Recent reviews by exader

I'm not sure if making a game almost identical to another game means that you're saying you can do better or that you're so much of a fan of that game that you wouldn't do anything to disrespect it, not even create a different game.

Lords of the Fallen is the bastard child of Dark Souls with a prostitute rumored to be Darksiders.
What I mean by it is that while the game is pretty similar to Dark Souls, all the armors in the game look like they are wearing armors themselves.
And when I say "pretty similar" I mean that the game tries to do what Dark Souls does in almost every aspect.
You lose your souls (experience) when you die and enemies respawn. All controller mappings and actions are the same as in Dark Souls, and so on.

There is a slight difference whereas in Dark Souls you could play as a tanky character or an agile assassin with lots of stamina, while in Lords of the Fallen you can choose between being a Russian tank or a German tank, because that is the only playstyle that seems to work well. And every playstyle feels clunky for some reason.

I'm saying "Dark Souls" too much and I'm not really trying to compare the two, but I don't have to try.
There's a loading screen tip where something like "you can't have more than one thing of a type, but you don't need to have that because YOUR STUFF DOES NOT DEGRADE! Ha-ha!".
Seeing that I'd think whoever wrote it was a cocky prick, but I know better than that because I've seen the developers being supportive and helpful on the Steam forums, so they seem like nice guys.
I appreciate the fact that they take and give feedback based on the game in a very humane way, a thing that you don't see so often.

The game doesn't seem to have a very wide variety of environments, it's either inside a castle, outside a castle or the equivalent of both in a demonic world.
I assume that while the programmers were implementing things like the chatting system, the artists have already finished their jobs and went home, then the Darksiders team broke in and started drawing random details over all the existing textures.
Even the chests in the game look like they are the sarcophagus of a very wealthy child pharaoh.

Inside of them you can generally find swords that look like they've been made from Turkish swords sewn and stapled together.
...Well, they actually look quite nice, I enjoyed the different looking and feeling pieces of equipment. Not the equipment selection wheel, though, since I was playing this on a controller and selecting some categories wasn't a pleasure.

Anyway, I think creating this kind of game requires a good deal of effort, and since the devs were able to pull it off, I would've liked to see more of their original ideas in this.
It feels like it's trying too much to accommodate the Dark Souls player. Even the story is presented in a way that lets you figure out what's going on without explaining everything (though I got to the end of the game without knowing or caring too much about it). Although here there are some scrolls that work as audio-logs and record whatever the people who were there were saying or doing at a certain time. And there's that pretty annoying dialogue system that goes nowhere.

It's obvious the game has been worked on and polished, but it somehow has some home-made indie sense to it, like some things were not tested enough.
For instance, you can roll to ignore poison damage.
Or if you get close to an NPC that's programmed to say a certain thing, it's enough to step a nanometer away and look at him again to hear him say the same line over and over.
Boss battles are all right, but I would have liked more variety even so. Pretty much all of them are oversized demonic humans I had no problems dealing with. The first ones I have beaten with a small stick, the next ones with a tree branch and the final ones with the whole tree, but that's all that was different in my fights.

Again, I think the game would have done much better with some original concepts.
Playing felt like once a few minutes the protagonist and I were standing at a table and he was saying: "Hey, remember that thing from Dark Souls? Well here it is again with a different hat and clunkier"


At the end of the game there's a thing where you can see how you did in certain parts of it and what decisions you've made. I liked that. It was interesting to see how my actions affected the development of the story. There's a New Game+ mode, so if you want to see all the things that change, there's an option to continue playing.


Overall, there might have been a bit of things I didn't mention, and I know I have pretty much highlighted the game's negative aspects, but that can be a good thing if you're interested in the game, because everything I didn't mention was fine. So give it a try if you're good with all these.


I enjoyed it despite its flaws, I think it was fun, though I'm not sure if playing Lords of the Fallen without having played Dark Souls first could give someone a taste for this kind of game play and style.
I also wonder if the game would have existed without the Souls games.
I'm sure it would have existed without Darksiders, it would have probably been a better game as well.


It's pretty all right even if not compared to other games.
That, or I am just suffering from an illness which makes me appreciate or at least not hate any game that resembles a certain game that I love.

"8/6, decent GOTY" - IGN

People shouldn't take the in-game jokes so seriously, no one is trying to insult you.
It's a good game with clever level design. Not hard to finish but with extra content if you're willing to put in some work.
I had fun. :)