Lords of the Fallen 2.0 pt 1/12 | 4K playthrough | Road to Pieta boss | Deaths cut out
0Walkthrough of Defiled Sepulchre, Abandoned Redcopse, Holy Bulwark Otto Boss, Redcopse Village, Skyrest Bridge, Pieta, She of the Blessed Renewal
Review - This is the new and improved version of Lords of the Fallen 2023 that deals with criticisms from the original build. It’s a free update and it has been critically praised. I didn’t play the 1.0 build but my impression of this is that everything they have done to improve the game, was to copy Dark Souls even more. This game is beyond a Soul-like. It is Dark Souls. It’s as if From Software made it themselves. This is a double-edged sword. In one way, it’s good because it is just as high quality as any Souls game, but disappointing for me because I wanted to play something at least a little bit different.
Everything is the same - collecting souls (Vigor), levelling up, items, weapons, the user interface, the menu’s, the controls, the way you select your items in game, the lack of information about the game mechanics – it’s all there.
They show off that they added some tutorials at the start of the game, but there a lot more mechanics that are vital to know and I only knew about them from reading guides and Wikis. This is something they had the opportunity to improve on and is more necessary due to the additional mechanic of changing to Umbra (basically the dark world).
You can use your lamp to reveal parts of the dark world or you can kill yourself completely and walk around it as a ghost. This is a very useful extra chance when you die, and welcome in a Souls-like game. It doesn’t make the game any easier though, just less frustrating. What this has forced the developers to do, is redesigned every area of the game again to show what it looks like in the dark world. This is very impressive as they look very different, so twice as much work had to go into the graphics. The quality of the graphics is beautiful too. I was actually quite shocked by the quality of the resolution when the first screen loaded. I thought it was a static picture.
Given that this is a Dark Souls but with a different name, it’s a little bit annoying that you have to learn what all the items do again if have played all the Dark Souls games. There are just so many to collect and you have to read the description to know what everything does, but the descriptions always have a bit of lore written with it, so the bit you want to read can be at any part of the description, so often you are forced to read the entire block of text when you just want to skim through. Some uniformity in the description – as in the first line saying “cures poison” would be welcome. This is one of the problems of following Dark Souls too closely. They aren’t giving themselves any room to make gameplay decisions for themselves.
The difficulty is not insane but hard at times and I always felt on edge. But I put that down to previous Souls experience. Some of the bosses can be horrible but they don’t come very often, and are very different in difficulty. I was stuck on the Spurned Progeny boss for a very long time and was worrying about future bosses being harder, but I was able to beat a lot of bosses on my first go after that. I was never stuck again.
The exploration is fun with branching routes that usually end up joining up with previous areas that you have visited to make it feel like one big world. It was very addictive for me to explore everything even though I promised myself I wouldn’t because I didn’t want to spend too long on this. It’s one of the best parts of these games for me.
But curiously enough, I did get stuck a few times with no idea where I had to go next so I did end up looking at guides a few times, when I didn’t need to for Dark Souls because I would just remember to go back to a branching route I hadn’t taken. This game has dead ends, so sometimes I thought I was at a dead end and found out that I could have progressed. Sometimes it was as simple as opening a door, but the graphics made it look like a background rather than a working door. Some parts you have to traverse to a part of a map miles away which I would have no clue to go to and I could have ended up going through every area in the game again just to find something I missed.
The sign of a good game for me is when I lose sleep to prioritise completing it throughout the night when everyone is asleep. This game did that for me. I couldn’t put it down. I was getting about 5 hours sleep a night if I was lucky due to not being able to start until 11PM because of hectic family life, but I did blast through in about a week.
Time for a well-deserved lay in.
Rating - 9/10
Difficulty - 8/10
Played on PC
Most deaths and some side exploration cut out
No cheats used
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