There are many characteristics that could be used to describe games that are similar to Souls, but the pacing style that is unique to the genre must rank highly on the list. They are first and foremost characterized as an action-RPG group by escalating, building tension. You battle through lengthy areas populated by difficult foes, each of whom drops “souls” that can be used to level up your character but which you risk losing if you pass out before getting to a secure location where you can do so.
When you finally reach a checkpoint and stop there to restore your health, improve your character, and catch your breath before resuming your journey into danger, the tension has finally been released. You are constantly faced with the same difficult choice: Do you risk moving forward in search of greater rewards, or do you retreat to safety and build up your strength, aware that you will eventually have to face all the threats you have just encountered once more?
Even though Lords of the Fallen checks off many of the boxes on the list of characteristics that Souls-like games are known for, the ebb-and-flow pacing, or rather the lack of it, is what aggravates players the most. The game’s meandering level design, the spongy enemies you encounter as you advance, and the unbalanced checkpoint and death systems all contribute to the lengthy and frustrating slogs you must endure. The game Lords of the Fallen has all the necessary Souls-like components, but it never quite gets the balance right.
The Umbral realm, an additional dimension that sits on top of the one you see while playing Lords of the Fallen, is the main aspect that distinguishes the game from others. You have the rare ability to communicate with and even enter the Umbral as a Dark Crusader traveling the globe in an effort to halt the return of an evil god. You can actually avoid dying by entering the Umbral dimension when you take too much damage instead of dying instantly. This gives you another chance to recover and survive.
Exploring the Umbral, where platforms or ladders that don’t appear in the real world might exist, is a major focus because it frequently allows one to pass through a dead end, wide gap, or blocked path. You will use your Umbral Lamp in both combat and exploration to enter that parallel universe. You can raise the lamp to get a glimpse of what lies ahead in the alternate dimension, or you can use it to zap yourself directly into the Umbral proper (but not back to the real world; that requires finding special corpses).
However, the Umbral responds by staring back at you. It’s teeming with monsters that, while ordinarily not a part of your reality, materialize there and pose a threat to you if you stay too long with your lamp holding the veil open in the Umbral. In fact, the danger increases the longer you stay there. Enemies pursue you; they periodically appear in front of and behind you, and as time passes, their numbers grow. You can also be completely killed in the Umbral, which returns you to the previous checkpoint or “vestige,” making you particularly vulnerable there. Additionally, while you are in the real world, opponents in the Umbral are invisible to you and are unable to engage in combat with you. However, even though you are in the Umbral, living things can still see you and harm you.
The Umbral is a terrifying place where hungry creatures follow your every move and even the walls and ground are alive and pulsing. Lords of the Fallen feels enormous and alive in an unsettling way thanks in part to the Umbral, which also presents some creative navigational and puzzle-solving opportunities at crucial times. The Umbral is a fantastic addition to the standard Souls-like formula. When you are forced into it, the dangers only get worse and you are always being hunted, even though it can help you survive a fatal blow.
However, in actuality, Lords of the Fallen’s fundamental problems are only made worse by the Umbral. It adds to, rather than reduces, frustrations in combat and helps to throw off the game’s exploration pace.
The level design is where the pacing problems are the worst. The locations you visit in the game are all suitably ravaged and horrifying, and when combined with the frequent jumps into the Umbral, they make for a terrifying environment to explore. While the settings in Lords of the Fallen are atmospheric, they are also painful to navigate because they are sprawling and twisted.
The checkpoint system is the main issue. You occasionally come across a vestige in Lords of the Fallen, just like in other Souls-like games. In addition to replenishing your health and the healing charges in your Sanguinatrix (also known as an Estus Flask), resting here also causes all nearby enemies to reappear. From here, you can level up, quickly travel to other vestiges, and rest.
The remnants you encounter in the world are sporadic but persistent. However, by putting a thing called an Umbral Seed in a flower bed found in the Umbral, you can also make your own checkpoints at particular locations.
The Umbral Seeds are a mess, despite the fact that as an idea they seem like a potential improvement over the typical Souls-like approach to checkpoints. In the absence of a seed, a checkpoint cannot be created. Seeds are uncommon and are typically obtained by defeating bosses.
It’s a recipe for frustration when levels pack challenging enemies together quickly succession and there aren’t any checkpoints. When you first enter a new area, you’ll frequently engage in a mini-boss battle with an opponent who is sufficiently challenging but not quite as difficult as the main bosses in Lords of the Fallen. You’ll start encountering these foes in levels as standard foes not long after you defeat them.
The problem is that Lords of the Fallen frequently follows up defeating a sizable former boss enemy with another one up ahead. after which comes another. after that, another. When enemies are lined up in a row like this, it makes for a series of drawn-out battles where a single error can lead to death and the need to restart the entire series.
Add to that numerous side paths, Umbral detours, and shortcuts that, frequently without your knowledge, lead you into cul-de-sacs on every level. These locations look important and are just as dangerous as the main pathway, but they mainly hand out armor and weapons. In Lords of the Fallen, I frequently wasted hours exploring irrelevant side areas and engaging in pointless fights that would only grant me access to weaker weapons.
Additionally, some Umbral flowerbeds are situated in incredibly unfavorable locations. For instance, there are flower beds left in the middle of enemy groups so that if you use a seed, you will awaken surrounded by enemies; however, you are unsure of when the next bed will appear. Sometimes there will be a flower bed right before a room full of challenging enemies, followed by another bed on the opposite side, making you feel as though you wasted your seed on the weaker position. Additionally, you can only plant one seed at a time, which forces you to give up your old checkpoint in favor of a new one. As a result, you better hope you choose a location that will be helpful.
The main hub area has an Umbral vendor where you can purchase more Vestige Seeds, but they aren’t exactly cheap, so this amounts to a running tax on the money you would have spent on leveling up. After too many instances of losing enormous amounts of progress due to the absence of a checkpoint, I started making sure I always had seeds on hand.
The levels in Lords of the Fallen have so many tiresome, drawn-out battles with so few rewards in the form of safe places to rest that I eventually just started running past hordes of enemies. Even in unfamiliar surroundings, it is usually quicker, simpler, and less tiresome to simply run for it and skip a number of difficult and time-consuming minor battles in order to find a flower bed. Lords of the Fallen is a series of slogs rather than rising tension and sweet relief. Lords of the Fallen’s beautiful world might have been fun to explore, but that fun is undermined by the disorganized checkpoints and perplexing level design. It also doesn’t benefit much from its combat.
Lords of the Fallen, like other Souls-like games, focuses on players making slow, powerful attacks, deflecting blows with shields, and dodging blows with a specific dodge move. Lords of the Fallen is at its best when it puts you through battles against interesting and peculiar boss enemies, which frequently alternate between towering corrupted knights and twisted demonic monsters. The combat generally feels fairly standard for the genre. Despite this, pacing problems still exist in the game’s combat, as every battle—from minor encounters with the game’s common enemies to epic battles with its best bosses—seems to last an eternity.
In the souls community, there is a running joke that if you’re having trouble with a boss, try dodging left. It’s frequently a quick and easy way to avoid attacks, and it can make battles that seem insurmountable into simple snarls. If you dodge at all in Lords of the Fallen, you don’t even have to turn left. The dodging system is very forgiving, giving you a ton of invincibility frames during the animation to completely avoid any damage from an attack, frequently even if you dodge slowly or incorrectly. Typically, dodging is so effective that using the game’s blocking or parrying systems is rarely necessary. Left dodge, attack, and victory.
With dodging being so incredibly forgiving, it’s fairly simple to pick up the feel of a fight after a few attempts, even against a challenging boss. However, Souls-like games are supposed to be challenging, right? You can’t simply steamroll a boss by dodging all of their attacks and attacking them when they give you a chance. These tasks are meant to be difficult for players to complete, giving them a sense of satisfaction after many attempts.
You can see how the problem arises. Lords of the Fallen slows down how quickly you can defeat an opponent to make up for the extremely generous (and, it must be noted, extremely enjoyable to use) dodge. You can get in a few attacks when there are openings after four or five swings, but it feels like every enemy, and particularly bosses, have a sizable health pool. Therefore, your one or two hits feel about as effective as throwing rocks at a T-Rex, especially when using lighter, one-handed weapons.
This is why the preferred tactic is to run past large groups of enemies in search of a checkpoint. When you encounter an enemy that you have previously encountered as a boss, you are aware that not only will it hit you very hard if you fail to avoid its attacks, but that you will also have to plink away at it for a very long time. That would be acceptable if Lords were to present you with one or two of these fights and then reward you with a break or a shortcut back to an earlier position so you could avoid those fights going forward. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Instead, you get rewarded with endless, mud-moving fights.
Boss battles also have this pace-killer because they drag things out until you make a mistake in order to make up for your ridiculous dodge ability. In Lords of the Fallen, there are some really impressive bosses, many of which have great move sets and present substantial challenges. But because each one of them takes so long to kill, they all make you feel frustrated long after you feel like you have control of the situation. This is because they all make you feel tested long after you feel like you have it under control. The boss battles in Lords of the Fallen start to resemble Groundhog Day loops where you know exactly what will happen but are still trapped.
There is a parry system in Lords of the Fallen as well, but due to how it functions and the effectiveness of the dodge, it is frequently preferable to ignore it. Parrying appears to be a valuable strategy with impressive results. When you time your blocks just right, you can lower an enemy’s “posture,” which is indicated by a small meter that appears next to their health, and when it is empty, you can launch a large Grievous attack that is similar to a Dark Souls counterattack or a Bloodborne visceral attack. You should look for opportunities to lower posture during fights to use regular attacks and charged attacks, which both do so similarly to the parry systems in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Lies of P. Or it would be, until you realize the risk is not even close to being worth it.
Even with a flawless parry, blocking something results in “withered health,” which turns a portion of your health bar gray. Another interesting system that plays like Bloodborne’s rally system or Lies of P’s guard health system is withered health. If you hit an enemy, you can regain your withered health as regular health, but if you take damage, you lose both your withered health and the regular health you would have lost otherwise. Therefore, blocking and parrying can help you withstand a blow, but they also cause you to lose health, which makes you more cautious.
The issue is that the benefits of the failing healthcare system never outweigh the risks. Usually, deflecting an attack only results in you taking the next blow, which will deplete your remaining health and more. Standing your ground is only necessary in a few extreme cases because dodging requires timing that is much more forgiving than parrying and carries no penalty.
And this is the point at which the appealing notion of having a second chance to enter the Umbral after death also loses its appeal. You regain health when you enter the Umbral, but half of it is withered, so you must start fighting right away to regain your full strength. Additionally, any healing you perform in the Umbral is less effective and some of it is withered. It’s a good idea to give you a second chance at life while also increasing the risk, but the Umbral has more enemies than the real world, and they keep spawning all around you as time goes on. When you find yourself in the Umbral, things frequently just worsen because there are more enemies for you to deal with.
Due to the increased enemy density, you now have to contend with the same enemy that killed you as well as additional foes who require numerous hits to kill. You also have less room to maneuver because of the increased enemy density. That second chance from the Umbrals now feels more like a gang beating. And that’s assuming the enemy who killed you doesn’t just slay you right away once you stand up, taking the rest of your real health along with your useless withered health.
Lords of the Fallen has a lot of potential for being cool. With a story about a number of religious zealots succumbing to corruption and ambiguous characters making you question whether what the orthodoxy defines as evil is actually all that bad, its world is vast and beautiful. Every location is made eerie and more interesting than it would be without the Umbral dimension, which is a great addition. Combat can also be enjoyable, especially when going up against the game’s most creative and difficult bosses.
However, the game simply can’t get the ratios right. Risk-and-reward gameplay is fun when the rewards are actually earned; if the rewards aren’t great enough or if the risk is too great, the fun quickly turns to frustration. Lords of Fallen struggles to produce a return on investment that justifies the investment despite having many good ideas. One gets the impression that getting up and doing something else would be a better use of time given its meandering level design and tedious encounters that turn challenge into tedium.