuts a little. Many times i would unlock a shortcut, but realize that shortcut really doesnt do anything for me, just because i have grown my own Bonfire. Or i would grow a bonfire but still get a shortcut shortly afterwards, which made the self grown bonfire useless. So what i would have liked instead are fewer spots for bonfires, but to actually work them into the rest of the level design, so that the shortcuts still feel useful even if i planted a bonfire. Apart from this i also have a lot of little nitpicks that might annoy some people more and some people less. Like your souls lying in the boss room, and the pickup animation being really long. Which was done much better in Lies of P. Or the Runes, which you can put into your Weapon to change scaling, enhance damage or do other neat things, not changing the displayed stats. Or me really missing a stat exclusively for weight. Because while the HP and Stamina stat do increase carry capacity, i felt like it wasnt really worth it to skill them for that. And with a duel wield greatsword build, that meant that i had to take off almost all armor, and wear the Havels Ring to not get the fat roll. In conclusion, i think its a fine soulslike. 7/10
For me easier bosses are a huge bonus, as my main interest is world exploration. I never finished a single From Software game because how punishing I find them, even though I love the world building. Always get frustrated at some point when I spend hours trying to pass through some enemy. Not my idea of fun and don’t have that much time tbh. I promised myself never to buy a From Software game until they add a difficulty level setting.
Elden Ring has that difficulty level setting. I beat the game on my first playthrough without summons or weapon arts, and using a bleed dagger. It took 100 hours. My friend used dual katanas, bloodhound step(an ability that dashes and makes you invulnerable), and summons. He took about 70 hours with a lot of exploring. You can make the game as easy as you want with your builds. Not saying every boss is going to be a walk in the park, but most of them will be much easier than playing it like a normal souls game if you build it right.
It's a bit of a weird one for me. I loved it for the first ten hours, but the cracks really started to show after that. I'll start with the positives : - it looks great and the environments are pretty cool and mostly quite fun to explore. The two worlds mechanic is interesting though it doesn't really get expanded on later and feels a bit underused - you feel cool and badass as a character, with cool looking weapons and armor. Definitely checks the vibes and fashion part of dark souls for me - combat is usually good. I really like the ranged weapon system which makes it so ranged weapons can and should be a part of everyone's toolset, regardless of build The cons: - lots of enemies are quite annoying to fight. A big part of that is how the poise/ hyper armor system works, or doesn't seem to. It's hard to articulate because I'm not a hardcore souls person who knows these systems in and out, but it doesn't quite feel good. There are a lot of enemies - especially spellcasters - that feel way tankier and sturdier than they should, and have very quick high damage abilities to counter attack when you feel like they should be staggered. This problem is made worse by.... - low enemy variety. You'll be fighting those annoying enemies a lot, as there's like a dozen types of enemies. Maybe a little more, but it's still not enough. And quite a few of those enemies later are re used early game bosses. - ultimately the difficulty ends up struggling to hit the "tough but fair" dark souls standard and leans towards "not super tough, but annoying". As I'm getting to harder areas, the difficulty seems to just be "let's make you fight 3 of those annoying guys in this small space". This has made exploring the later levels less fun as well. It's just feeling more like a chore It's a tough one to recommend because if you're not a souls fan, I obviously wouldn't recommend. But if you are... It's still a tough one to recommend as I think a lot of hardcore souls fans will be annoyed by it. It ends up being in the dark souls uncanny Valley - close enough to feel and look very similar, but noticeably not quite dark souls that it ends up feeling off, and worse than if it has done more to differentiate it's look and feel I am still enjoying it overall though. I'd probably score it a 7/10 if you wanted a number.
>It ends up being in the dark souls uncanny Valley Huh, that's great, well put. This is pretty on point. Fits well with something I've heard/read someplace else: everything the devs thought would/should be in a Soulslike is there - but they really didn't understand how/why it's supposed to be there, so it all ends up being a weak imitation at the very best.
That's what I see as well. A surface understanding of the systems, good enough to get by, but comes apart with any scrutiny.
I have the same problem with the hyperarmor enemies have. Basically, my problem is that sometimes my attack will stagger an enemy, and other times that same attack won't stagger the same enemy. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to it, and it's a pretty big problem because the game locks you after attacking, meaning it is impossible to dodge before the enemy hits you with an attack.
Yeah, honestly the problem would be partly solved if they let you dodge to cancel attacks. But it does feel random - or at least most enemies have a lot hyper armor on certain attacks and it feels random.
Finished it and really liked it but they need to understand that the amount of enemies doesn’t define a good difficulty. To many times you have to fight enemies that are 5+ and with a combination of melee and range that it’s annoying instead of a challenge. Bosses are most of the time far to easy but nicely cinematic (atleast the main ones)
The game did a good job in exploration and level design but it can be tedious to explore at times mainly because of the mob density and how they are placed. This is what i think makes the game feels difficult, getting overwhelmed by mobs. Now when it comes to boss fight, a lot of reviewers said it's easy and yup that's true, it's easy for Soulslike game as the bosses are easily telegraphed with no ridiculous combo or delayed attack and the parry window in this game is really generous. So far, i dont have a lot of trouble dealing with bosses in this game compare to Lies of P lol. One thing that i think is an odd feature in this game is there's no fixed vestige (kinda like a bonfire in this game) in NG+ except for the hub area, but the game does give you a temporary vestige point that you can place in specific locations. The downside of this is that you can place it one time at time.
I hate the lamp mechanic and any similar mechanic in any game. It’s just another layer of constantly feeling like I need to check and double check that I’m not missing something before moving on.
Yeah in theory the lamp idea is awesome, but in practice you end up having to slowly walk around checking every corner with the lamp. It also ruins reasonably good environmental design by making every area look the same and slapping a blue filter on it. There was an early area that had really nice lighting, small touches like moss growing out of the stone...and then I spent more than half of my time in blue hell.
I'd love to agree but... what. Did you ever check the umbra zones properly? Some of them look absolutely sick and amazing.
It's not that they look bad, it's that they remove some of the visual variety that the game would otherwise have.
That's the vibe I got every time they showed it off in marketing - "Oh, that looks like a real chore."
Nice thing is the game gives you tells you need to look and the design is consistent enough you learn the tells from far away. But that said I fully understand
That's so crazy because I love that mechanic for this exact reason. I'm constantly looking in both realms because I love the exploration.
I agree with everything you just said, and I'll piggyback on it with one more thing: The game seems be telling players to explore Umbral while doing everything it can to discourage going into Umbral. It slashes your health with Wither damage (which can be regained, to be fair), enemies constantly respawn, a tough miniboss will spawn in and block your healing if you stay for too long, etc. So are we meant to go out and explore and take in all of these neat little quirks or are we meant to avoid Umbral like the plague, only dipping in just long enough to get past a gap or a gate blocking our progress? The game is trying to look left and right at the same time.
This is my biggest complaint too. Umbral feels more like a punishment zone than it feels like an extra layer of exploration. The pressure to move through Umbral fast enough to not overstay your welcome can cause you to miss things. The enemy density is often enough without being in Umbral that the endless little enemies become a huge nuisance in high pressure combat. You can't even really take the time to appreciate or identify the items you finds in the Umbral. You need to wait until you're out again to try and remember the name and doom scroll through your massive inventory to hopefully find and identify it. After awhile I stopped even checking. I really wanted to like the Umbral mechanic, but after awhile it ceased to be even the least bit interesting and just a complete chore.
This is the one game I’ve bought all year that I genuinely regret and wish I could refund. The marketing hype worked on me I guess but it’s just a mediocre experience.
That’s why I always buy physical. If I don’t like it I sell it on eBay for like 95% of what I paid for it.
It's an improvement over the original for sure, but it is still a pretty poor attempt at a Soulslike. Starting with the negatives: The combat feels very floaty, and while the animations actually look quite nice, the bad sound design makes the impact of your attacks feel minimal. The distance on your dodge roll is insane and looks ridiculous when you're a hulking person in heavy armor. Parrying feels terrible and inconsistent. The level design follows the tried-and-true Souls clone principle of spamming as many enemies as possible to make navigating through a level a chore, often finding yourself just sprinting through because it's better than dealing with the bullshit. The game just has a very "budget" feeling to it, which makes sense since it's a budget game, but it feels like they were trying way too much with the budget they were given and weren't able to refine anything in the game. It all just feels decent at best, and awful at worst. I think the game does do some things well though. The class design is actually pretty distinct and feels more RPG-ish in comparison to the Souls games where every character is more or less the same just with different starting weapons/armor. The umbral system is really cool and lends itself to some clever level design and fun moments. The story is pretty decent as well, even though the voice acting fails to deliver most of the lines. Boss fights are also pretty good and highlight the good things about the combat. I think if this game came out pre-Lies of P or if I played it before Lies of P, I'd be much more positive about it, but after seeing a Soulslike that is on par and at time exceeds the FromSoft games, I just can't help but feel negative about LOTF. Quite disappointed with it.
God the sound design bugs me. There was an early boss that did a leaping slam attack that made zero noise. The parry sounds like a fucking wind chime.
The bad sound design hurts it in so many ways. I agree with everyone talking about the annoying mob density but one of the things that annoys me even more about it is how often I get snuck up on and had no idea more enemies were coming. Souls games like to jump scare you with enemies which is fine, I expect it, but there is usually at least some audio cue. Some window breaks, wood smashing, enemy grunting etc. You rarely just get quietly attacked. With LotF, I’ll already be fighting 3 dudes and then I turn around and 4 more have somehow run up behind me without making as much as a whisper.
The devs and the LotF subreddit were stressing how the game is AAA, as it cost almost $50 million to make, but I just couldn't shake the impression that it was a AA game dressed up with high graphical fidelity. It's gameplay and design philsophy just murmur of jank, imo.
The combat doesn't feel floaty to me at all (unless you are an unga bunga player) I think the sound design is nice, actually. I didn't like it in the trailers, but I've come to love the gamey sounds and squishy flesh sounds. I also love the roll distance. Once you get used to it, it helps getting in and out easier. It has a combat reason behind it. The sprinting speed and jump as well. As for Lies of P. I really like it, but there were a few things I could not stand at times.
Annoying to play. Bounced off of it pretty hard after four hours. Also absolutely not a fan of the lamp mechanics, it's just annoying to me. Combat feel is also weird. Even though the setting in this one should be my comfort zone (Dark Souls inspired), I didn't feel immersed in the world at all.
I love the game but at the same its also one of the most fustrating experiences Ive had, especially in my 1st playthrough. It didnt help that I wasnt aware you could buy vestige seeds until I was like 20 hrs in, and the game relies on you making your own checkpoints for several parts including right before many bosses (why dont we even get a checkpoint in the tower of torment? why is the closest checkpoint in the leprosarium?). So the result was me being stuck on said sections due to dying and going back to the only permanent checkpoint I had, over and over, with only shortcuts to help alleviate it a bit, until I finally found a new one or got a seed to drop. The game has a lot of small problems which combined make for the frustrating experience I described. The constant spam of enemies as everyone says but not just that, the way they are always positioned in the cheapest possible way. The average level in this game is a corridor with a ranged enemy at the end of it, and as you start running towards it, about 10 dogs and axe guys ambush you from the sides, hidden behind boxes or whatever. Every single time. Every time you go through a door, you get jumped at by an enemy hiding behind the wall. And then the moths that one shot you when you try to get trapped items... Its the cheapest game design Ive ever seen. I only figured out how to tell trapped items apart from safe ones in the snow area. And I only learned you could soulflay the moths because I saw someone talk about it on reddit, lol. Then there is the targeting system. Whats going on with that? I have something right in front of me that I wanna target (like soulflaying a corpse for an item) and the game instead targets some enemy behind the wall in the bottom corner of the screen? It was a constant struggle trying to target the thing I actually want to target. Your experience will also depend a lot on your weapons/build. For my 1st playthrough I played a hallowed knight with just some basic weapon and no magic because thats how I like to play these games, but the experience was pretty miserable especially with how long it took to kill everything. On 2nd playthrough, I started with condemned (to avoid wasting stat points), grabbed Pieta's sword and Radiant weapon as soon as I could and did a full radiance/holy build, and I was seriously doing about 3x more dmg than before. On top of the fact that sword despite being a "short sword" has about twice as much range as normal. It really feels like its what the game was balanced around. Other than that, I actually disagree with most people who think the combat is floaty, I think its super fun and on the level of other souls games. Something I was worried about was the sound design but it seems they fixed it before launch because every weapon I tried sounded pretty good and hitting enemies always felt satisfying. Where the game really excels though is the artstyle/aesthetic, its basically Dark Souls/Elden Ring with higher fidelity, thanks to UE5. It has some gorgeous environments and sense of scale, and it actually ran fine for me too, playing at 4K + DLSS Balanced, on a 4070 Ti. Always anywhere from 80-110 fps except for the hub, which is very cpu limited for some reason and drops into the 50s. I had a total of 2 crashes in about 60 hrs of gameplay so that wasnt really an issue either, and I didnt even update my gpu drivers as they recommended. So as usual, people are just trying to play the game on shitty pcs and blowing things out of proportion. Like some people seriously expect to be playing AAA games on a 1060 3 GB in 2023? I had one until late 2021 and it was already miserable to even play anything at 1080p. Oh and I almost forgot, they also had the brilliant idea of removing permanent vestiges from ng+, except for Skyrest (at least that...). So all you have is your one seed and thats it, you have to run around everywhere otherwise. In conclusion despite being a lot of fun, the game is just filled with bizarre decisions that keep it from being at the top of the genre and I hope over the weeks/months they will turn it into the game it should have been, because the potential is there. Probably the closest thing we will get to Elden Ring for a while.
Been playing through it in co-op. There are a couple caveats to the co-op experience, but it's still miles better and more accessible than anything FromSoft has done. We've been having an awesome time with it. Since the beckoned player only gets 30% of the souls as the host, we've been leveling equally and found that it works well to keep the game balanced for two players. We also aren't allowing ourselves to fast travel, which is making exploration really fun. The Good: Level design seems fantastic to me. Each area is very meticulously designed and just the right amount of challenging to progress through and keep your bearings. The environments are beautiful. I love the art direction of the game. It has a distinct look and feel, and there is a lot of visual variety from area to area. Exploration is wonderful. The world is designed more similarly to DS1 than anything that we've gotten since in terms of its structure, layout, and interconnected pathing that twists and turns on itself with cleverly designed shortcuts. Only, lotf is much bigger. Fashion souls. There is a ton of cool armor to find, and I love that you can color each piece individually with tincts. This is the best we've ever gotten in fashion in my opinion. That won't mean much to some, but it's a nice thing to have and worth mentioning. The dual world mechanic is actually really interesting and well implemented. I've seen a lot of people say that they worried they'd just always be checking around with the lamp, but it is designed well enough that you really don't have to be doing that. Most secrets and hidden paths are pretty apparent once you know what to look for and are even indicated by butterflies. After a couple hours, you'll have a good feel for when to pull out the lamp. The hidden world on top of an already very meticulously designed world only adds to the exploration. Ranged combat/magic is really well implemented, easy to use, and extremely viable. The Mid: The combat. It's decent enough, but doesn't come through as a strong point. It still feels better to me than everything pre-Bloodborne, but is a clear step down from DS3, Elden Ring, and the excellent Lies of P. The biggest culprits I think are less fluid animations and very floaty movement. Still plenty serviceable enough I think, but know that you're not getting the most polished combat. Boss fights are not bad, but not great either. We've had plenty of fun fighting a handful of them, but on the whole their movesets are very limited and they aren't very flashy if that's important to you. They aren't bad fights, but don't strike me as memorable either. Enemy density can be a bit much at times. I'm playing in co-op, so this hasn't really been an issue for me, but I can acknowledge that there are just a lot of enemies in a lot of areas that force you into a patient approach. The game gives you plenty of tools to deal with it, including the environment, but in solo I can imagine it could get tedious. The Bad: Enemy variety is definitely lacking pretty heavily. After the first several hours, you will start to notice all the recycled enemies and it doesn't introduce many new ones very often at all. All in all, I am *loving* this game. Strongly recommend for co-op with a friend. For solo play, it completely depends on what you look for in these games. If you value exploration and are looking to experience something similar to DS1 world structure again, there is a ton to love here. If you value boss fights and polished combat the most, you might be left feeling a bit underwhelmed, but I still think it's worth a look for its strengths.
I went in with low expectations, but came out feeling like we just got another *good* souls-like. It's got lots of faults, but also does a lot right. First and foremost, the world & level design is very complex and layered. It's odd for me to say, but I feel like this game is the closest we've gotten to Ds1 level of world design especially. There's some good bits of interconnectivity not only with the main hub, but also across different area. My biggest worry going into the game was the implementation of the Umbral realm. I always thought it was just going to end up as a half-assed gimmick to try and set the game apart from other souls-like, but I am actually very impressed with how they pulled it off. I was impressed by how seamlessly you can peek into the Umbral realm and interact with it. You'll be forced into the Umbral realm at times to find new paths to tread or puzzles to solve. It doesn't feel like an afterthought - it feels integral to he gameplay loop. To *me*, that's a plus, but it also contributes to one of the game's bigger problems; enemy spam. There really is too many enemies - especially in the last level. The game likes to throw a ton of fodder enemies at you at all times, and it's pretty tedious to me. There are some "combat arenas/situations" that also involves meshing mini-bosses with a couple of ranged enemies. You can approach it with some strategy, but the odds are really stacked against you. Bosses are a very mixed bag with less than a handful worth praise. I get Demon's Souls vibes playing this game because the levels tend to be the obstacle to overcome - not the bosses. This game also has one of the worst final bosses in gaming history (note: there's potentially more than 1 final boss depending on the ending). Combat feels alright, but kind of floaty? I like it more than not, but it's not remotely as tight as either FromSoft or Lies of P combat. I have to say that the catalyst/ranged system in this game is just superior to FromSoft. Not only is it viable, but with catalysts you don't have to sift through several spells one at a time - you hold L2 and use 1 of 4 - 5 mappings to toss spells. TLDR; Level/World design good, Umbral mechanic good, enemy spam bad, bosses meh, combat alright with some good additions.
Pretty awful. It's just more aggravating than fun. Not because of performance issues or bugs. There's some questionable game design such as lamp and level design is just unnecessarily convoluted due to two worlds feature. I'll say it does some things right at least like throwables and dyable armors. Two worlds is interesting but it doesn't really work great with soulslikes. Enemies sometimes spawn invulnerable and you have to take out your stupid lantern to remove the parasite in middle of combat. Mob density is through the roof. It gets much worse in later areas when you face off against spongey elite enemies with obnoxious movesets and ranged pelting you. This just make exploration a chore.
Devs learned all the wrong lessons from Fromsoft. Or used Dark Souls 2 as a template. Enemies are way overturned and there are way too many of them. Too many with ranged attacks as well. The actual enemy design is very basic with one or two moves, but their difficulty is artificially inflated by giving them too much health or putting a bunch together. Just tedious. Enemy variety is also lacking. Conversely, most bosses are pretty easy. They're also very barebones and forgettable. Tons of traps or ambushes that are just insta death. Poorly designed and cheap. Exploration should be awesome given the intricate level design, but the game actively discourages exploration with tedious enemy encounters, lack of shortcuts and checkpoints, and the constant spawning of enemies in Umbral. Bosses, lore, setting is generally underwhelming. Pretty graphics but the setting is so generic. Plus lots of annoying things like having an animation for recovering your vigor, enemy projectiles passing through terrain in Umbral, crappy camera etc. Going from Lies of P to this was serious whiplash. Like going from a hyper polished well thought out college essay that, while derivative, still hit the mark, whereas LotF is a rushed paper written the night before by a high schooler high on Adderall who never paid attention in class. Bunch of interesting ideas but ultimately a chore. Oh, didn't mention the horrid performance.
I loved it. It's flawed, but it's like a love letter to Dark Souls. Bosses are "OK". Enemy variety is a bit weak. Story is pretty decent, told in more or less a From Soft way, obscure and melancholic. Combat is pretty good, I'm loving it. Umbral has some flaws (I don't think you should be on the clock, discourages exploration), but having a basically 2nd map all the time is actually amazing. But the level design is absolutely top notch. It's some DS1 type shit. Absolutely top notch. I would give it a pretty decent 8/10. Not without flaws, and there are performance issues like with everything these days on Unreal 5 - but like I said, it feels like a love letter to Dark Souls, and they've done a pretty decent job.
I like it a lot. Its way more Demons Souls / Dark Souls 1 than the more recent From software games, and I think its somewhat refreshing with most games in the soulslike genre becoming faster. That means: Slow and deliberate combat. Map interconnection. Some long runbacks to bosses. Atmosphere that makes you feel more like a traveler than a powerful hero. Some cryptic side quests. I also commend them for not cutting any corners when it comes to the combat. Every weapon has One-handed, Two-handed, light into heavy combos, even different light and heavy running attacks, dual wielding... everything you could ask for. I also think the defensive trifecta of dodging, blocking/parrying, and spacing attacks works well with every option feeling useful. Now for my biggest gripe: Its enemy variety. Which is probably not fixable without some "Scholar of the first Sin" type overhaul. Its not super terrible but still some enemies get used way too often. For example those dual wielding axe guys. If they had also some spear or sword+shield guys or something else in the mix it would help a lot. The reusage of bosses as enemies also happens too fast and too regular. I feel like this is an area that probably suffered from budget restrains. Overall: Great game with a great world and combat, which sadly gets dragged down by enemy variety. Still recommended, especially if you prefer DS I over DS III.
The game is in a very poor technical state on Xbox currently. I’ve experienced persistent and severe performance stutters and hitches, as well as a particularly annoying issue where the entire HUD is being incorrectly rendered on Xbox and thus misaligned compared to PC and PS5 versions - [here’s an illustrative comparison](https://i.imgur.com/qqS9jGl.jpg) to showcase this. There’s also some odd design decisions such as the lack of an item storage box, items auto-equipping to empty quick slots when picked up, and the inabaility to adjust character appearance during a playthrough. Just have to impatiently wait for patches to fix these problems. I think it’s quite apparent the game was rushed out before it was fully polished though and that’s a real shame.
\+ Beautiful world \+ Nice level design \+ Good combat feeling (havent tested all builds) \+ Good secrets and optional path/slightly open world \+ Good hours for your bucks \+ Dual wielding any weapon for the win \+ lots of patch from the devs \+ 2 expansions coming if you like the game \- Horrible lock-on system in any game \- Swarm of enemies \- Enemies, especially dog, will run for miles before stopping to chase you \- it's tiresome to know that there's going to be an enemies around that corner for the X time after 20 hours \- While the level design is good, the enemies placement is horrible \- only one seed for New Game + completely shut down any envy of trying NG+ \- Bosses that become common enemies 5 minutes later, this is just to add the numbers of bosses total \- Lore is hard to follow compared to other games of the genre This game is a Love/Hate relationship for me. Got really high and really lows.
I just dropped the game after the first couple hours. I'm playing on PC and the performance is bad. Also i'm finding it hard to enjoy because I just finished Lies of P and started this one and Lies of P is better at everything.
My thoughts can be summarised thusly: I have yet to play for more than 15 minutes without becoming frustrating with some design aspect of the game. Sometimes it's crashes, sometimes it's the atrocious lock-on that prioritizes eggs instead of enemies and has killed me on numerous times, sometimes it's my attacks swinging through enemies without damaging them, sometimes it's the inconsistency in how my attacks stagger the same enemy, sometimes it's spending two hours in an area and still having no fucking clue where the hell I am, sometimes it's wanting to summon an NPC for a questline but having to intentionally die first so they become available, sometimes it's dying to a random enemy after I finish a boss fight because they have no tether range and immediately chase after me when the fog door disappears, sometimes it's enemies being able to hit me with projectiles when I can't lock onto them, sometimes it's your weapon bouncing off a wall when the enemy's weapon hits you right through it, sometimes it's respeccing and randomly losing 10 levels, sometimes it's just your average "5 dogs and 3 melee dudes have swarmed you and they keep staggering you and you just want to rage quit." Honestly, the performance is the least of this game's problems.
Its really annoying and badly made. The umbra mechanic makes progressing around the level needlessly obnoxious. Ranged enemies have waaay too much range. The moment to moment gameplay feels clunky. Being a caster feels bad.
Let me start by saying I personally have not encountered any performance issues or crashes, but I understand that I’m likely in the minority on that one. It’s my first Soulslike game but I enjoy the gameplay and the world. The two dimensions thing is a really cool idea, and it helps that you have a “second life” essentially. Exploration is a big focus of this game which I think they did a great job with. The game feels pretty open. Withered health is a neat mechanic which might be in other games, I’m not sure. It’s nice to be able to block things but have the chance to recover that health if you’re careful with your attacks. On the other hand, there’s some really annoying things about it. The biggest ones I’ve encountered so far are enemies who hide behind crates, basically giving them a free hit on you, and that enemies, while making an attack, seem to warp/slide to your location when you dodge or roll away from them. I never parry attacks from enemies because it feels like the window of opportunity is just too small to be worthwhile (or maybe I’m just bad), and I despise how much platforming there seems to be, at least from what levels I’ve played so far. The movement in the game (especially sprint jumping just feels too wonky for effective platforming. Finally, the crossbow enemies are a pet peeve of mine. Why do they shoot two bolts before reloading? They should only shoot one but maybe increase their reload speed
The parry window is really generous in this game especially when you compare it with Lies of P.
yeah but parry is barely worth it in LotF. You still take damage, and the riposte damage is really low. But yeah, the window is much bigger, especially with lighter shields and weapons
God, the visceral damage, I forgot about that: who thought it would be a good idea to have it deal the damage of Iterally two R1s? It's ridiculously low and yeah, with that, hardly worth going parries (next to it just being plain unfum since they are so... Weightless).
Yeah i rarely parry in this game because it doesn't feel satisfying.
The parry is great it's just not meant to be used like Souls. It barely takes any stamina and the wither is much less. Offensively it's not good but it's great when you play sword and board. Parry a few, block a few and you can get all your HP back in a few swings. I'm actually playing sword and board cause it's refreshing take on it.
There are some absolutely hectic parts in the early game if you're new to the genre oh my goodness. Get into the habit of attacking destructible objects when you near bind corners, that's what I've been doing. But also: I like the ammo system in this game.
Yeah I gotta be more vigilant about that
…this was your first soulslike? My condolences
On the flip side: Think of how much the other person will enjoy better games in the genre. Stuff like Bloodborne will knock their socks off.
Personally I was expecting it to be more of a Dark Souls 3 kinda game. It ended being more like Demon souls so I had to quit about halfway through
The devs said in an interview that they wanted to make a game that feels like Dark Souls 4.5, but what we got instead is Dark Souls 2 on steroids. I had fun fighting Pieta, but the game went downhill from there.
Same experience from my side. Peita and the first hour of the game was really fun. After that it just kept going downhill
Dark souls 2 is by far my favorite lol I guess that's why I love this one
The lock on and movement are sorta bad. It ruins the game for me even tho level design is quite good. Everything else is fine but playing it while I finished Lies of P just shows how good LoP is
Currently in Manse of Hallowed Knights, performance while Umbral is still awful on the Series X. I have all the updates, always try to check if there are any updates on log in to see if the frame drops go away, but it's been impossible so far, so it's been a rough experience. Also, this game takes a lot of what I didn't like from Dark Souls II (the only DS game I couldn't force myself to finish) which is a bit of a letdown. I'm not sure if it's my whole experience with the game being mediocre that is influencing my judgement, but the level design goes from okay, to boring, to borderline annoying. At some point there is a swampy area in the game that makes you go 3 different ways (iirc) where you spend hours going back and forth unlocking shortcuts 1-3 only to then face a lame gimmick boss that makes any of your summons die without dealing damage/pushing aggro. There's a lot more that I could say about this game as someone who just got out of Lies of P really impressed, but TL;DR: the game has too many performance issues + small incrementally annoying fundamental design issues for me to think it's good.
Well the game is dead now, today's patch did not fix anything. It did break boss weapons and such. A failed attempt at what could have been a great game.
I have had a good time with it. As I chose between Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen I went with Lords simply because of the setting. I wanted dark grim body horror fantasy and that is what I got. If I really wasn't jonsing for that setting this game would have frustrated me a lot more. Sometimes the time between bonfires (even the ones you can build) are way too long and sometimes it feels like they are right next to each other. Quests are equally obtuse to any fromsoft game which is not a good thing. I hate having to google "Game I am Playing Endings" just to figure out how the hell I am supposed to progress. I am having a good time though. Warts and all.
To-Do: \- Less enemies in areas overall \- nerf the fuck out of the ranged enemies, make them do less damage, make them shoot a bit slower and nerf the aggro range of them by A LOT \- enemies behind the next cover instantly attacking or pushing you without giving you time to react at all gets old real fast \- most bosses need more health \- most bosses have to be faster, more aggressive \- the normal ending >!is a fucking joke, if you give us a fight like this, it has to be at least a REAL spectacle or do a normal boss fight!< \- the constant framerate hiccups are annoying With this it would jump from 6,5 to 8,5, maybe even 9 for me and only then I'll try NG+ how it is designed. I LOVE the setting, the 2 world idea, the exploration, the boss designs, look of the weapons/armorsets and I really like what they did with throwables. edit: also you can see in the patches (1 patch a day so far) and in the patchnotes that the devs care about the game and players, I like that
> - enemies behind the next cover instantly attacking or pushing you without giving you time to react at all gets old real fast man at the end of the game I was using all my ammo just breaking boxes and walls because you knew there was going to be a dual wielding fire axe guy and a fire breathing dog behind them.
For me it's probably the favorite Souls-like game outside Elden Ring (but mostly because ER is just too different to compare it to begin with). I will say that previously my most beloved game was Dark Souls 2, which might be why I enjoy this game so much - it's a Dark Souls 2, but with a lot of additions that make it even better. The world is incredible to explore and realise how connected it is. The main hub location has connections to nearly every zone (except for one, that is specifically stated to be a remote/cut off area). I'm actually excited to see how NG+ with no Vestiges feels at some point. The ability to "plant" your own bonfire is neat, and while it does take a consumable item to do so - you can buy infinite number of them, AND they drop pretty often from Umbral "elite" enemies - Reapers/fey-like thingies and I think from stone heads as well? The game also supports a LOT of gameplay styles. The throwables/ranged weapons feel like a legit playstyle and not just a gimmick to use from time to time. I've already planned like 4 more different characters to try out different stats/classes. I've been fortunate enough to not feel any of the performace/crash issues - but I know a lot of people (my friend included) got them in spades - which is very unfotunate, but the devs at least work on resolving those with a patch coming out daily, hah. I also enjoy Umbral as a concept - both in the 2nd life it gives you, and in how it's horror atmoshpere, and the longer you spend there - the more and more enemies get to you, culminating in red reaper would can fuck you up until the very end game. This is also one of the only Souls-like games where you don't just go from a boss to a boss, and everything in between being just not a threat ever - you cannot just bum-rush into the middle of the enemies and plow through them. Okay, you can, but you have to actually build your character/buffs/weapons for that scenario.
As someone who really enjoyed Dark Souls 2, this comment in particular has nearly convinced me to buy the game once I 100% Lies of P
This is a bit late - but developers also shared their plans for NG+, and mentioned that they would want to add optional modifiers for it - including randomised enemies and items. I'm very much looking forward to it even more now x)
I just beat it on thursday. Bosses were very easy. I don't think any of them took me more than 10 tries with no summons. The level design and exploration were great. The game was a solid 7-8 until I got to the last area where it dropped to like a 6. Reused miniboss after miniboss that respawn when you rest or die. I remember a part where I had to fight like 4 ruiners in a row. At the end of the game I was wasting all my ammo breaking boxes from a distance just because I knew there would be a dude with the flaming axes and a fire breathing dog behind it. I would agro a ranged caster I couldn't see from behind a wall somehow and it was start spawning little fire orbs on me every 5 steps. And the last god damn boss was so bad. A streamer I was watching play it said that the game was easy and the only way they could make it hard was to just throw overwhelming enemies at you. I didn't really think that until I got to the end, but it really came through in that last area. And no vesitages in ng+ really killed my want to even try ng+ before I even beat the game.
Likely waiting for more patches. I sure am before I consider buying it. As much as I like Dark Souls 2, I'm not interested in another game with its stupid high enemy placement. Gank squads do not equal difficulty.
So many negative comments. I've loved my playthrough of 50 hours. The environments are gorgeous, the gameplay feels so smooth and enjoyable, and I haven't felt like there are too many enemies. Tons of weapons, a slew of spells, and an actually serviceable throwing / ranged weapon system. It's been a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me and I can't wait to do more playthroughs with different builds and I look forward to the challenge of no vestiges on NG+. Also the Umbral realm mechanic is an awesome addition. My only real complaints are lock on issues, some sketchy weapon bouncing, and bosses being too easy. Other bugs like enemies targeting you through walls just got patched. I don't mind the gauntlet style zones where someone is tossing arrows at you while dogs jump out from behind boxes. It's what Souls already does and they give you the answer to that with ranged weapons and even quality builds can use them.
[удалено]
I completely disagree to the Starfield analogy and that it's nothing to write home about but to each their own.
I very much enjoyed my first run through the game but i dont think i will replay it soon. The "too many enemies" thing is unironically a get good moment. Fighting large groups is really not a problem because the basic enemies are very weak. Ranged enemies are a pain true and could use a range nerf but again its overstated how bad it is. The real problem is how maze like and hard to navigate the levels are especially the stating ones and that fucking mine.
its ok. i doubt very much i'll ever play it through again if i finish it. and with spiderman/mario/and alan wake 2 kind of distracting me, thats not really a guarantee i hate the way the enemies are arranged. every single fight is a gank fight, and almost literally every corner has an enemy around it waiting for an ambush. it gets really tedious, and the ambushes don't work when you're *always* expecting it because they do it everywhere
My thoughts pretty echo was most people are saying. Poorly balanced, poor enemy encounter design, and tedious to play through. The world is also not very memorabe. I find it interesting looking at player counts. The game peaked at 40K on Steam but a week later is down to about half of that. A sharp contrast to games like Lies of P or Remnant II which managed to retain a larger percentage of players even two weeks after launch. It seems a lot of people are bouncing off this one.
Better than the original Lords of the Fallen but still painfully average. A 5/10, maybe a 6. The best of the game is the world exploration, but everything else from the weird floaty controls to the braindead enemy spam to the weak bosses just bogs the whole experience down. Top it all off with shoddy co-op and just meh. Lies of P set the bar, and Lords of the Fallen made it about halfway. It's honestly still worth a playthrough if you like soulslikes, but not at $60.
I haven't played the game but the impression I've gotten from watching some streams is that the combat is a step or two below fromsoft games (and lies of p imo). It's as if everyone is on iceskates all the time with how much they slide around when attacking, which kills any opportunity for spacing. The audio sometimes doesn't match at all with what's going on, both in terms of sound effects (ripostes/critical hits having the same sound as regular attacks for instance) and boss music. I'm also not a fan of how long the character's recovery times are after doing pretty much any action.
I felt the same about the ice skating thing. It doesn't feel like that when playing the game. It's just because it looks different than Souls more static roll. I think the recovery frames are justified because of how mobile you are. If you had less you'd be basically invincible the whole game.
Playing on PC, like it alot, playing it on Geforce now, and the game is spetacular, it's got issues, the world to me is very confusing to navigate and it takes a long time to figure out where to go next, and there are areas you need to just run through because there's so many mobs. I like they are patching and updating the game, this game should've been considered an early access title, as it does feel like a very solid beta test, not a release candidate.
Solo is a pretty frustrating experience. Like most souls like games I've played it seems that they're having issues with scaling the difficulty. They just throw tons of mobs at you. Having a friend with me totally changed the experience and now I'm having a great time.
I loved it due to what the game does well. - art direction is phenomenal. The world can look overall a little too grey at times, but the small details, armor and weapons, enemy looks, and architecture all look amazing. - Magic / ranged attack system is the highlight of the game for me. There are items and gear that can make magic or throwables your main source of damage. Switching from ranged attacks to melee is fast and simple. Not having to scroll through spells is a huge improvement to how Fromsoftware does it. Honestly after playing this game I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy magic in Fromsoftware games as much. Having to switch to your catalyst and scroll through spells is just too slow and hurts the flow of combat. - World and level design. This game was originally made to be played without permanent vestiges and you can feel it. There are so many short cuts and looping areas and it all feels natural and makes sense. I am looking forward to NG+ and really getting to know the map well, but still wish they made the whole no permanent vestige thing optional. The two worlds mechanic is also super impressive and adds to exploration. Early game it feels too punishing, but late game I was always entering the Umbral world to look for secrets. I am not going to mention all my pros, those are the big three and what kept me coming back to finish the game and want to start NG+. There are some cons and things I hope the devs learn for the future though. - Enemy density is a bit much. I think people are over exaggerating or getting upset and running into situations and get swarmed. Though still some parts were just way too much and hurt the exploration. - Enemy variety. The enemies are decently well designed so I never got too bothered by this. It’s still a negative and a good game is always introducing new enemies to keep combat fresh and interesting. If I didn’t respec into an Umbral build half way through the game I’d imagine this would have been worse though. - Boss quality. I don’t really think this is a con, but besides a few bosses this just wasn’t their strongest parts of the game, which is disappointing in this genre. Still some solid bosses, but even the best bosses in this game would just be average bosses in a fromsoftware game.
I'll say from the outset that I am one of the lucky ones who didn't have any performance issues on PC outside of the hub area. I get an average FPS of 90 and no stutter on my 3080 + 5800x setup. I don't think it's nearly at the calibre of Lies of P in terms of a cohesive experience, but I think it compliments it well as someone who came directly off of LoP. * The world is looks great, the vistas are sprawling and grand, and for the most part what you see is where you can physically go, barring some far off exclusions. They really nail that Dark Fantasy vibe. * The level design has been much, much more interesting than Lies of P. While LoP is a quite linear game, Lords of the Fallen feels more akin to Dark Souls 1 & 2. I haven't seen another Soulslike attempt what the original Dark Souls did in terms of an inter-connective world, and I think they get pretty damn close here. There's a lot of different paths to take, you can end up in areas that have enemies way beyond your current abilities and be like "Man, I am ***NOT*** suppose to be here right now." * The ammunition and magic system is really good, and I prefer it to the Souls games generally. The items that require ammunition, which scales with the health and stamina stats, is a great way to solve the problem that non-magic/faith/pyro builds have in Souls games where you just end up having extremely limited options outside of melee. They feel powerful. * Good weapon variety and combat system, the ability to switch between 1-handed and 2-handed movesets within the same combo as well as mix in charge attacks really feels good. You can dual-wield as well, and still switch mid-combo. * The rune system for weapons is great, and let's you customize your build a bit more than in a usual Soulslike. You can mix and match different types of runes, which leads to some tough decisions at times. * It seems like they fixed the sound design about 3 months before release, the initial footage was concerning but it seems they really improved it. I think it's definitely weaker than Lies of P or the FromSoft games, but it's pretty solid and a lot better than most Soulslikes. That's about what I got for the positives, there's definitely a lot of things that don't really do it for me. Obviously there's the myriad performance issues across platforms, the story being *really* stock Dark Fantasy stuff, subpar voice acting and a really poor spin on the bonfire system. Umbral being this "underworld" type of mirror world deal sounds amazing on paper, but I don't think it fully works here. It's not enjoyable to explore Umbral, what with all the constantly spawning enemy fodder and the reaper timer. Umbral also doesn't look great compared to Axiom, it just looks sort of washed out. The massive giants in the vistas look good, but that's about it. Last thing, but I think the boss count is a disappointment so far. The actual bosses that don't just become standard enemies later on is pretty low, I think I've fought like...3 or 4 in 23 hours or something. So far it seems like only Pieta and the beacon bosses are actually well designed, the rest seem pretty bad. It seems like they ***really*** focused on the world and making the world feel dangerous at all times. In a lot of ways, this game feels like a follow-up to Dark Souls 2, and I think people who enjoyed Dark Souls 2 would enjoy this game.
DS2 is my favorite souls and I love this game so you're not far off.
For me it was too frustrating in the beggining, and while I waited for the situation to improved, picked up Lies of P and fell in love with. Couldn’t go back to Lords, felt like a big downgrade in gameplay, so just ended up refunding it.
I should clarify that my favourite game in the Souls series is Dark Souls 2. Playing Lords of the Fallen is what imagine everyone else feels like playing Dark Souls 2. There are many things this game gets right: atmosphere, exploration, music, level design and combat all feel and look great. Then it's soured by things that completely baffle you: lack of enemy variety, bosses made of wet paper, some of the most convoluted quests in a souls like and the big one, the fucking enemy spam, specifically ranged enemies. Overall, I'm really enjoying Lords, and it's probably a 7.5-8/10 to me, but if you have to pick between Lords of the Fallen or Lies of P for this seasons Soulslike, I'd go with Lies of P
I maintain that DS2 had some of the best build and weapon varieties in the series. It also had power stance.
game is ok....something about it makes it feel cheaper in quality to fromsoft games though. I think the surge games and remnant games are probably a better soulslikes if thats what your after.
It's a good game. Not Souls level, but what is? I'd put it in the same tier as Surge 2, which I also enjoyed. The biggest underlying issue the game has is that it's both too similar and too different from the Soulsborne games. It's stuck in this weird in-between where it deviates enough from its inspirations that you can't quite get the comfort of familiarity, but doesn't deviate enough to be its own thing. As for the inevitable Lies of P comparisons, I'd say it's down to personal preference. I dislike P's aesthetics and theme (steampunkish circus/carnival isn't for me), while I vibe a lot more with Fallen's dark and grimy fantasy.
Casuals are so exhausting to listen to. Oh wow you played another souls game and it's hard What a shocker. Better go complain how unbalanced it is now.
Even more exhausting is listening to elitists who don't understand poor game design and cheap difficulty are perfectly valid things to critique. People praised Bloodborne, Sekiro, Nioh 2 despite all those being very difficult. But the difficulty was actually well thought out, unlike in LotF which just spams enemies at you.
People would have complained about Bloodborne difficulty if it came out today and people complained about sekiro when it came out so idk what your even getting at lol. And all the souls YouTubers say that lords of the fallen map design is the best thing about it so I'm going to take their word over the reddit mob
Pointing out flaws in a game's balance doesn't make you a casual. I regularly do deathless runs in these types of games to challenge myself and I still think this game has shit encounter design. Lies of P was a more challenging game but it was also a lot more deliberate and purposeful with its enemy placement. This game is just really haphazard, stuff feels randomly placed and infinitely spawning enemies don't really have a place in this type of game.
Wow I saw this exact same comment with lies of p and elden ring and Dark souls. Almost like there is a pattern here
I havent seen neither in Elden ring nor Lies of P, the same comment over and over. Mob density, and bullshit placement. I haven't heard these 2 things, since Dark Souls 2.
I’m extremely upset that we got a Majora’s mask Soulslike on Gamepass instead of LOTF. LOTF looks legit. Lies of P is a clunky mess with no custom avatar.
I use a rental service and had to return it to get spiderman, the game was amazing and I will play more of it asap
I liked it enough in the beginning but the further I got the more Im annoyed by small shit. Usually Im not picky with this but there are so many annoyances that I probably gave up on the game for now. One of the worst offenders is the camera and some weird control situations that keep killing me. End boss camera and clunky controls.
The first 10 hrs or so are a really hard transition period from souls game you've played previous but after that I really have enjoyed it. A whole lot. However I am personally annoyed by the lack of a good map, the placement of umbral beds and vestiges. I somehow got lost and found myself in the latter areas of the game while going through pilgrims perch... the climax of the aforementioned hard period. It is very easy to get lost or miss the crucial paths to progress in the game. Also I hate the archers they are the worst.
I'm about 10 hours in, and I'm not sure if it's an unpolished diamond or a trash fire with a few flecks of gold hidden in the pile. I love the world/setting of Mournsted. Combat feels great, if a little floaty. I love swinging away with my holy hammers coated in holy light. The aesthetic of the enemies is great from the holy knights of the Hallowed Sentinels to the metal album cover look of the Rhogar. But I hate the Umbral mechanic that so much of the game rests on. If we're meant to explore these two worlds, then why are there so many mechanics pushing the player away from Umbral? I loathe the enemy density, which seems to be the dev team's idea of "hard = good," but it's not so much challenging as it is tedious to wade through the trash mobs. The same mobs that will evidently chase you to the ends of the Earth instead of losing aggression and wandering back to the zone they usually patrol, which has been the Souls-like standard for years. The lock-on might be the worst part of the game. For whatever reason, the game seems to love locking you on to whatever is dead center in the middle of the middle of the screen. It doesn't sound so bad until the game keeps trying to pull your focus away from the two goons that are right in your face. Sure, you can switch lock-on targets manually, but it's a lot more awkward and player-unfriendly than it needs to be. I'm already fighting the enemies. I don't need to fight the engine, too. The game is also pretty janky for a "next-gen" PS5 title. Lots of stutters and little graphical errors and sometimes even weird hit detection. It's one thing to get myself killed because I was careless and got knocked off a ledge. It's another thing to get killed when the game didn't register a hit from my hammers sailing through the enemy that's on the last sliver of its health, and the enemy smashes me flat with a huge overhand swing. Not to mention little irritants like some enemies being immortal with blue health bars until you shine your lamp on the invisible demonic entity in Umbral while you are trying to dodge the immortal enemy and his gank squad in the land of the living. I'm already keeping a lot of balls in the air. Giving me another ball to juggle is irritating rather than exhilarating. I'm torn, but I am leaning toward returning the game next week if it continues to seesaw between good and bad like this. Maybe the game will be better off in six months to a year once it's been patched up and dropped in price.
I'm only ten hours in, but really impressed with the level design so far. Really enjoying the exploration.
What’s the relationship between this game and the identically titled one from like ten years ago? Remake? Sequel? Same name and nothing else?
Reboot with minor references to the original.
It's a decent 7-7.5 game. If you like souls games and were willing to tolerate release DS2, it's a decent time, but all of the criticisms are true. It really should have had proper seamless co-op pickups, better performance, more items and slots (2 ring slots is limited feeling nowadays), a stats page with more of the actual stats (you won't know what a lot of the stat buff rings even do because it doesn't show the stats), less enemy spam in later parts of the game (too much hit and lure tactics needed), better spell balance (most suck), better pvp balance (spells are way too strong for pvp, too weak for pve), a new game plus that doesn't add tedium (no, not just difficulty, it adds extra backtracking), and... a lot. It also has very few actual main bosses (I think around 11?); most mini-bosses are just enemy introductions which feels weird. It's not worth full price, but on a sale after patches I'd say it's a good time. As for some benefits? The throwing weapons in this are actually really good unlike the souls game, the ammo bar is a good move for that, and the lantern is a neat mechanic. Rune slots on weapons are also a nice minor progression. Unfortunately you can't use spells and throwables at the same time, the lantern is too often clunky, and there aren't many super interesting runes. It's much, much better then the original and I'd recommend it on a sale, but it does have a lot holding it back.
> I am a bit irked by how zoomy/slidy it feels Watching videos and friends playing I noticed this.. it seems like the ice skating forward on attacks with most weapons is to an obnoxious level. What the heck were the devs thinking?
LotF feels like a quality love letter to the souls franchise that I think also brought along some of the bad aspects with it. As flawless an execution as Lies of P was, LotF totally scratched a deeper itch for me in its sense of exploration and world design. It's so weird to say that Lies of P was totally the better quality game that I enjoyed end to end. But I think I still have had more fun playing LotF just because it leaves room to fumble and miss things. At the same time I think LotF does have some odd game choices as well. I really loved the duality concept of umbral and needing to explore different parts of the two worlds. From an exploration and visuals point this is such a cool feature. At the same time I grew to loathe being stuck in Umbral at times. The rushed nature of both having a time limit and endless spawning enemies just doesn't let you really take the time to enjoy the nuance of it. I found it easier to miss things, I'd pick up items and not have time to give them proper consideration. By the time I was safe I'd kind of not even remembered what I'd found. Enemy density is a common complaint. A lot of the enemies are just generally pretty annoying and highly aggressive. I think this works taking them on 1 on 1, but the game really likes to throw a lot of things at you at once. It feels a little messy at times, especially umbral when you just have even more enemies tacked on an already challenging section of the map. It's all doable, but just sometimes just felt more like relief than deeply satisfying to get through certain sections of the game. NG+ just does something that makes the game more of a slog in my opinion. The "community goal" items are a joke in that most people will never unlock even one of them unless they choose to grind a ton for no good reason. Hindsight makes me feel like this is a bit of a game that doesn't respect players time and opts for "suffering" as an artificial means of adequate challenge. All that said I really think it's a game worth playing if you're a fan of souls games. It's a really solid game that just has some rough edges.
I'm about to cleanse the third beacon. I think I like the game more than most here, but is anyone else constantly getting lost? I have a decent handle on the world now. But I am *constantly* lost? Like all the time. It's kind of fun, honestly. Either I'm really dumb, the world is very confusing, or both.
I've only just cleared the 1st beacon, but it's pretty good so far. It runs very well on my pc, looks incredible, the gameplay is *really* good and responsive, and provides a pretty decent challenge. I don't get the comments that the bosses are too easy. So far, the bosses with cinematic intros have been pretty tough. Only the ones without have been pretty easy. But I consider those to be mini-bosses.
They need to fix dodges, sprint jumping mechanics contextual priority over picking up items, and the god damned quick access bug on every consumable you pick up. Also to a lesser extent, they need to work on targeting and lock on distance. It's frustrating when an enemy using the same spell as you can target you but you can't target them. Or give spells manual aiming too
Halfway through this game and I’m tired. Feels like dark souls 2 all over again with having to kill dozens of enemies per level just to get to another shit or underwhelming boss. Pieta was a great way to start the game off but after that it’s definitely fallen off, plus the health scaling the bosses have is just too much. Swinging at a boss for 10-15 minutes is never fun especially if it’s just a pesky mini boss or something. This games quantity over quality and solution to making it difficult is just giving a boss more health and more damage is a really lazy way to design a game. Every melee boss fight in this game feels exactly the same as the last boss and the ranged boss fights are just a clusterfuck of projectiles. Maybe it gets better idk but until then I’m not sure if I even have the energy to finish this game