"I'm a cautious, roomba-like player..." is the most perfect way of explaining what I like about the typical souls-like genre's balance of combat then exploration.
This is also why I recently tried Remnant 2 excited about a shooter Soulslike, and absolutely did not enjoy it (no hate if you love the game). I didn't realize just how much I value the slow, exploration-based atmosphere of Souls games until I was being bombarded by a new horde ever few minutes with a music cue.
sometimes combat then watching horse hiney, is what it is, for the major part. Genre's fine imho. I love traversing, the risk and adventure, horses and mountain goats too! ( *pat pat* Torrencik, I'd call u Roach if I could, although still wouldn't feed you, ngl)
@@nicknagy8903 I enjoyed it for the opposite reason, it actively encourages more active and aggressive play. It also has a wide assortment of guns and abilities enabling quite a bit of replayability in between in randomly generated worlds. There's also something satisfying to seeing a Soulslike big man with sword character getting gunned down by a well timed shotgun blast.
@@nicknagy8903 funny that you mention remnant 2, because personally first hours of LoF feels like that so i refund it because putting melee oriented combat with enemy density of remnant 2 it's just not fun for me.
They actually added the parry sound just before launch. Originally there was no sound at all and it was one of the biggest complaints from reviewers when they got their hands on it for first impressions. So it was a literal after thought.
@@Akrioz some people were using it as a reason to praise the devs for their response time on player feedback. Instead of recognizing they were serving as free play testers.
"I am a cautious, Roomba-like player, that goes around in small semi-circles until I'm sure that I've explored everything in the environment" HE'S JUST LIKE ME FR
@@fulltimeslackerii8229 No, he was not asking chat for directions. He ONLY did that at the end of the very last stream when he was getting fed up with the game not really telling him a direction of where to go. He has ALWAYS been telling the chat to NOT give him any advice, and that has been the standard when he is playing a new game. Clearly you haven't been watching his steams, and I can prove I was there because you can find my comments in his chat.
And he's right. This game really seems like it disincentives that play style. I consistently find myself sprinting around and cleaving my way through large groups of enemies before I'm like, "Damn, I should probably look around at least a little bit..."
@@fulltimeslackerii8229 don't you think that's because of the design of this particular game? that's exactly his point, this game makes you tired of having to clear everything, so you end up running around avoiding that because it's so exhausting.
I found that the mechanics of souls games always incentivized methodically clearing an area on the first time you enter it, and then ignoring the enemies on subsequent runs through the area.
I personally still fight most of the enemies on subsequent runs, or even all of them in certain ones. I still go through (almost) every nook and cranny and pick up all the loot. I don't know, it's still just really fun to do for me.
Oh yeah I am all up in every crevice the first time but afterwards you learn what you can and can't skip. One thing I kinda lost with elden ring was that drive to see it all though. It was amazing the first time but its so spread out and the maps so big I skip everything I can lol
@@OD91MJ I don't do everything in the open world, though I still do a lot, including the more interesting (and build-necessary) side dungeons. I still do all the major and legacy dungeons and all the underground areas (most of the time).
10:25 I feel like this adds to why I keep getting lost too. Not only does the large amount of ganks discourage exploration, it doesn't give me much breathing room to stop and orient my surroundings to know where I am, I have to pay attention to the 4 enemies in front of me and 3 enemies on my back. And I'm talking about Axiom not the umbral world either
There shouldn't be enemies behind you unless you are in Umbral or you didn't clear enemies behind you in the living world. The Umbral world is the land of the dead, spirits walk around everywhere after they die, you are not supposed to stay long in Umbral, the less the better, unless you are farming. Enemies can pop up all around you in Umbral, one of the ways they made the area feel more dangerous. I've played through almost the whole game and only encountered one area in the Pilgrims Perch that had a badly placed sniper caster behind you. Most of the time they are in front of you and can be easily dodged or singled out.
@@Halfshanksit's not fun being swarmed, especially if I'm trying to clear for exploration, there's to many paths with endless enemies and you stop caring to clear them after a while. That's why there's enemies behind, especially if you are in umbral, and can't get out. It's not good design, don't trick yourself into liking constant ganking and spawning enemies. There's good ways to have loads of enemies and not feel overwhelmed, and feel hopeless in clearing. Bloodborne has swamrs of enemies, but they usually aren't one that can't be taken out easily. Most of the trash mobs, will be 2-3 hits, while there's ranged enemies, and dogs, and spear guys, and the shield and sword guys who take much more to fight. I like to aggro small enemies and take them out, but for some reason that's not easily possible. I'll always aggro tons of enemies
@@Halfshanks The game relies too much on ambushes AND ganks. You find yourself peeking around corners, adding yet another layer of distraction. We should get lost in the levels because of the map's physical design, not because the developers decided that cheap tactics = challenging. How is it challengin and "tactical" to awkward angle your camera around corners every 5-10 steps to check for ambushes? I mean the Umbral, understandable (despite the GUARANTEED ambush), but for Axiom it's not. Re-design the enemies, don't make them hit harder than a fully-armoured, dual-wielding clad with their flimsy attacks. Don't make them able to lock on you double your lock-on range. And if that wasn't enough, they further discourage exploration by having monsters able to pull you from Umbral. These ambushes are straight up BS especially in the latter parts of the game because they are the hardest to avoid. Sure, when it's the 2nd time, but you're either guaranteed to get hit (which is something YOU MUST avoid due to the limited heals and overtuned damage of enemies), or killed. There's absolutely no way to check beforehand compared to being able to check for ambushes in Axiom, as there may be some random things in Umbral and even if you try to scan in advance, if you are unlucky, it just so happens the Umbral assassins were standing near you. Basically, you're running past enemies BEFORE the 2nd encounter, when you find it's the ridiculous combination of ambushes in choke spots while being chased by a small platoon lead by an elite, supported by unrendered spellcasters/archers.
I will always defend Code Vein's controls for spell casting the same way that Lords does it because it's so simple and perfect that it should be standard for souls spell casting.
I wish more of these types of games would take a cue from Code Vein and give you a way to recover MP/magic use outside of just using a potion/consumable. While you couldn't be a "pure mage" in Code Vein, you could still have a functionally infinite amount of spell casts so long as you were attacking the enemy.
The ammo guage being used for throwables instead of the amount in your inventory is great. Also, 100% agree with the spell casting choice hear. Phenomenal approach. Always enjoy your critiques Ratatoskr. However, I'm NOT unsubscribing. I will however, post something spicy in my comment: Habanero
The consequence of the ammunition gauge is that there is no way to balance the usage of throwable items with scarcity. The moment you find a really powerful item, your only limit are your ammo pouches, which you should never run out of. Magic has the same issue, mana regen is too easy, yes the convenience of having each spell mapped to a button is great, but not only are spells strong, your mana is pretty much limitless.
@@TheHeartThatRunsCold I think if you made ammo pouches similar to the standard souls health flask (you can only get a few charges of it, it only replenishes at checkpoints) then it would work well. I like the idea of a throwables being simple to manage. Just equip one, and it pulls from a universal ammo pool. I didn't realize ammo pouches are very prevalent as I'm not super far in, so I could see that being easily abused. I haven't toyed too much with magic yet, so I'm not actually aware of how mana regenerates.
its free on gamespass give it another try I think it's great I played through twice and Lies of p once. I played it after all the updates but its the best souls like that isnt made by team ninja (I don't count those as souls likes really they are more rooted in ninja gaiden)
As someone who likes Lords of the Fallen and also likes good, thoughtful reviews, this was great man. The points in which we agreed (wither/spells) I appreciated your articulation, and the points at which we diverge I can understand your perspective or recognize it being a subjective difference that was well-considered. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I too think his review is fair up until he just calls the game "bad" and wouldn't recommend it. Because the game is far from bad and is worth the money.
@@crankpatate3303 He clearly states why and I completely agree After hyping up the game to be the next big thing and it's just not, many would be disappointed. If the combat, bosses and exploring is not fun, why bother? A hit-and-miss soulslike for me Also, like most AAA titles, it has horrendous optimisation issues since launch.
This is it. I've never had one but I think this might be the game that is the answer to when someone asks me "is there a bad game that you really like?" And it's not even that I actively found the overall experience to be bad or even subpar. I love the game and I've avoided looking at reviews for fear of spoilers, but it scratches that particular itch for the Dark Souls 1/Dragon's Dogma feeling that I've had for almost a decade that literally no other game has managed to scratch. I'm not done with the game either but I'm loving it. I feel insane reading the reviews because it feels like I'm missing something obvious, or that something is wrong with me. Listening to your critique is like you're describing a completely different game. This is the first time I almost completely disagree with you, save for one or two points, and I've been subscribed for a good long while now. Unfortunately for you, I have developed the ability to let someone on the internet be wrong. It took many, many ego deaths for me to unlock this ability. You have not alienated me and I will not be unsubscribing.
“unfortunately i’ve developed the ability to let someone on the internet be wrong…” sounds like ur egos shining through m8. he’s allowed to have differing opinions without being “wrong”. and you’re allowed to like a game that other people don’t like without you being wrong, more power to you! doesn’t mean anybody is “wrong”
I feel the exact same way mate. I'm 48 hours in and enjoying it greatly. Most of the things he brings up as part of what makes this game "bad" are things I enjoy greatly. It's a solid 8/10 for me.
For me, the death blow is the encounter design. In the mid game so many encounters boil down to a big mob of annoying enemies protected by a parasite that makes them invincible. Or half a dozen tanky enemies on a narrow ledge with smaller mobs who do their damndest to shove you into an abyss. Dealing with that in any reasonable way feels like cheese, so I just ran by them!
I figured out only a few hours in that the parasite mechanic would never actually be significantly more than what's shown in the tutorial. Same with the Umbral traversal/puzzles. Which is highly disappointing, it feels like a great idea squandered.
I personally found the hordes in DS3 to be more insufferable than DS2. Sometimes those hordes can get bad enough to lag the game pretty hard. But Lords of the Fallen could've at least made some minor tweaks to appearance and add a move or two between variants to change it up a bit.
Glad I’m not the only one that noticed this. The game has two tests for general combat: Mob surrounded by ranged enemies And parasite powered enemies. This never changes. You will be shown the same challenge in the first level as you will in the last
@@Battleguild There are a few ridiculous ganks in DS3 but I can't imagine how they're worse than the ones in DS2 lmao. Shrine of Amana is goddamn awful.
I think the color scheme is simultaneously monochromatic and too much difference on the light-dark/saturated-desaturated scale. Elden ring and Dark souls uses a kind of desaturated, not agressively shaded style that’s just good to look at and makes truly colorfull places(like Liurnia) in them pop. Long story short its likely the lighting,the mist and color ballance
@@tinminator8905 I've played both, and I just don't see what you're seeing. LotF has higher contrast with the darks from the lights, creating deeper, richer tones. Elden Ring has that same greyish color filter plastered over it like its predecessors, as if the color was slightly faded (this is especially noticeable with the character models) If you haven't played the games, I'd recommend watching other videos, because even the other LotF vids, I notice the rich color palette.
They use UE5, and they are CAPABLE of making things look good. I remember being amazed the entrance to the Fen area, which was just vibrant with different colors, only to be dropped into a hole of shit and piss everywhere. They deliberately wanted to make their game look like shit (DS1) with the low poly washed out wooden platforms, mossy ass swamps, pitch black caves, not to mention they added the snowy area and the hell area. If you copy a game that came out a decade ago, it's going to look outdated, even with a shiny new engine
6:10 Its weird because the combat not being clunky and slow is actually something that seems very good for me Edit: I just finished the review and it is so funny that it actually gave me the courage to buy the game because I feel attracted to pretty much everything you say its bad
Also interesting bc the first Lord's of the fallen from 2014 was criticized for how unreasonably slow it's combat was, to the point that half of the weapon classes were unusable.
Same. (But the audio for the parry is pretty week) I like this game precisely because it's fast. That's the best part about it for me when comparing to others in this genre.
The problem with holding the spell catalyst's button to bring up a menu is that this means you can't hold down that button to charge spells or maintain channeling spells, which is a big part of Elden Ring spell casting. You could make the menu work but you can't have the cycling spells on a tap and the menu spells on a hold without losing that.
And what about just holding up to bring a selection wheel? Tap up to scroll in between spells or hold up to bring a small radial selection wheel with your equipped spells...That would work better IMO
there are literally spells that require channeling and it works perfectly ... i rly dont know wdf u fromsoft fanboys are hating about and clearly u dont know either
I’m having a good time with it. There have been some frustrations with the density of enemies (it gets crazier a little past where you are) but it does make me want to play one of the FromSoft games again. I am enjoying it, and I’ll most likely finish it, but right now it’s sitting at a solid 7.5/10 for me
I had heard about the number of enemies, so I got a pole arm with its INSANELY wide horizontal swings, and went radiance/inferno 50/50 umbral caster. Having tons of fun, the more enemies the better
My 4080 gave me solid 80+ fps with dlss on plus the drivers I never got crashes till the latest patch. I would give it a 8.5. But yes lots of enemies, but honestly I’ve been enthralled with this game more than Spider-Man.
@lindtlichr1005 I agree. It was pretty rough early but once you level up and work out the enemies it becomes fairly manageable except if you get stuck in Umbral.
once u get into ng plus the game is ruined and horrible, if they ever fix it it won't be horrible but until then ng plus turns this game from an 8/10 to a 1/10
I’m glad you mentioned about the forward momentum. For me, that was one of the biggest annoyances I had. It seemed silly to have these tight narrow areas at the beginning of the game and yet have an R1 attack move the character the same distance as a locked on dash. Speaking of lock-on, they’ve also really got to address its accuracy. Auto lock priority should go to the nearest enemy to you not half way across the level. Having said that, whilst it’s not the best game, there’s also charm to it that’s really got me hooked. Personally, I think it looks great, I like that it’s dark and gritty. And if you can get your timing and positioning right, the combat can be really satisfying.
Very much agree, I think all his points are valid and I agree with some of them (dear god there are so many enemies) but I love its style, systems, and world. The bosses are a snooze compared to the levels but I still find them enjoyable. I know its a bit janky, but I still like this game a lot.
I'm really loving this game. Adjusting to the way it plays compared to a more polished Fromsoft game, clicked for me almost immediately. It is so unbelievably flawed, but for some reason I adore it.
@@KSabotit works well with the free flow combat in Arkham because you want to keep up the momentum of Batman’s combos, but it shouldn’t be used carelessly in other genres.
In this game I've taken up a playstyle of running as fast as I can to collect loot and shortcuts then inevitably die. Now I can go a bit further and run through my new shortcuts to continue sweeping while completely ignoring enemies and eventually find progress. The mob density is so great I feel forced to speedrun some really nice skyboxes and environments.
Me personally Im in love with it. It matches the souls like aesthetics, has a neat new mechanic thats super fun, but its really brutal. The game punishes you really hard if your new to a specific location by making you level up otherwise taking like 90% of your HP. Its a very 'adjust to the combat and playstyle' game
@@rohansensei5708 I played Sekiro, it's my favorite game of all time. Couldn't try out bloodborne yet because I don't have a Playstation but from what I've seen so far, I'll probably like it. Also played Lies of P, finished it within a few days, I like how the parrying feels. I couldn't bring myself to play LotF for longer than the 2 hour refund window to get my money back. There's something about the game that makes me not like it that I cannot exactly put my finger on. The graphics, the low commitment combat, even the speed your character walks at or the way you turn around or even the camera movement, almost everything about this game looks or feels "off" in some way to me. I'm just not having fun playing this
10:50 I think I know the issue. There’s too little contrast, but not just with color, but a combination of color and shading. Let me explain. In the first game this was also a problem. Everything was really cluttered and looked too similar, plus everything was kind of the same tone. Dark colors, dark colors, dark colors, and if there was a “light color” it still wouldn’t pop. It would still feel like it was shaded somehow, and I honestly don’t understand how they managed to do that. This applies to this game too it seems, wherein everything just melds together, including enemies, and your character, and you just want to squint or stop looking at it because it’s sensory overload trying to decipher. Like looking at one of those AI images of things being combined but not identifiable. For an example of “dark” with clarity and dark without clarity, go look at DS1 catacombs. Those areas are dark, but you never lack the ability to see if that makes sense. Everything is clean, even when slathered in grime, which goes with Miyazaki’s design apparatus of making even the most hideous of things seem “elegant”. Then you look at LotF and are like . . . Oh, wow. This hurts.
This! Constantly while watching others play this, I was constantly missing being able to see. It was full of clutter, and the constant fog in most areas just blurred all the details. Like, I think turning down the graphics might ironically improve the visuals!
I believe the word that best sums up how this game looks in the, er, bad to look at areas he has mentioned would be 'dismal' It feels as though everything is being leached into this visual morass that might theoretically be quite vivid as a mixture but in practice ends up looking like that art class experiment where you mix all the paint colours together and get a kind of alien brown that is both uncomfortable and somehow boring
Great video! I wholeheartedly agree with the overall review. I just finished the game and while I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with lords of the fallen, it started to fall short for me at about the mid-end game. The point about the enemy variety and the level design enemy encounters was spot on, this game loves to throw hordes of the same enemy types at you in every corner. It got to the point where I was running past every enemy in Bramis Castle just so that I could see the end and re-roll my character on a new playthrough.
"I Thoroughly enjoyed the game and im re rolling a new character for a second playthrough, but i agree with this review that states the game is bad" - Human
He makes valid points, you can enjoy something but still criticize it. Instead of reacting to "It's bad" try watching the video first so you can engage with the points. @@Jack_Sparrow_85
@@Jack_Sparrow_85enjoying the game doesn't mean you can't find some design choices extremely annoying or want to try again because you like the things it did well more than you hate the things it did poorly.
You can also partially agree with a video review and still say the game isn't bad, - which this video obnoxiously states in it's title, as if it's an objective fact, and you clearly don't think it is, or you wouldn't be even considering a second playthrough. I also agree with some of his points, but I think the title is unwarranted and unfair.@@Xstream24
In the video he mentions that his peers and big souls content creators were showering the game with praise. The title is a response to the positive feedback, also maybe clickbait? Regardless it's a far greater video on the merits and pitfalls on the games design than of any other review I've seen here on youtube.
As someone who liked this game I still feel that your criticisms are valid. As far as combat and enemy placements go I think the experience depends alot more on the build than it does in any other soulslike game. I played on an inferno/pyromancer build, after a really tough early-game similar to what you described I started getting many tools for my build in the mid game and suddenly I could deal with every encounter pretty well. Strong melee weapon for 1v1s, AOE-Spell for crowds and range spell to snipe ranged enemies. Playing with a completed build like that it was very satisfying to clear areas methodically (though it felt more like outsmarting a troll level in mario maker rather than getting good in some scenarios).
@@PepperoniPapaya I can tell you that my radiance build is suffering. Even at 70 radiance, my Pieta sword, and my most powerful radiant spells, are taking at least 3+ hits to kill any enemy but the zombies. The zombies have ranged attacks and can basically kill me in about three hits, which sucks because there’s a ton of other ranged enemies that do massive fire damage. It’s an absolute slog. It’s worse than Shrine of Amana by a mile. Amana has nothing on the end game.
@@kolbywilliams7234 My Umbral caster build really shines there. There is an umbral spell that bounces from enemy to enemy that works really well on those fire zombies. What is your most powerful radiant spell?
Wither Damage is essentially like something that they've been doing in Fighting Games for a while now. That's an interesting adaptation. There it's mostly in tag fighters, where it incentivizes you tagging out the character as they will heal while not the point character.
Just completed Lords of the Fallen. Yes, it has some issues such as frame rate stutter and some frustrating, poorly designed enemy placement, but I genuinely enjoyed it. The game is one of the better souls -likes. With a few more patches, I'd highly recommend it.
@@MrFox101 Many games receive years of updates that amount to nothing or make the overall experience worse for the sake of "balance" and other re74rd3d things. Or just never get patched at all and become abandonware. These games should be finished from the get-go but now we live in the patch era and every dev wants to skip on countless hours of Q-A to sell you something entirely on its marketing. people saying patches will make it better just reinforces this lazy practice, and we will continue to get unfinished crap.
The game has the same problem Dark Souls 2 had at launch. It was too punishing and has way too many enemies that make the game tedious more than it should. For those who were around for the launch version of Dark Souls 2 and remember what it was like before it got patched to have less enemies you know what I mean.
I agree with you about the enemies. There are waaaaay too many. I like exploring and seeing the world and environment, but a lot of times I can’t cause there are so many enemies I have to take care of first. Also I umbral world is tough. You are forced to go there too much and again way too many enemies combined with the already too many in axiom. Wish there were more different enemies too. I constantly find myself running past groups cause it’s not worth spending time taking them all down.
Sounds like a skill issue...Oh, no. Did you have to hit r1 and r2 a dozen more times?! Umbral is supposed to be the hard mode of the game, where you are constantly being attacked...🤡🤡🤡
I agree there are too many enemies in Axiom but I think that was kinda the point in Umbral. Its supposed to be a scary experience and you want to spend as little time there as possible.
Holy shit, this video is amazing man. 13 minutes, 28 seconds, no intro or outro unrelated to the review or the game you are reviewing, just straight into speaking about the game. The description of the game's content, your tone of voice, the realness of your feelings towards this product, the simplicity. It's funny how "barebones" this review is compared to all the big players in YT game review space while being leagues better in doing the things a review is supposed to do at the end of a day. Great job!
I'm very glad this review exists for the sake of my sanity. Before and after the game came out, I heard glowing reviews from all types of reviewers and players. I was very excited to play the game on release, but as soon as I booted up the game, I immediately felt a pit in my stomach because everything just felt off. As I played, I encountered moments of awe and enjoyment, but it never lasts. I looked to reviewers and the subreddit to see if anyone else has the same issues with the design and general "feel" of the game. I was disappointed to find that most people on the subreddit didn't seem to acknowledge the game's flaws. I plan on finishing the game still, but it's just nice to see someone voice my critiques in a coherent manner.
I truly think it's something that takes time to get used to. Also, I'm on the subeddit all the time and people complain like crazy. I don't get that point.
It's sad how common a subreddit doesn't acknowledge criticism of the game that the subreddit is about, and any discussion about it is thrown out the window
@@Nhileishere "It's sad how common a subreddit doesn't acknowledge criticism of the game that the subreddit is about, and any discussion about it is thrown out the window." Have any of you been on the subreddit, lmao.
@highdo2244 I just finished cleansing the 5 beacons. I actually have had a lot more fun playing the game. I think the level design and enemy density improved a lot. I hated the area attached to skyrest and the snow area. Imo they started players out in the worst places. Also now that I have a build online I feel like I can explore normally.
I fired up for the first time tonight (on PC RTX4070ti). Controller integration is really bad for me, as in either super sensitive or ignoring button presses. Tried to build a character and it crashed, restarted started the game and locked in the starting pool. Went Umbral to get out. Started the tutorial area and absolutely hated everything about how it controls. The camera is way to finicky, the jumping is silly. I'm not even sure I can be bothered to go back through the chore to actually start properly! The original Lords of The Fallen was OK, just way too easy, this new one is too finicky
Thank you. You’ve been able to voice things I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on. I’ve been watching streamers play and heard so much positive reviews, but nothing I watched got me interested to play at all. You’ve nailed many of the reasons. I’ll happily continue on with my upteenth playthrough of Lies of P.
I liked lies of P but I still feel the game would be better with a more generous parry window, or some significant stamina costs reductions for parry/guard maybe idk
I am about 50 hours into the game and I'm loving it. I understand it's not for everyone but the thing that I really love the most is how big and interconnected the world is just like DS1 but bigger. It's cool seeing places that you've visited in the distance knowing that pretty much every landmark you see in the distance is a place you can go to.
I'm having a great time .. not as hardcore as dark souls as far as difficulty but that's more of my style. I can explore, find some lore stuff and not get frustrated by overwhelming cheese from mobs
@@zagaant7233He probably just adapted and used the tools the game gives you for dealing with multiple enemies at once. Frankly this complaint puzzles me every time I see it. It's pretty easy to deal with if you bother to learn how.
@@zagaant7233 It's honestly just not as bad as people like you are making it out to be. It's definitely a higher density of enemies than people are probably used to but you guys act like it's a never-ending parade of enemies, which is not the case unless in the Umbral, where the whole schtick and theme is _supposed to be_ that it's literally never safe.
my main issue with it is that for some reason my frame rate is so incredibly low and the animations are so incredibly choppy it sometimes gets me killed and even makes the game unplayable despite me playing on performance mode
Nah this game is pretty fucking cool man. Lots of people shitting on it, and it's got its problems, but similar to DS2--it doesn't deserve so much hate. This is a COOL game. I definitely disagree about the world, this is one of the best dark fantasy worlds I've seen and experienced. Combat is also very fun, with lots of mechanics and player agency, although it's not all perfectly polished. Bosses need a few more moves, they lack some complexity, but they're still pretty good outside of the gank fights. Speaking of ganks, that's probably the game's biggest issue. And it needs more enemy variety for such a huge world.
Yea the hate is bonkers, this dude rails about ambushes and ganks and in another video praises Lies of P even though LoP is the most gank/ambush happy soulslike ever made.
@@alexDD-j6e I like both Lords and Lies. Lords has the better world and is the better RPG, Lies is tighter and more polished with better bosses. Both games are good.
Really interesting upload. Your points on combat are very well explained. I absolutely love Lies of P. I am still likely gonna pick up Lords of the fallen but on sale and way down the line when its all patched up. It just does not look like my thing. I hate the speed of it. I like my souls styles heavier and slower. That said I am curious about it and it seems like it will be a good filler title when I crave more souls style stuff. Anyway I digress. Keep up the great content dude.
This might be wild but this is my first ever souls like game I’ve ever played and I absolutely love it, sure the performance isn’t the greatest and that alone should be enough to diss on the game especially these days when devs release half baked games but idk I’m just really loving the gameplay. I enjoy the fast paced combat as well, not sure how it differs from actual from soft games cause again I’ve never played it. I would definitely wait a while tho cause there is a lot of frame drops that go on.(I’m on Xbox) but all in all I’m enjoying very thoroughly. I do have a feeling tho that the more I play the easier it will get. And I don’t mean by just being higher level but just figuring out parries and what not. That’s one thing I’ll agree is it’s probably easier than other souls likes
just pick up all the fromsoft games before even thinking about this shit fr they are all better (ok maybe not demons souls or dark souls2) but yea these copycats dont even come close at all
You should go ahead and get it. It's a really good game. Don't let critics effect your perception. If you do, you _will_ end up skipping tons of really good releases just because of what amounts to nit picking. Reviewers and critics obsessively overly fixate on things, especially negatives, and over time due to the nature of hyper-comparative analysis they develop these boxes they end up putting every game in and in doing so they end up letting those things ruin their experience unnecessarily. I'm not even saying their critiques are necessarily wrong or invalid, that's not the point I'm trying to make. I love reviewers, and I have a small, curated list of them that I watch consistently (like Ratatoskr, I genuinely love this dude and his takes despite regularly disagreeing with him, same with ShillUp and Austin) (though I also wouldn't necessarily call Ratatoskr a dedicated reviewer but he does do reviews obviously), but I have learned over the years as a life-long hardcore gaming enthusiast that if you look at games from the perspective of critics (or really of any one other than yourself) then you will absolutely end up screwing yourself out of good experiences. This game has flaws, as any game does, but overall it's a fantastic experience and one of the best additions to the souls-like genre to date.
Definitely wait for sales if you're unsure. The game has a lot of good things going for it, followed by mildly to extremely frustrating approaaches to certain things. If you're sure you want to play the game though go ahead, I think it's worth it.
Wait a week or two, till they fix most of the things, at least I hope they do, because right now in order to play this game for a long session you need to be a masochist
You definitely nailed on your comment about the levels, even admiting you don't have the skills for elaborating on it. Specially when you said about the lack of negative space. It was something I noticed from the first trailer: the game seems to want to evoke "Dark Fantasy vibes" at any cost. "Hey, look at me, like at how dark I am, I even put spikes on my head", but the art design team has no clue on what makes Dark Fantasy "Dark" (or someone who aproves what the art team shows is clueless, It happens A LOT). The art direction seems to try to mimic the Aesthetic of Dark Souls, also putting a lot of elements inspired by Blasphemous with the pointy helmets, masks and spikes. Blasphemous has a very dense and well made research on Spanish Sacra art and that's what makes it unique. It just feels generic and bland with no fundamentals. The whole game just looks like a Death Metal logo rendered in 3D.
There are definitely moments in a game where it feels like the base design for something came from asking a particularly “edgy” 12 year old what it should look like.
Dark fantasy is just a fantasy that’s dark, there is nothing else to it. There is no your own specific thing that separates real dark fantasy, from “fake” dark fantasy. Really, spikes has been a huge part of the western dark fantasies. Also, it’s not spikes, it’s thorns.
I think the controls are too floaty, it's laggy and slightly buggy and I don't like most bosses so far. But I still have fun with it. Metacritic gives the game a 7/10 and I thinks that pretty acurate. Lies of P was way better tho.
In a world in which anything less than 8/10 is a disappointment I'd say 7 is probably fair. On my scale, I would give it a 5 or 6 for being middling overall.
I really have to agree unfortunately. I managed to cleanse 4 of the beacons but after this point i found there to be a massive increase in the amount of enemies and the combat is too janky/floaty for me.
- there are no shields - if you get roll (well, dash) caught outside s you take stupendous counter dmg BB's no souls? Still, unfair imho. I say less tracking for enemies and for the player, make it fair, game!
@@justaquietpeacefuldance Bloodborne doesn’t have shields because it never wanted shields. Dashing is much fairer because enemies don’t have insane tracking, positioning is as important as the dash, meanwhile LOTF EVERY ENEMY can track 360° to hit you as long as you don’t roll.
@@extremelyboredtatsumaki.495 that's some serious freaking tracking, f^ck my spacing. maybe it's a roll-souls? 350 mm rolls and 360s with tracking, oh my rolls! Not my type.
Let's just say that some of the developers that worked on this had a better understanding of what they were making than others. Though it's mostly the director's fault if something is under par for allowing it (and the deadline's considering how bad much of the late game is).
Agree with everything you said. I thought lies of p would be mediocore, while this would be the stand out game, but it was the other way around. I too couldn't force myself to finish it. It's so tedious and unenjoyable.
your explanation of how the mob density and enemy placements make me feel as a player is spot on and its such a bummer. I was so excited to explore this game but my will to do so was quickly worn down by the endless eries of ganks, trash mob spam and annoying encounters. Add to that the "frantic" feel of combat due to the animation speed and it contributes to this overall spastic feeling. edit: I also feel like the way the levels are so "samey" looking with lack of landmarks also makes me feel like i cant stop playing until ive fully cleared a zone and found the next major vestige or boss. Because I know that even one day later ill be completely lost and unsure of which pathways ive taken already and which remain to be explored. And that feeling of wanting to stop playing but feeling like I cant kills my enjoyment.
Don't worry Ratatoskr. I'm in the same boat as you. What's funny is Lies of P EXCEEDED my expectations in every way, and made me super excited for Lords of the Fallen. Lords of the Fallen really disappointed me mainly through the bosses, mobs, and story telling. I am surprised that so many souls TH-camrs gave this game such high reviews and some even said it was the best souslike. For the first time I felt a huge disconnect with many of them.
The character moves so fast it looks like driving a car in neutral, he doesn't give any weight sensation, as the weapons too look like made of cardboard lol The distance the character travels when attacking or dodging is ridiculous to the point the devs had to make a patch fixing the "falling from a ledge when attacking". The s from the dodge are on point tho. Hate the fact that you can't hold a catalyst and a crossbow, since they both use the same slot of "distance weapon".
THANK YOU!!! As someone who adores the game its so nice to hear someone say WORD FOR WORD BAR FOR BAR what I'm saying about the levels in this game, it doesn't matter how well intricately and carefully constructed the physical space of the levels are designed when you simply don't get to take your time enjoying exploring them. It's so frustrating walking through a level taking in how amazingly it is made, how it wraps around to somewhere you've already been and looking back at the vista behind you tracing out the journey you took to get there only to then look around you sighing in frustration at the 75 enemies that surround you on top of the 50 more that will be there in a short minute because the umbral mechanic is a continuous swarm.
That wither damage system, that is pretty much the same thing as the guard regain in Lies of P, is a fantastic system that complements souls combat very very well. I wish all new souls games, including FromSoft ones, implement something like that. It really gives a new flavor to combat.
are you alright in the brain? that mechanic was stolen straight from bloodborne. its not something lies of p did and this game does it but just better.
for the enemy layout, I think it's due to how much more important the ranged attacks are. you can pick off those 2 ranged units with 3-4 thrown attacks and can usually kill one or two melees before they reach you. there's not many if you spend a few resources, the trick being to spend as little as possible while still keeping in good enough shape to fight the boss you're headed towards. On the bosses themselves, I noticed they get harder as i progress, with the strongest i saw in your video here being the hushed saint which is only the first beacon boss. I think you went into it as a veteran souls fan but only played the amount that was made to introduce new players to the game before ramping it up, so of course it felt fairly easy. as for the rest, I guess that's mostly subjective. I prefer the faster combat, I like having plenty of enemies to farm through so I'm not bored while going through the same area again, and Personally I have no real opinion on the looks of the levels themselves. some views are pretty cool, like looking from where you killed the crimson rector percival over the stone bridge, whereas I always HATE swamp levels, but overall it was all fine IMO. it's not elden ring, but a solid souls game nonetheless.
all the bosses are super easy... with the possible exception of the sundered monarch if you made the choice of playing an inferno build. in fact, sundered monarch was the only half decent boss in the entire game.
@@powerbeard5653 if it takes more than 2 tries to beat, it's not "super easy". I don't think there's a single boss besides crimson rector Percival that i beat first try, and even then i kinda knew his patterns from one of the dev gameplay videos. I'm not looking to fight the same enemy 9-10 times, or to beat them first go. 3-5 attempts is my range of "that was a good boss", and LOTF hit that range with most of their bosses. and even with all these things making it "easier" we still have people dropping the game and negative reviews for the game being "too freaking hard". some dark souls vets found it too easy, but some new players can't even get through the first area. they did their best to make the game assessable without dropping all the challenge from it, and from the looks of it they hit a pretty good balance.
@@phrozonphoenix5894 imo the player just move way too goddamn fast for the boss,as in i can sidestep or start moving out of the way exactly when i see the boss winding up any attack ,same deal for any other encounter like oh i fuck up my great sword heavy i should be scratched in the face but i can just backstep the heck out of there, i think thats why they have so much mobs going around cuz if 4 mobs takes podshot at you one might land
Having not played Lords of the Fallen, my commentary here is purely academic and obviously has no basis in any understanding of the actual feel of the game, but I will say a faster swing speed and recovery on attacks may be intentional to make the game's combat feel somewhat more realistic to real world swordplay. I'm a huge fan of the Soulsborn games, and have beaten all 3 Dark Souls, including having played Dark Souls 3 up to NG+7, beat Bloodborn multiple times, and Elden Ring 4 times. I understand the appeal of the commitment system on attacks and I do love it as a system for learning and improving in the combat, but as someone who's also a huge fan of historical swordsmanship, it has little to no bearing on how actual fighting is done with swords. From what I can see in your gameplay, Lords of the Fallen definitely isn't one to one representative of actual historical swordsmanship, but the way the character moves and stepping into their strikes IS fairly typical of actual swordsmanship. Typically in real swordsmanship, over commitment to a strike is a huge novice mistake, and even something like a greatsword does move a lot more like a katana does in Elden Ring. Does that necessarily mean that translating more realistic speed to combat into a game makes for a good combat system? No idea, as I said I haven't played the game, but that may be what they're going for just looking at the gameplay.
One thing worth mentioning as well about the parry is that if the attack you're parrying has any type of hit-conditional effect (like a secondary explosion that only happens if it hits you) then the parry will NOT absorb that damage and you will be guaranteed to take that damage fully, as well as cancelling the withered hp you could have regained from hitting after the parry. I also fully agree with the part about FromSoft's way to handling spells and I do feel LoTF is an improvement; however, I think games like Code Vein still do it even better. Allowing full quickslotting of spells makes things so much more accessible and engaging to cycle through attack combos, and the ichor system heavily encourages melee aggression even for magic users. As a whole, I was also very disappointed, especially because I mainly got the game due to its stellar reviews. I even cleared the game's secret ending (Umbral) because I really wanted to get the boss weapon from the secret final boss, I beat that boss and got the weapon, my game crashed soon after and the weapon self-deleted. I uninstalled and bought Lies of P to help me cope through the trauma.
@@Choryrth I can't tell if you're trolling or simply incorrect, but in case it's the latter: The umbral ending first requires you travel through a side area, then acquire a non-descript item to enter Mother's Lull, then later you have to know to get the Withered Rune of Adyr without it telling you to do so, then you have to figure out that Pieta is the one referred to by the story as the person you need to soulflay, which you either know from other side dialogue interactions unrelated to the questline OR from just randomly going up to NPC's until it works. If that's not a "secret" ending to you, then I'm guessing the only secret endings are ones like the DS3 dark ending where all you do is phase through a single illusory wall in a side area and grab an item. As for the "quickest" ending: The other two endings literally just have you do the mainline objectives of the game and either cleanse or not cleanse the beacons. The umbral ending has you do all of the same objectives, except you have double the steps in between and a different final boss from the other two endings.
@@nephorium6160 it's not secret, because everyone was blatant told about it. convolution does not equal secrecy. we were told by developers about all 3 endings, AND the fact that they unlock classes, weeks, if not more, before the game even came out. as for easiest and quickest, it doesn't require all the things the others do. the other endings require you to go to ALL 5 beacons. this one doesn't require you to visit any of them (other than Hush, obviously), and you can do it in much less time. it only requires 2 bosses that the other endings don't, Harrower, and Ellianne. meanwhile you're skipping multiple bosses the other endings require, including Crow, Cleric, AND Tanrec, the entire frost area, so on and so forth. if you know what to do? it's the easiest and the quickest. easiest is subjective, of course, i personally think it's easiest, but it is factually the quickest, assuming you know how to do all 3 endings.
@@Choryrth One, you're simply wrong about being able to skip the frost area, because you literally need Harkyn's parasite from there. Two, you also need to fight the wraith trio which you wouldn't need to fight otherwise. Three, you can say it's "factually" quicker when you provide some clear times, because the quickest speed runs I've seen so far are roughly 3 hours for Radiant and Inferno and 4 hours for Umbral. Finally, if you want to have that definition of a secret ending, fine, but it such an obviously stupid definition that not I nor anyone else is going to use it. By that definition, literally any "secret" ending would no longer be secret the moment anybody made a TH-cam video about how to do it. The secrecy of an in-game objective should be measured relative to the game's content, not information available outside of the game.
It's very rare that I happen to disagree with you on matters of taste, Rata, but I suppose that it was bound to happen eventually-and that's fine! Everyone comes into a game looking for something a little different, after all. I'm enjoying the game quite a bit, myself, and none of the flaws that you've detailed (and honestly, all of them are entirely valid complaints) have had enough of a negative impact on my enjoyment of the game that I could see myself quitting. At the end of the day, I just feel bad that you didn't enjoy your time with the game as much as I am.
So how do u enjoy the game wit all those flaws u just decide to ignore it ? and because u supposedly ignoring it those flaws suddenly disappear ? it's not a matter of taste when it's plain facts everyone can agree on
So aimbot enemies that wait till you roll ends to attack you infinite farming glitches to reach high levels trivalizing the game ranged enemies with infinite vision and 50 enemies every 25ft is fun to you? Hate to see what kinks you have lol
Exactly, im not mad here. I just disagree mostly but his opinion is still super valid because the game is no where near perfect, shit lies of p is better by far. But its not at all like dark souls 2, thats a terrible comparison mostly.
This review is spot on. I'm enjoying the game but I agree with everything you said. I am enjoying all of the tie ins with the first game. They did more then I thought they would so it's easier for me to stay invested in the game.
I feel like one of the very few weirdos who disagrees, personally after beating it today it's easily become one of my favourite Souls-likes. I personally love the level design, exploration, interconnected world, combat, enemy types, Umbral, build variety, etc. While it absolutely has its faults like performance, being too easy and such, everything it does hits just right for me personally. It also helps that I'm also one of those weirdos who liked the OG LotF, and seeing a ton of lore, character stories and main events tie back to it in really meaningful ways honestly put a smile on my face and even got a few feels out of me at times. Felt like the game catered to me and what I want in a Souls-like almost every step of the way.
I hate being stuck in animations, I always feel like it's not my fault when I get hit cuz I could've moved but the animations didn't allow me, it's why I loved nioh2 combat, I always felt that if I got killed there it was totally my fault
Completely agreed, animation cancel should be a must in every souls game, or souls like rather, also the input itself lags sometimes ill press the button and nothing, then i press it again and the dude does it twice......
The spell system in lords of the fallen reminds me of the way magic vocations use their spells in Dragon's Dogma, you should give that game a shot if you haven't yet ;)
I didn't like the game tbh I hate it it aged bad btw amazing game as well I c why it was so good before when it released but like the game I don't like now
@@dijik123I played it for the first time last year. There are some things about it that I think it does best than any modern game: I like the psychotic level of customisation in character creation, allowing you to go adventuring as a wispy 10 year old boy or a seven foot tall muscular woman with shoulders large enough to intimidate a bear. The playable classes are also a ton of fun, and I love that you can respec at any moment with little to no cost. What I don't like is that the story is kinda eh
@@brodericksiz625 I don't like the save point tbh like the dark souls bonfire was like amazing it's so good tbh I want it in every games I don't want to manually save everytime
100% agree. If they made the mob density a bit less atrocious I would love this game. And no, it’s not just in the umbral world, it is everywhere, every corner, every champion enemy who used to be a boss with 2 archers that run away from you, 2 regular enemies, and just for shits and giggles, the fire crossbow bitch. It’s artificial difficulty and it feels like “Got ya! We are a soulslike- The game”
I'm glad you mentioned the sound! It was the first thing I noticed when watching your stream. This game is a good example of what happens when a lesser designer handles the sound, stuff just feels *off* (It also shows just how good Fromsoft sound design is). There's some good stuff in there but their sound designer definitely could have done better.
@@googleplaynow9608 If you want positives then the Umbral world is quite impressive, loved most everything there. I'd love to see the sword foley (listen to the opening cinematic), and particularly the foot steps reworked.
fully agree with everything and it was pretty much my exact experience one thing I would add is that the lantern mechanic also adds to the tediousness of the levels, you pretty much have to go through them twice for each world to get everything
I've completed it this today and beyond some fairly irritating issues, I enjoyed it a lot. - Some of the enemy design is straight up bullshit. That gets on my nerves. - Max of four fully upgraded weapons a playthrough. Ditto. - By far my biggest gripe - and when I first realised I didn't think it would be that bad - is the NG+ system regarding checkpoints. And its doing my nut in. It's really killing my enjoyment of the NG+ aspect hard and historically that's been my favourite element of the Soulslikes (obviously not limited to that "genre" but you know what I mean). However, I did enjoy it and I like that it follows Remnant 2 and rewards new classes to start new playthroughs with. I think that's a really neat touch. Overall, I'm a fan. But it's not been without points that have frustrated tbe fuck out of me. 😂
I always thought that fast combat doesn't mix terribly well with the original souls mechanics from Ds1. You need BIG adjustments to the formula to make it fun. In Ds3 and Bb it became a rithym game of roll and r1. Sekiro managed to do it by changing a lot of the mechanics like removing stamina and letting you cancel attacks and Elden Ring managed to do it by forcing you to use more mechanics like heavy attacks, running, jumping and other stuff during battles.
BB did well by having rally, aggressive enemies and things that encourage you to stick to enemies rather than back away. DS3 did well by encouraging successive well timed rolls in a number of boss fights (Dancer, Pontiff and NK coming to mind immediately). This just has very little of that, it's a hodge podge of mechanics that don't seem to form a cohesive whole to me.
Sekiro is just dance dance revolution the extreme edition lol you can stand in place and beat majority of the bosses that's shit design in itself as for the rhythm for ds3 and bloodborne it's a perfect dance of death that rewards you for focusing (same as sekiro)
@@fastenedcarrot9570nameless king not so much that forward slash attack they admitted they didn't program the hitbox properly and while his model swings forward the actual hidden box that causes damage to register is slightly delayed by like 1.5 seconds which is why people said he was so hard they were rolling in time with the model but they hadn't attacked the hitbox to it 😂
lol Elden Ring didn't really do all that well forcing people to use those mechanics though. The opposite is in fact the case. There are just _way_ too many overpowered weapons and ashes of war which let players spam boss disintegrating abilities nearly endlessly or allow the player to avoid or otherwise disregard mechanics that might otherwise instagib them. This ultimately makes it totally unnecessary for players to actually interact with difficult mechanics or learn patterns and develop strategies unless you intentionally handicap yourself by ignoring those (very numerous) options to avoid ruining your own good time. *I'm not hating.* ER is one of my favorite games of all time, not just for it's game play but for the unbelievable depth and density of it's narrative and world-building and everything else about it. I don't even fault it for the things I just brought up because I believe the whole wildly exceeds the sum of its parts. Regardless, this didn't detract from the fact that it was definitely way too easy to trivialize the game without really trying to. Also just to clarify I'm not a souls-veteran with years of experience with the franchise or with build crafting or anything, Sekiro was actually my very first foray into souls-like territory until the release of Elden Ring. ER is just highly exploitable.
FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT, after i beat Lies of P i was excited to play again! but just WATCHING people play Lords of the Fallen made me decide to wait for it to go on sale or after i finish the games i have already before i buy it, so after finishing my 2nd run of Lies of P and Excited to play the 3rd time, im on Spiderman 2 rn because it was more hype lol.
I love Lies of P big time, but LotF is also incredible. I'm not saying Ratatoskr is necessarily wrong in his analysis and I'm certainly not faulting him for his perception of the game, but you really should give it a shot for yourself and not let his take persuade you. This is one of the bigger problems I think gamers face today. They have no idea what they're truly missing out on because they allow the opinions and critiques of other people weigh to heavily on their opinion before they've even had the chance to form one for themselves in the first place. LotF is absolutely a great buy even at full price. *I swear* I'm not trying to play you, my friend! I am just genuinely concerned that I see so many of my fellow gamers being prematurely swayed away from what has turned out to be a spectacular release for the souls-like genre. I would seriously buy you this game if I could, I am that confident in my own assertions here.
Man this review is so accurate it's scary, like, it describes my exact feelings about the game with a gargantuan 90% hit rate (aside from the environments and magic mechanics in FROM games in general). Especially that forward momentum thing you described in LOTF23, it annoyed the hell of me during my playthrough. It was like I wasn't moving around but balleting during attack animations. Attack animations that lacked proper impact. Add low commitment to the attacks to this, and the combat feels worse than in the original LOTF, where I actually liked that clumsy, over encumbered, extremely weighty combat that many players actively hated back then. Another thing in LOTF23 combat that I find frustrating is this strange hit magnetism that affects both the player character and the mobs, where hit animations sometimes wind up far away (further than objective weapon reach of the combatants), but then the game almost teleports one of them (or both, depends on attack state of PC and mobs in question) closer to each other, and the hit lands with an unrealistic precision. I also suspect it ties up with extremely cheap tracking which enemies are utilizing. Yet another thing that bothers and frustrates me is inconsistent poise behavior after successfully landing a hit on smaller enemies. I understand that larger mobs, bosses, and maybe some inhuman/monstrous adversaries (plus unique, mini-boss-turned-mob enemies), in theory, can 'eat up' my hits without blinking an eye, it's (probably) fine. But even normal humanoid-sized mobs sometimes don't react to charged attacks at all, their attack animations cannot be interrupted no matter how much damage they suffer - all that while player character does have it all, it can be poise-broken with ease, and even with low attack commitment 'advantage' I can be as easily staggered when bunch of overly-poised (hmm, if that's even a word) mobs pile up & hit all at once. It's not the damage, or me being hit that annoys me there, but inconsistency of it. In fact, I can apply this term to the game as a whole, and it probably describes my overall feelings about it in general: LOTF23 just feels inconsistent in many ways. Sometimes it's beautiful, sometimes it's intriguing to explore, sometimes it's even fun to swing & slash, but many times it feels unfair (where it shouldn't be), boring, and tedious. The areas feel more like decorated combat arenas rather than lived up places once corrupted by ill presence and now withering away, decaying into pitiful mess. It all really lacks a clear vision as a project, and after all it feels inconsistent as a soulslike in many aspects. I had extremely high hopes about it, I believed the game would scratch the itch in the best way possible. The trailers looked fantastic, the anticipation was huge, first reviews lent me faith in it... but then I tried it myself, and felt disappointed in its combat feel. Again, the game is brutally beautiful, I absolutely dig its design & artistic strengths, but the combat is so underwhelming to me, it hurts. Such a heartbreaking letdown, indeed. Suddenly, the wait for the game is over, yet I play it in very short sessions, and I'm not feeling like enjoying it, thus not feeling like returning to it more often, mournfully.
The point about not restricting level design to the narrow physical space, but also to encompas enemy encounters, and the way these incentivize or thwart exploration, was masterfully made. Finished the game twice, and found myself in wholehearted agreement with your well-thought takedown.
I always thought the “skill” on a catalyst in ER could be “multi spell”. You hold down L2 like you would on the moonveil, but then you hit a,b, square, R1, whatever spell was attached to that button. Been wishing for that for a year.
This is almost literally how it works in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. You hold R2 and then press one of the face buttons (square, triangle, circle, X or A, B, X, Y) and cast the associated spell. And by pressing L2 while holding R2, you can swap to another set of 4 spells, for a total of 8. Your weapons also have skills that work the same way, just with R1, and with the number of skills dictated by the weapon's rarity (one for 1*, two for 2*, and so on up to 6*), but it makes for a pretty smooth system. That said, I personally prefer Nioh 2's approach, where your spells, consumables, and whatnot were assigned to the D-pad, so it was a single button press to cast a spell, throw a kunai, what have you. You could have up to 16 items hotkeyed to the D-pad, with sets of 4 swappable through R1 + left or right on the D-pad (changing weapons was R1 + down for melee and R1 + up for ranged). It takes a bit to get used to after Soulsborne's simplistic (and tedious) cycling, but it's an insanely convenient system in comparison (plus, you can assign a single item to multiple hotkeys, so you could assign your healing items to the same spot on all pages so that if you hit down on the D-pad, you're always going to heal, no matter what).
This is also how Code Vein does its Gifts system, it really should just be in FromSoft Souls games, it's very nice and made me actually want to try spells
4 year student of aikdo and have done some parrying in my day. Regarding the sound, ll i can say is that parrying is all based on timing and leverage and if you parry poorly, you have poorer leverage and will tent to require more effort and will thus make a louder sound. We were also told to listen to our techniques as well, because the noise in the technique was where there was wasted energy. So a louder parry is usually a sign of a weaker one.
Bah! Is this 4real? When a low kick sinks into the muscle and you can't hear the SLAP on the impact, it was a good one. As far as my combat experience goes, anyway 😂
I've done karate and I understand that the best parries are very smooth as you just guide someone's arm/leg in a different direction. But in a game you ultimately juse need a clear signal that you pressed a button in time of which the result doesn't really reflect reality either. Perhaps it's just that why I tend not to like parry mechanics that much unless they don't even pretend to be like actual parrying.
I‘m pretty much in the same boat. Good review. In regards to the environments, I think part of them looking so hideous might be because they are so „noisy“ - they are overstuffed with, well, stuff, and this visual oppression doesn’t give you any room to breathe in the environment.
Elden Ring has a similar amount of detail but it pays careful attention to where it allocates that detail, because most of the gameplay will comprise of fighting enemies that will occupy the upper half of your screen almost every vista you're treated is gonna have their visual interest points invested at that region. That way it doesn't tear your attention this and that way and keeps you focused on what matters. By contrast there's too much clutter going on in the bottom of half of Lord of the Fallen's environments.
I actually like moving forward for the most part, it helps you close distance. I like this game honestly, yeah it’s not the greatest, but it has earned my respect in one huge way, what you see is what you get in regards to armor and weapons
I enjoyed the game. The first half the game especially felt like a fight to earn ground. I really appreciated the balance between vestiage seeds, your mobile checkpoint, being rare to acquire, but seedbeds are rather common. This was the best way to handle that, as it allows you to really consider where you want to risk putting your one of your one or two seedbeds down. The Umbral really invoked a sense of dread, the audio design got more tense the longer you stayed there and the constant threats you push through only further added to that fighting for ground theory, desperately trying to find a vestiage or a way to return from umbral. I like it. The bosses in my opinion were hard to get into at first. Pieta and The Hushed Saint were my favourite fights in the game and I loved their designs so much. Took me several good attempts to finally beat both of them. Afterwards, when I got Fitzroy's sword, most bosses took me one attempt, some managing to make 2, the Spurned Progeny was the hardest, mostly because his final attack I didn't understand. But I enjoyed the bosses. Easy as they may be, I thought each was really well designed. I am saddened that some of the lesser bosses did become frequent enemies with less health, but it seems to be an issue entirely with the lack of enemy diversity. If they could add some and switch out the bosses, I'd be happy for that.
Yeah, the segment about levels is exactly why I ended up dropping the game. Maybe I'll come back to it at a later date, but once I got to a point at which I was mostly running past enemies instead of exploring levels carefully as I am wont to do, I wasn't having fun anymore. Bosses weren't exactly making up for it either. It's a shame, because there's a solid foundation here for the most part. If nothing else, this game did make me want to get Lies of P. But I decided I'd wait until that one's done with patches since I believe there's a roadmap for it.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. Although the bosses were rather easy, I did enjoy em quite a bit, though mostly by design/visuals. One example was the Hushed Saint, how the camera kinda shifts when he's about to attack you from behind after he sends his horse to distract you or how you can use your lantern to knock him off his horse with those root looking things nearby. I just think that was pretty cool. Most things are just well telegraphed, some of course were not so well done. I also didn't finish the game, I got to the very last area of the game and all the negatives you brought up is amplified by a fuck ton. I just straight up gave up since there were so many enemies and a lot of them were just the super strong ones, aka previously bosses. Sometimes you get like 3 or 4 of them in a room. I swear at some point it was even more. I did give that area a good solid few hours before calling it. The game does many things well but certain design choices really kills it. Respect/hats off to anyone who actually beat this game. At some point the frustration with dealing with the hordes and hordes of enemies becomes not worth it. Even just running past enemies was annoying cuz there was so much and they can end up blocking your way if you're not careful. The game overall wasn't the worse but not something I can really recommend to a souls fan exactly.
the last area of the gmae was miserable, i slogged through with a friend and we didnt pick up a single items for probably like 4 hours, the final "boss" is just ad clear, and the one before hat was horrible
@@GhostMan407 I salute you and your friend. Yea that area was the first time I just said Nope, I'm not doing this. It was unnecessarily long and a total maze. I got as far as getting the royal key and then unlocking like 5 different shortcuts back to an area I was just at making me wonder what was even the point of the shortcut. You save like maybe 20 seconds. I just got lost a lot. I didn't particularly want to look up a guide since if a game needs a guide in order to progress then maybe they should rethink their level design. Either that or I am just really bad at figuring out where to go, which was what most of the game was for me lol.
I am on ng+3 rn apparently I like to torture myself , the Bosses get way harder in ng+ that’s why I don’t understand most negative reviews ofc they are very easy in first playthrough i mean some of the later bosses took me like up to 4-5h but maybe that’s just me lmao , also after you got the royal key you might want to check a leaver that turns the steaks in the room to get further 🫡
@@Eliquis885 Definite respect to you for reaching NG+3, kudos bruv and thanks for the tip!. I don't think of the bosses being easy as a bad thing, I enjoyed them quite a bit as an overall experience, I would expect it to be harder as you go into NG+ and onwards. I was informed that in NG+ you don't actually have any vestiges and you have to just constantly put down your own and that seems to be a big complaint, so I'm curious on how you feel about that since you've gotten up to NG+3.
@@tomislol thank you , yeah you have no vestiges in ng+ only the seedling you put down and your hub vestige + the shrine of adyr vestige you are able to access , was a real pain to do the alternative ending haha hope they change that
I totally agree about the block/parry system in this and Lies of P. I think it's vastly superior to how parrying works in most previous souls/soulslike games. I always liked challenging myself by trying to parry every enemy and boss in Elden Ring and other games, but it always felt too gimmicky to seem truly viable.
Parry is not done well in souls games. The only one that mastered it is Sekiro, and i think thats because of the way it works. Sekiro parry is low risk medium reward instead of very high risk high reward of other souls games. If you miss the parry you still block the attack. Missing one isnt a huge issue and if you miss too many you just loose momentum instead of loosing the fight. Souls parries trivializes the game if you are good at them but getting there is painful and not a good experience. Sekiro parries have the same thing mentioned in the video, they feel incredibly satisfying auditorially. It makes you want to get more of them and more and more. They are accessible and core part of the intended experience, not an afterthought mechanic
I think one of the things about fromsoft parrying is how you’re mostly using it on trash enemies that you’d kill in a couple hits anyways because it’s wildly inconsistent on what miniboss or boss enemies can be parried. LOTF and LoP implement it as a solid mechanic against everything so you’re not always guessing and both reward doing it repeatedly to get the hang of it, instead of a one and done “you can now riposte” which feels cheesy to certain enemies like black knights or havel.
@@kylele23 That's true but they have gradually increased its viability with newer games ever since DS1. In DS1 the only boss you could parry is Gwyn, but in Elden Ring, for example, you can parry against the majority of bosses and it usually takes several parries to fully stagger them. I think the logical direction they are going in should result in a system like LoP or LoTF has.
I started off not particularly enjoying LotF so much.. for a lot of the reasons as you mentioned... but then I found as I moved on from the earlier areas, I started to enjoy the game more and more.. I ended up having a really good time with it. My biggest gripe is that areas tend to stick to one colour palete and they feel samey.. you don't get this sense of marvel around the corner (which doesn't need to be every corner..) Still, I really enjoyed it and it's a worthy Soulslike for me.
Like DS2, this is definitely a game that is an acquired taste. It does get better the more you play it. And then suddenly you find you actually love it.
I don’t care about the Lord of the Fallen. In fact I’m tired of these high derivative games. Yet, this just sounds like a “it doesn’t feel like a FromSoftware therefore is bad” typical nonsense. So tired of this community. Make it very close to FromSoftware: “copycat”, brings its on twist “the developers don’t understand what they are doing unlike my personal god Miyazaki”. Let these games be themselves for crying out loud.
Yeah, some people should broaden their horizons and try other games outside of Fromsoftware titles. I personally think 2D metroidvania's will always be better than 3D metroidvania(what souls games claim to be).
i’m playing though dark souls 2, and I’ve just gotten through iron keep and shrine of amana. the latter especially was some of the only time that i skipped enemies entirely and just ran past them. i also did it in the last hallway before the boss in undead crypt admittedly
Yeah, I also had a problem with how the game looks. It's very grim with a muted palette. Forsaken Fen was genuinely hard for me to navigate, especially when Umbral paints everything in a blue hue. The enemy encounters are absurd and relentless. It leads to a game with very few opportunities for respite. As weak as the mobs are, you're still taking two hits or more to clear them out. It's an investment in time and resources just to make the smallest of gains.
The hell are you on about?! There are umbral flowerbeds everywhere and entering umbral is basically a full heal. Sounds like your refusal to understand the game's mechanics has led to your own downfall. When you use the flowerbeds, there are more "checkpoints" than in fromsoft's games...
I wouldn't say it's bad. It has its problems, yes. But it does a lot more right than it does wrong and it's a blast to play. I've been having some fun with it!
I have a theory as to what caused the insane enemy density. I'm guessing that once they were near the end of development and started playtesting, it turned out that the game was super easy, with playtesters breezing through everything. There was not enough time to rework combat system or bosses so, to artifically inflate the difficulty, they just doubled/tripled the number of enemies and/or increased their health. If that's the case, I really hope that they have the original encounters setup saved somewhere and will release it in some patch as an alternative game mode, maybe then I could actually be bothered to finish the game. While soulslikes are typically known for their difficulty, they can also occasionally serve as a power fantasy. In fact, I would argue that some of them (ekhm, Steelrising) were even remotely playable only thanks to being easy, as otherwise all the jank would be insanely fustrating.
But if they want to reduce the enemy count they need to rebalance the combat to be weightier and more meaningful or it really will be too easy, then they also need areas that are actually interesting to explore and look at, and perhaps other types of gameplay such as the souls patented "falling onto weird stuff which ends up being a secret pathway," not to mention more interesting enemies and more enemy variety, and just generally more interesting encounters rather than presenting to the player the same exact experience over and over... and I don't see any of that happening.
@@I-ONLY-BUILD-MECHS-AND-DUSTERS that can't be done, cause "weightier" means slowing down the movement, the attack and the commitment (where you can't dodge a bit after attacking) it's like reworking the whole game at that point, the ones that did like the fast edit will complain
EXACTLY THIS. The game is UNFINISHED. There are broken animations, even the parry sound was non-existent before release. Loading screen when resting? Fairly confident that's not an intended design. So to save face, they are making an excuse of "this is our vision" when in fact the game is just plain unfinished. Enemies are slow and easy, but instead of maybe tweaking their attack speed and aggression, they instead spammed their numbers. I guess clicking one's mouse on the map to define a spawn point is far faster and easier than tweaking enemies. Another very obvious indicators are the bosses. They had a band-aid solution for the common trash mobs, but reworking bosses to be faster or more aggressive required more work, so a lot of the bosses can LITERALLY be 1-tried, while in the overworld, you're guaranteed to die atleast once in each area between vestiges. And the patches? These were obviously already in the works way back before the game released. Of course, before you release a patch, there needs to be some form of QA behind it, and now they're releasing it in trickle to make it look like they are hustling. I mean sure, they ARE hustling, but not to the extent these fanbois are thinking. They were already there, ready to be released, they just needed to test them before they released, and it just so happened the QA phase finished AFTER the game launched. Kudos to developers though, they were able to hide it very well. But unfinished it plainly unfinished.
I don't think I have ever tried so hard to like I game as I did with LOTF. What really sealed the deal and made me sour on this game to the point of quitting, was having my level 60 something character be bugged out and sent back to nearly the very beginning of the game after countless hours of play. I understand that they have put in a new patch and added ways for people to gain their levels back, but it is honestly just too little and not the change needed. This game is sort of like a smoothie made out of bits and pieces of chopped off limbs and body parts of other souls games, then once blended it was put into a fishbowl with a label slapped onto it that said "SOULS GAME". LOTF is like the person who is just trying too hard all of the time and everyone knows it, but everyone also doesn't want to confront them and state that.
i bought both lies of p and lords of the fallen the day of release, and have 100 hours on lies of p and 40 on lords of the fallen. i beat lies of p once, and intend to beat lords of the fallen. i am lvl 105 and have about two beacons left. for background, ive played nearly every fromsoft titles, primarily dark souls 3 and elden ring. i can say that out of the two, currently lies of p has provided me with the higher quality soulslike experience. i like the world of lords of the fallen more, its big, interconnected and it does feel like its had thought put behind it. but there are many things lackluster about lords of the fallen. - its a shame that the first 15 enemies you encounter in a few levels are the same enemies you will be encountering throughout the rest of the game, just inconveniently placed in the worst spots with either limitless range or umbral parasites that are impossible to get rid of because you are constantly being attacked every second. - i would be lying if i said that i havent occasionally got sent off the edge of a cliff because of the fast weapon attack speed, there should either be cliff protection or reduced swing distance. - the maps feel empty and useless, most of them dont show you 95% of the area, with the exception of a couple that show you which trail to take to get to a beacon that was mildly helpful. - im actually kind of glad the bosses werent over the top difficult because id feel like to accomplish that each one would spam aoe's or some bs. i didnt really dislike that they were easy, i disliked that they felt easy because they werent all neatly designed (looking at you hollowed crow). like iudex from ds3 is objectively not difficult, but if you dont know the mechanics of him or your own character he will be difficult. theres a learning curve. lotf doesnt really feel like it has a learning curve. you can exploit bosses really easily and sometimes not even intentionally. too many bosses summon dogs to make the fight more of a slog, not to be more difficult. - yeah the performance issues really arent justifiable but im glad they are working double time to take care of them - some levels genuinely feel like a maze and make me go insane. same mobs, same tunnels same stuff, bleh. - assisted suicide has better co op functionality than lotf multiplayer. overall, ive spent more of my gameplay in lotf being frustrated at bugs, poor functionality or outright bullshit. i dont have that much time to play games in general so i dont really feel bothered to spend what time i do have slogging through bullshit. souls titles and lies of p had a lot of frustration, but at the end it felt worth it going through that because they had something exciting and conclusive to offer. lords of the fallen just teases and edges me all the time, its like using a fleshlight with no holes. also heard ng+ doesnt have vestiges, wtf?
@@Tackitt i am on pc, so i can only say for pc. when co op functions, its pretty decent. summoning a friend is your best bet, its the most seamless. a lot of people complain that you cant pick up quest or boss items as a non-host, but imo you shouldnt really be able to. randomly however, sometimes it will take up to 45 minutes just to summon one person, either for them to leave or disconnect. invaders will either disconnect or be way too overleveled and one shot you. invading yourself either disconnects you or its super laggy. on paper its not a bad system, its just bug infested and feels unfinished. seems to be an unfortunate habit for this game
@@zzenqi34 I'm on pc as well. I'd mostly be playing with the wife, maybe a friend if I can find one to run through it. The boss/quest item thing isn't a big deal since I'm used to it with Souls. But doing each level twice sounds potentially tedious in this. I appreciate your feedback.
So everything you described actually really sold the game for me. I don't think you're wrong about what you said, I just am not a roomba player, and I've been missing ds1 world design ever since I played it. The only thing I am still wondering is how the story is for the game.
I’ve got some solid hours in, and can honestly say if you enjoyed ds 1 you’ll like this game as you can definitely see it’s influence on world design. The story so far is decent enough it’s somewhat of a generic dark fantasy theme but it’s kept my attention. On ps5 I haven’t had any game breaking bugs only a few textures not loading properly here or there but I play offline so idk if multiplayer adds to the bugs. Overall I’d say the game is a solid 8/10 for me.
trust me, it doesn't reach DS1 world design. its better than more recent fromsoft games (so decent), but its not ds1. the interconnectivity within individual areas is actually really good, like the shortcut design can be very cool (though sometimes useless). the interconnectivity BETWEEN those areas exists, however its next to useless since you can just fast travel most places anyway. its like DS1's interconnectivity post-lordvessel. it sometimes matters since you cant fast travel everywhere, but very rarely.
What's the appeal of DS1 world design if you aren't someone who enjoys exploring the areas' nooks and crannies? Or do you just like the sound of a game's levels connecting to each other and find it worth being impressed by that alone? It still isn't like DS1 in that regard, and concerning level design or just about anything there was nothing said in this review that gives off the impression that LotF is anything like DS1, which it isn't. There's maybe 20-25 enemy types tops too if you include all the enemies that have shown up as minibosses.
LotF doesn't need the same high commitment as other soulslikes, you need to keep in mind that LotF throws way more enemies at you. You should see it more as an action RPG with soulslike elements. If attacking and dodging were as high commitment as Dark Souls it would just not be balanced around all the waves of enemies you're constantly dealing with.
That is true but I think the point he's making is that it would be more enjoyable if the attacks were higher commitment and also there were less enemies.
Good review, just finished the game and I share almost all the feelings you have on the game. The lasts bosses are not worth enduring the pain of the last zones which are overwhelmed with too many mobs and especially previous bosses mobs. I enjoyed the journey but not enough to try NG+ or see the other ends.
I have been ground down to that conclusion as well. I’m a radiance build with 70 radiance. My best spells are hitting for over two-thousand damage and that isn’t enough to bring down a freaking rhogar witch. The amount of damage these enemies can do on top of how much health they have, is ridiculous. I had to stop and take a break. It’s worse than DS2 in this regard.
What's worst is that the extra classes are locked behind the endings smh. I don't think im even half way through the game and I stopped because i was getting frustrated with enemy placements. This is the second game I regret buying this year.
@@DWN-024ShadowMan I don’t think enemy placement is too bad, it’s the fact that once you get to the end game, virtually every single enemy has a strong ranged attack. Witch? Barrages of fireballs and aoe spam. Proselytes? Fire-spike barrages that shred half your health bar in just one volley. Even the zombies shoot fireballs that tear off a third of your health bar, and they are everywhere. Bramis Castle was the first rage quit I had during the entire game. It’s bs.
Id give this game another chance after 1.5 patch. Enemy density among other things have been re-tuned and it feels pretty manageable for the most part imo and I could explore a good deal of the areas like in other souls type games when I played recently. Especially since every build has good range options and the games designed around that. Id keep going just for Judge Cleric if you didnt get to her. Shes a From quality boss imo. Speaking of apparently bosses got moves added that some were missing and were made all around stronger but most are still not too tough. Game still has rough patches like enemy variety being sparse a lot of the time, reuse of minor bosses way too liberally, the way umbral works can still be a ganky mess, vestige seed system is still kind of nonsense, and the interconnected world isnt really beneficial like in DS1 because fast travel is unlimited from the getgo. But I still kinda dig it. I wasnt for the first like 10 hours similar to you but suddenly I couldnt stop playing it was odd but yeah its aight Lies of P was better but this is still worthwhile on like a sale.
I go back and forth between liking this game and just being disappointed. Everything you’ve said is what I said when I was streaming it and I got so much hate for it. And there were TH-camrs that I enjoy watching who shilled for this so hard. I feel like I’m wasting my time and energy trying to get through it
You've actually sold me to look more into this game and prolly get it when a sale hits. As you explained it sounds like it plays like Remnant 1/2 but your melee now
I am normally a quite picky gamer, im not gonna play a game that i dont enjoy just to play it and this game sure does have its problems and ive gotten frustrated at times but i am still enjoying the game. I just cant decide if i rly like the game or if its insanely mid.
Disagree for most of your negatives here. Especially when you said something along the lines of: "Good level design isn't supposed to make you want to run through the levels and not explore" The level design in Lord of the Fallen creating a decision for the player to either try and clear an area or explore while actively on the run is a super novel design that I am very much happy mad it into a souls-like game. The garbage enemies building up creating a pressure for you to keep moving helps take the more boring methodical edge that is so typical of souls-likes and puts the player in more situations to make split decisions. This situation is suuuper rewarding for a souls-like veteran because we aren't spending time panicing to figure out controls, we are really just gaging what fights we think we want to take, and what we would rather ignore. At the risk of missing items or secrets no less. It is a very compelling premise, one that I hope makes it into many more souls-likes!
It is so ****** TEDIOUS to explore and kill all the enemies, again again and again... I completely agree with you there. Pieta's sword that you get is a pure faith short sword with reach of a zweihander. Most of the time I ended up out DPSing a boss or enemies because of how fast I can swing and how much damage I can put out in such a short window. I restated into a quality build (40/40) and since the game gives me ranged options and so many ammunition bags & pouches, I just end up using my flying Mjolnir of a hammer to kill everything because it does 1k damage. What is the point of engaging in close combat with a giant sword, when I can spam ranged weapons endlessly ? And I have to use ranged weapons to deal with absurd amount of enemies to not get overwhelmed.
Agree, I want to explore, loot all things, learn more about the lore and unlock secrets. I just get what I can, speed run the umbral area and get to the boss. repeat again and again
I cant say i agree with the takes on visual design as well as the level design. I do think attack speed could probably slow down. The boss fights in my playthrough were fairly difficult enough but speeding up heavy weapons can somewhat make light weapons and daggers obsolete by comparison. One thing that i didnt see mentioned in other people’s vids/reviews was some of the voice acting being a little sub-par (at least for the characters i’ve seen thus far). I think Pieta’s voice acting (not the actress herself) is pretty weak. I dont think the slightly European but mostly american-ized accent really pulls me out of the game. I wish that they went in a different direction or spent more time for her character considering shes basically our ‘firekeeper’ npc that we likely interact with the most. Nonetheless i respect ratatoskr’s opinion on the game even if i disagree in a few areas. Keep up the detailed reviews and great vids!
Actually one of the things I disliked the most about Lords of the Fallen is that there is a particular boss in the game that is a straight rip off of the Twin Princes Fight from DS3. Sure the mechanics of the fight are different but from the boss room, to the intro cutscene, to the mage/knight duo setup, to the second merging phase, to the second phase's cutscene EVERYTHING felt the same from an aesthetic point of view. The boss design barely feels inspired and borders on plagiarism.
All excellent points. Actually, my main beef is disorientation. I get lost constantly and the cluttered environments and enemy density/frequency makes it hard to get my bearings again. Will try it again in a few months when they’ve had time to implement all the player feedback.
I am playing it at the moment and I am enjoying it. Really appreciate the fact that it's not trying to be a Dark Souls/Elden Ring while having similarities.
Interesting idea with the spellswapping only thing that would be weird when it comes to implementing that sort of system in elden ring would be how it interacts with charged spells.
Yeah idk why they insisted on this, even if you get successful parries you still receive wither damage. It’s really dumb. It’s why Dark Souls is super popular to begin with, they don’t really care how you approach combat, everything is valid. No idea why LotF insists on punishing players that want to use a shield for safety on their first play-through.
"I'm a cautious, roomba-like player..." is the most perfect way of explaining what I like about the typical souls-like genre's balance of combat then exploration.
This is also why I recently tried Remnant 2 excited about a shooter Soulslike, and absolutely did not enjoy it (no hate if you love the game). I didn't realize just how much I value the slow, exploration-based atmosphere of Souls games until I was being bombarded by a new horde ever few minutes with a music cue.
sometimes combat then watching horse hiney, is what it is, for the major part. Genre's fine imho. I love traversing, the risk and adventure, horses and mountain goats too! ( *pat pat* Torrencik, I'd call u Roach if I could, although still wouldn't feed you, ngl)
@@nicknagy8903 I enjoyed it for the opposite reason, it actively encourages more active and aggressive play. It also has a wide assortment of guns and abilities enabling quite a bit of replayability in between in randomly generated worlds. There's also something satisfying to seeing a Soulslike big man with sword character getting gunned down by a well timed shotgun blast.
@nicknagy8903 please keep trying it it's soo good 😢 what difficulty?
@@nicknagy8903 funny that you mention remnant 2, because personally first hours of LoF feels like that so i refund it because putting melee oriented combat with enemy density of remnant 2 it's just not fun for me.
They actually added the parry sound just before launch. Originally there was no sound at all and it was one of the biggest complaints from reviewers when they got their hands on it for first impressions. So it was a literal after thought.
Sounds like Devs have no idea what they are doing
7 patches later with nothing fixed to show, this statement is truer than ever@@Akrioz
@@Akrioz some people were using it as a reason to praise the devs for their response time on player feedback. Instead of recognizing they were serving as free play testers.
What? The devs of the game weren't finished until before the game released?! Crazy...🤡🤡🤡
@Akrioz so whens your top tier game coming out
"I am a cautious, Roomba-like player, that goes around in small semi-circles until I'm sure that I've explored everything in the environment"
HE'S JUST LIKE ME FR
Me three!
that’s funny cuz on streams he was sprinting everywhere and asking chat for directions every 5 minutes
@@fulltimeslackerii8229 No, he was not asking chat for directions. He ONLY did that at the end of the very last stream when he was getting fed up with the game not really telling him a direction of where to go. He has ALWAYS been telling the chat to NOT give him any advice, and that has been the standard when he is playing a new game.
Clearly you haven't been watching his steams, and I can prove I was there because you can find my comments in his chat.
And he's right. This game really seems like it disincentives that play style. I consistently find myself sprinting around and cleaving my way through large groups of enemies before I'm like, "Damn, I should probably look around at least a little bit..."
@@fulltimeslackerii8229 don't you think that's because of the design of this particular game? that's exactly his point, this game makes you tired of having to clear everything, so you end up running around avoiding that because it's so exhausting.
I found that the mechanics of souls games always incentivized methodically clearing an area on the first time you enter it, and then ignoring the enemies on subsequent runs through the area.
I personally still fight most of the enemies on subsequent runs, or even all of them in certain ones. I still go through (almost) every nook and cranny and pick up all the loot. I don't know, it's still just really fun to do for me.
I never ignore enemies😂. I’m the guy that gets ALL the souls 😂
Oh yeah I am all up in every crevice the first time but afterwards you learn what you can and can't skip. One thing I kinda lost with elden ring was that drive to see it all though. It was amazing the first time but its so spread out and the maps so big I skip everything I can lol
@@Marco1995MegaEven in Elden Ring?? I mean if you say legacy dungeons I could understand. But every time? That is cap.
@@OD91MJ I don't do everything in the open world, though I still do a lot, including the more interesting (and build-necessary) side dungeons. I still do all the major and legacy dungeons and all the underground areas (most of the time).
10:25 I feel like this adds to why I keep getting lost too. Not only does the large amount of ganks discourage exploration, it doesn't give me much breathing room to stop and orient my surroundings to know where I am, I have to pay attention to the 4 enemies in front of me and 3 enemies on my back. And I'm talking about Axiom not the umbral world either
There shouldn't be enemies behind you unless you are in Umbral or you didn't clear enemies behind you in the living world. The Umbral world is the land of the dead, spirits walk around everywhere after they die, you are not supposed to stay long in Umbral, the less the better, unless you are farming. Enemies can pop up all around you in Umbral, one of the ways they made the area feel more dangerous. I've played through almost the whole game and only encountered one area in the Pilgrims Perch that had a badly placed sniper caster behind you. Most of the time they are in front of you and can be easily dodged or singled out.
@@Halfshanksit's not fun being swarmed, especially if I'm trying to clear for exploration, there's to many paths with endless enemies and you stop caring to clear them after a while. That's why there's enemies behind, especially if you are in umbral, and can't get out. It's not good design, don't trick yourself into liking constant ganking and spawning enemies. There's good ways to have loads of enemies and not feel overwhelmed, and feel hopeless in clearing. Bloodborne has swamrs of enemies, but they usually aren't one that can't be taken out easily. Most of the trash mobs, will be 2-3 hits, while there's ranged enemies, and dogs, and spear guys, and the shield and sword guys who take much more to fight. I like to aggro small enemies and take them out, but for some reason that's not easily possible. I'll always aggro tons of enemies
@@Halfshanks The game relies too much on ambushes AND ganks. You find yourself peeking around corners, adding yet another layer of distraction. We should get lost in the levels because of the map's physical design, not because the developers decided that cheap tactics = challenging. How is it challengin and "tactical" to awkward angle your camera around corners every 5-10 steps to check for ambushes? I mean the Umbral, understandable (despite the GUARANTEED ambush), but for Axiom it's not. Re-design the enemies, don't make them hit harder than a fully-armoured, dual-wielding clad with their flimsy attacks. Don't make them able to lock on you double your lock-on range.
And if that wasn't enough, they further discourage exploration by having monsters able to pull you from Umbral. These ambushes are straight up BS especially in the latter parts of the game because they are the hardest to avoid. Sure, when it's the 2nd time, but you're either guaranteed to get hit (which is something YOU MUST avoid due to the limited heals and overtuned damage of enemies), or killed. There's absolutely no way to check beforehand compared to being able to check for ambushes in Axiom, as there may be some random things in Umbral and even if you try to scan in advance, if you are unlucky, it just so happens the Umbral assassins were standing near you.
Basically, you're running past enemies BEFORE the 2nd encounter, when you find it's the ridiculous combination of ambushes in choke spots while being chased by a small platoon lead by an elite, supported by unrendered spellcasters/archers.
@@yvannenikolainethercott5709Sounds like a skill issue
Have you considered gitting gud?
Holy damn he jist gets straight into it. No into, no preface, just immediate "this is wussup". I can dig tf outta that.
welcome to the family
Kept me watching the whole video. Was expecting to just skip through it to get to the actual critiques, but he started it Frame 1. Very cool.
yeah I automatically subscribed tbh, just now 4 hrs of your post
Ya, it was cool. He usually ALWAYS prefaces the video a little bit, so this instant review took me off guard for a second lol.
its bc hes mad cuz bad
I will always defend Code Vein's controls for spell casting the same way that Lords does it because it's so simple and perfect that it should be standard for souls spell casting.
Code vein was freaking awesome. The combat was pretty good.
Code Vein enjoyers unite!
Waiting for sequel as well@@ProxyDeath2210
@@nephorium6160 Heyyaaa!
I wish more of these types of games would take a cue from Code Vein and give you a way to recover MP/magic use outside of just using a potion/consumable. While you couldn't be a "pure mage" in Code Vein, you could still have a functionally infinite amount of spell casts so long as you were attacking the enemy.
The ammo guage being used for throwables instead of the amount in your inventory is great. Also, 100% agree with the spell casting choice hear. Phenomenal approach.
Always enjoy your critiques Ratatoskr. However, I'm NOT unsubscribing. I will however, post something spicy in my comment:
Habanero
It's a meh change that's borderline necessary due to ganks and annoying bosses imo
The consequence of the ammunition gauge is that there is no way to balance the usage of throwable items with scarcity. The moment you find a really powerful item, your only limit are your ammo pouches, which you should never run out of. Magic has the same issue, mana regen is too easy, yes the convenience of having each spell mapped to a button is great, but not only are spells strong, your mana is pretty much limitless.
@@TheHeartThatRunsCold So many people are abusing some throwable hammers because of this lol
@@TheHeartThatRunsCold I think if you made ammo pouches similar to the standard souls health flask (you can only get a few charges of it, it only replenishes at checkpoints) then it would work well. I like the idea of a throwables being simple to manage. Just equip one, and it pulls from a universal ammo pool. I didn't realize ammo pouches are very prevalent as I'm not super far in, so I could see that being easily abused. I haven't toyed too much with magic yet, so I'm not actually aware of how mana regenerates.
@@TheHeartThatRunsCold Just limit the amount of ammo bag per bonfire like ds3 and er did with ammunition
I sold my copy and bought Lies of P… I’m EXTREMELY satisfied with my choice.
Probably one of the best gaming decisions you have ever made
Lies of dog sht
its free on gamespass give it another try I think it's great I played through twice and Lies of p once. I played it after all the updates but its the best souls like that isnt made by team ninja (I don't count those as souls likes really they are more rooted in ninja gaiden)
As someone who likes Lords of the Fallen and also likes good, thoughtful reviews, this was great man. The points in which we agreed (wither/spells) I appreciated your articulation, and the points at which we diverge I can understand your perspective or recognize it being a subjective difference that was well-considered. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I too think his review is fair up until he just calls the game "bad" and wouldn't recommend it. Because the game is far from bad and is worth the money.
@@crankpatate3303 He clearly states why and I completely agree
After hyping up the game to be the next big thing and it's just not, many would be disappointed. If the combat, bosses and exploring is not fun, why bother? A hit-and-miss soulslike for me
Also, like most AAA titles, it has horrendous optimisation issues since launch.
This is it. I've never had one but I think this might be the game that is the answer to when someone asks me "is there a bad game that you really like?"
And it's not even that I actively found the overall experience to be bad or even subpar. I love the game and I've avoided looking at reviews for fear of spoilers, but it scratches that particular itch for the Dark Souls 1/Dragon's Dogma feeling that I've had for almost a decade that literally no other game has managed to scratch. I'm not done with the game either but I'm loving it. I feel insane reading the reviews because it feels like I'm missing something obvious, or that something is wrong with me.
Listening to your critique is like you're describing a completely different game. This is the first time I almost completely disagree with you, save for one or two points, and I've been subscribed for a good long while now.
Unfortunately for you, I have developed the ability to let someone on the internet be wrong. It took many, many ego deaths for me to unlock this ability. You have not alienated me and I will not be unsubscribing.
“unfortunately i’ve developed the ability to let someone on the internet be wrong…” sounds like ur egos shining through m8. he’s allowed to have differing opinions without being “wrong”. and you’re allowed to like a game that other people don’t like without you being wrong, more power to you! doesn’t mean anybody is “wrong”
Its mid
@@BurnInBlissIt was obviously a joke
I feel the exact same way mate. I'm 48 hours in and enjoying it greatly. Most of the things he brings up as part of what makes this game "bad" are things I enjoy greatly. It's a solid 8/10 for me.
@@BurnInBliss No no, he's definitely wrong and I'm right. I'm the protagonist of reality so that's the only logical conclusion.
For me, the death blow is the encounter design. In the mid game so many encounters boil down to a big mob of annoying enemies protected by a parasite that makes them invincible. Or half a dozen tanky enemies on a narrow ledge with smaller mobs who do their damndest to shove you into an abyss. Dealing with that in any reasonable way feels like cheese, so I just ran by them!
I figured out only a few hours in that the parasite mechanic would never actually be significantly more than what's shown in the tutorial. Same with the Umbral traversal/puzzles. Which is highly disappointing, it feels like a great idea squandered.
I personally found the hordes in DS3 to be more insufferable than DS2. Sometimes those hordes can get bad enough to lag the game pretty hard.
But Lords of the Fallen could've at least made some minor tweaks to appearance and add a move or two between variants to change it up a bit.
Glad I’m not the only one that noticed this. The game has two tests for general combat:
Mob surrounded by ranged enemies
And parasite powered enemies.
This never changes. You will be shown the same challenge in the first level as you will in the last
@@evanvdl1996 ranged enemies, protected by parasites so you can't just snipe them with spells.
@@Battleguild There are a few ridiculous ganks in DS3 but I can't imagine how they're worse than the ones in DS2 lmao. Shrine of Amana is goddamn awful.
I think the color scheme is simultaneously monochromatic and too much difference on the light-dark/saturated-desaturated scale. Elden ring and Dark souls uses a kind of desaturated, not agressively shaded style that’s just good to look at and makes truly colorfull places(like Liurnia) in them pop. Long story short its likely the lighting,the mist and color ballance
Yeah I’m not sure why the mist/haze is so thick
The coloring and lighting are much more cinematic in LotF than in Elden Ring, and I prefer the cinematic over the haziness of Elden Ring.
Haziness? I think Elden Ring chooses quite realistic color schemes. LotF looks desaturated to me, similar to how DS3 did.@@VexJinks
@@tinminator8905 I've played both, and I just don't see what you're seeing. LotF has higher contrast with the darks from the lights, creating deeper, richer tones. Elden Ring has that same greyish color filter plastered over it like its predecessors, as if the color was slightly faded (this is especially noticeable with the character models) If you haven't played the games, I'd recommend watching other videos, because even the other LotF vids, I notice the rich color palette.
They use UE5, and they are CAPABLE of making things look good. I remember being amazed the entrance to the Fen area, which was just vibrant with different colors, only to be dropped into a hole of shit and piss everywhere. They deliberately wanted to make their game look like shit (DS1) with the low poly washed out wooden platforms, mossy ass swamps, pitch black caves, not to mention they added the snowy area and the hell area. If you copy a game that came out a decade ago, it's going to look outdated, even with a shiny new engine
6:10 Its weird because the combat not being clunky and slow is actually something that seems very good for me
Edit:
I just finished the review and it is so funny that it actually gave me the courage to buy the game because I feel attracted to pretty much everything you say its bad
right? I felt the same.
I'm not gonna buy or play the game anytime soon tho,
Also interesting bc the first Lord's of the fallen from 2014 was criticized for how unreasonably slow it's combat was, to the point that half of the weapon classes were unusable.
But I think the point about commitment is spot on, the dodge roll after swing is comically fast and un committed
Same. (But the audio for the parry is pretty week)
I like this game precisely because it's fast. That's the best part about it for me when comparing to others in this genre.
@@NibbleSnarphGiven how often you fight multiple enemies at once more animation lock would be brutal.
The problem with holding the spell catalyst's button to bring up a menu is that this means you can't hold down that button to charge spells or maintain channeling spells, which is a big part of Elden Ring spell casting. You could make the menu work but you can't have the cycling spells on a tap and the menu spells on a hold without losing that.
Just add it as one of the 2-handed features, so we can still have charging but also hotkeys for full mages
@@pinip_f_werty1382 wrong, they have charged spells in this game.
you can just hold down the spell specific button instead, its literally how soul-flaying works.
And what about just holding up to bring a selection wheel? Tap up to scroll in between spells or hold up to bring a small radial selection wheel with your equipped spells...That would work better IMO
there are literally spells that require channeling and it works perfectly ... i rly dont know wdf u fromsoft fanboys are hating about and clearly u dont know either
I’m having a good time with it. There have been some frustrations with the density of enemies (it gets crazier a little past where you are) but it does make me want to play one of the FromSoft games again. I am enjoying it, and I’ll most likely finish it, but right now it’s sitting at a solid 7.5/10 for me
I've almost beaten the game and it really doesn't get too bad at all unless you're spending too much time in Umbral.
I had heard about the number of enemies, so I got a pole arm with its INSANELY wide horizontal swings, and went radiance/inferno 50/50 umbral caster. Having tons of fun, the more enemies the better
My 4080 gave me solid 80+ fps with dlss on plus the drivers I never got crashes till the latest patch. I would give it a 8.5. But yes lots of enemies, but honestly I’ve been enthralled with this game more than Spider-Man.
@lindtlichr1005 I agree. It was pretty rough early but once you level up and work out the enemies it becomes fairly manageable except if you get stuck in Umbral.
once u get into ng plus the game is ruined and horrible, if they ever fix it it won't be horrible but until then ng plus turns this game from an 8/10 to a 1/10
FINALLY SOMEONE IS TALKING ABOUT HOW THIS GAME IS 35 HOURS OF SHRINE OF AMANA FROM SOTFS
It's not as bad as Shrine of Amana because you can turn off water in this game with the push of a button, which is the worst part of Amana
@@adrianeden8977Shrine of Amana looks nice though.
Amana couldn’t have been that bad
Lmao I kinda liked original shrine of amana before they nerfed it for all the complainers. Actually required skill to get through.
That's my favorite level and it's totally not a homing spell missile suckfest.
I’m glad you mentioned about the forward momentum. For me, that was one of the biggest annoyances I had. It seemed silly to have these tight narrow areas at the beginning of the game and yet have an R1 attack move the character the same distance as a locked on dash. Speaking of lock-on, they’ve also really got to address its accuracy. Auto lock priority should go to the nearest enemy to you not half way across the level.
Having said that, whilst it’s not the best game, there’s also charm to it that’s really got me hooked. Personally, I think it looks great, I like that it’s dark and gritty. And if you can get your timing and positioning right, the combat can be really satisfying.
Very much agree, I think all his points are valid and I agree with some of them (dear god there are so many enemies) but I love its style, systems, and world. The bosses are a snooze compared to the levels but I still find them enjoyable. I know its a bit janky, but I still like this game a lot.
Attack animation sliding is one of the great sins that Batman Arkham combat gave to the world.
I'm really loving this game. Adjusting to the way it plays compared to a more polished Fromsoft game, clicked for me almost immediately. It is so unbelievably flawed, but for some reason I adore it.
@@FearedFirebosses are not a snooze on ng+. If you want difficulty then go to the next play through and you’ll wish you didn’t.
@@KSabotit works well with the free flow combat in Arkham because you want to keep up the momentum of Batman’s combos, but it shouldn’t be used carelessly in other genres.
In this game I've taken up a playstyle of running as fast as I can to collect loot and shortcuts then inevitably die. Now I can go a bit further and run through my new shortcuts to continue sweeping while completely ignoring enemies and eventually find progress. The mob density is so great I feel forced to speedrun some really nice skyboxes and environments.
Try getting good. Pressing r1 a dozen times isn't hard...
@@googleplaynow9608Sounds like it’s less about difficulty and more about monotony.
@@googleplaynow9608The meat riding is crazy
@@googleplaynow9608”git gud, just spam a button” you are summarizing why everyone hates this game
Me personally Im in love with it. It matches the souls like aesthetics, has a neat new mechanic thats super fun, but its really brutal. The game punishes you really hard if your new to a specific location by making you level up otherwise taking like 90% of your HP. Its a very 'adjust to the combat and playstyle' game
yup, played every souls game and i think they did a great job.
This game is the actual child of Sekiro and Bloodborne, not LoP. LoP either feels like Demon’s Souls rather than anything else.
@@rohansensei5708 I played Sekiro, it's my favorite game of all time. Couldn't try out bloodborne yet because I don't have a Playstation but from what I've seen so far, I'll probably like it. Also played Lies of P, finished it within a few days, I like how the parrying feels.
I couldn't bring myself to play LotF for longer than the 2 hour refund window to get my money back. There's something about the game that makes me not like it that I cannot exactly put my finger on. The graphics, the low commitment combat, even the speed your character walks at or the way you turn around or even the camera movement, almost everything about this game looks or feels "off" in some way to me. I'm just not having fun playing this
@@rohansensei5708 True that! I haven't gotten around playing demon souls but it looks good
10:50 I think I know the issue. There’s too little contrast, but not just with color, but a combination of color and shading. Let me explain.
In the first game this was also a problem. Everything was really cluttered and looked too similar, plus everything was kind of the same tone. Dark colors, dark colors, dark colors, and if there was a “light color” it still wouldn’t pop. It would still feel like it was shaded somehow, and I honestly don’t understand how they managed to do that. This applies to this game too it seems, wherein everything just melds together, including enemies, and your character, and you just want to squint or stop looking at it because it’s sensory overload trying to decipher. Like looking at one of those AI images of things being combined but not identifiable.
For an example of “dark” with clarity and dark without clarity, go look at DS1 catacombs. Those areas are dark, but you never lack the ability to see if that makes sense. Everything is clean, even when slathered in grime, which goes with Miyazaki’s design apparatus of making even the most hideous of things seem “elegant”.
Then you look at LotF and are like . . . Oh, wow. This hurts.
This! Constantly while watching others play this, I was constantly missing being able to see. It was full of clutter, and the constant fog in most areas just blurred all the details. Like, I think turning down the graphics might ironically improve the visuals!
Honestly the game looks bland. Even the 2014 game looked bland.
I believe the word that best sums up how this game looks in the, er, bad to look at areas he has mentioned would be 'dismal'
It feels as though everything is being leached into this visual morass that might theoretically be quite vivid as a mixture but in practice ends up looking like that art class experiment where you mix all the paint colours together and get a kind of alien brown that is both uncomfortable and somehow boring
I had to crank contrast way down to even be able to see in the mines and the depths. Very very dark.
Great video! I wholeheartedly agree with the overall review. I just finished the game and while I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with lords of the fallen, it started to fall short for me at about the mid-end game.
The point about the enemy variety and the level design enemy encounters was spot on, this game loves to throw hordes of the same enemy types at you in every corner.
It got to the point where I was running past every enemy in Bramis Castle just so that I could see the end and re-roll my character on a new playthrough.
"I Thoroughly enjoyed the game and im re rolling a new character for a second playthrough, but i agree with this review that states the game is bad" - Human
He makes valid points, you can enjoy something but still criticize it. Instead of reacting to "It's bad" try watching the video first so you can engage with the points. @@Jack_Sparrow_85
@@Jack_Sparrow_85enjoying the game doesn't mean you can't find some design choices extremely annoying or want to try again because you like the things it did well more than you hate the things it did poorly.
You can also partially agree with a video review and still say the game isn't bad, - which this video obnoxiously states in it's title, as if it's an objective fact, and you clearly don't think it is, or you wouldn't be even considering a second playthrough.
I also agree with some of his points, but I think the title is unwarranted and unfair.@@Xstream24
In the video he mentions that his peers and big souls content creators were showering the game with praise. The title is a response to the positive feedback, also maybe clickbait? Regardless it's a far greater video on the merits and pitfalls on the games design than of any other review I've seen here on youtube.
As someone who liked this game I still feel that your criticisms are valid. As far as combat and enemy placements go I think the experience depends alot more on the build than it does in any other soulslike game.
I played on an inferno/pyromancer build, after a really tough early-game similar to what you described I started getting many tools for my build in the mid game and suddenly I could deal with every encounter pretty well. Strong melee weapon for 1v1s, AOE-Spell for crowds and range spell to snipe ranged enemies. Playing with a completed build like that it was very satisfying to clear areas methodically (though it felt more like outsmarting a troll level in mario maker rather than getting good in some scenarios).
I did the same thing and had the same feeling. I like the game, but helping my friend who is a str build has been a slog, the mob density is insane.
For a melee build you also have to use bombs. Just hacking away isn't going to cut it.
How's the build late game? Heard inferno is not very good late.
@@PepperoniPapaya
I can tell you that my radiance build is suffering. Even at 70 radiance, my Pieta sword, and my most powerful radiant spells, are taking at least 3+ hits to kill any enemy but the zombies. The zombies have ranged attacks and can basically kill me in about three hits, which sucks because there’s a ton of other ranged enemies that do massive fire damage. It’s an absolute slog. It’s worse than Shrine of Amana by a mile. Amana has nothing on the end game.
@@kolbywilliams7234 My Umbral caster build really shines there. There is an umbral spell that bounces from enemy to enemy that works really well on those fire zombies.
What is your most powerful radiant spell?
yeah this game is like a 6/10 for me just cuz they did improve from the first one but god getting through the areas is dreadful
Wither Damage is essentially like something that they've been doing in Fighting Games for a while now. That's an interesting adaptation. There it's mostly in tag fighters, where it incentivizes you tagging out the character as they will heal while not the point character.
Yeah exactly. It's pretty much chip damage.
Just completed Lords of the Fallen. Yes, it has some issues such as frame rate stutter and some frustrating, poorly designed enemy placement, but I genuinely enjoyed it. The game is one of the better souls -likes.
With a few more patches, I'd highly recommend it.
Why assume more patches = better.
@@ChernobylComedyAndWings Because patches usually fix issues and bugs in the game. Derp!
@@MrFox101 Many games receive years of updates that amount to nothing or make the overall experience worse for the sake of "balance" and other re74rd3d things.
Or just never get patched at all and become abandonware. These games should be finished from the get-go but now we live in the patch era and every dev wants to skip on countless hours of Q-A to sell you something entirely on its marketing.
people saying patches will make it better just reinforces this lazy practice, and we will continue to get unfinished crap.
@@ChernobylComedyAndWingsLord's of the fallen is already a lot better than it was at launch on stability and performance. Derp!
@@SanOcelotl good for you?
The game has the same problem Dark Souls 2 had at launch. It was too punishing and has way too many enemies that make the game tedious more than it should. For those who were around for the launch version of Dark Souls 2 and remember what it was like before it got patched to have less enemies you know what I mean.
Funny that they went back and then some with Scholar.
Laughs in elden ring
Maybe the devs of this game would care to make changes like that then, which would be really nice
@@fastenedcarrot9570A far superior version
The amount of umbral goons that spawn when your fighting a tougher enemy is what really urks me
I agree with you about the enemies. There are waaaaay too many. I like exploring and seeing the world and environment, but a lot of times I can’t cause there are so many enemies I have to take care of first. Also I umbral world is tough. You are forced to go there too much and again way too many enemies combined with the already too many in axiom. Wish there were more different enemies too. I constantly find myself running past groups cause it’s not worth spending time taking them all down.
Sounds like a skill issue...Oh, no. Did you have to hit r1 and r2 a dozen more times?! Umbral is supposed to be the hard mode of the game, where you are constantly being attacked...🤡🤡🤡
its not hard its tedious and boring, if you think 100 enemies with no health attacking you is hard then youre not very smart@@googleplaynow9608
Homie never played a souls game. Elden ring was exactly the same.
I agree there are too many enemies in Axiom but I think that was kinda the point in Umbral. Its supposed to be a scary experience and you want to spend as little time there as possible.
They are also scaled super high. I’m above level 100 and pilgrim perch enemies one shot me
Holy shit, this video is amazing man. 13 minutes, 28 seconds, no intro or outro unrelated to the review or the game you are reviewing, just straight into speaking about the game. The description of the game's content, your tone of voice, the realness of your feelings towards this product, the simplicity. It's funny how "barebones" this review is compared to all the big players in YT game review space while being leagues better in doing the things a review is supposed to do at the end of a day. Great job!
I'm very glad this review exists for the sake of my sanity. Before and after the game came out, I heard glowing reviews from all types of reviewers and players. I was very excited to play the game on release, but as soon as I booted up the game, I immediately felt a pit in my stomach because everything just felt off. As I played, I encountered moments of awe and enjoyment, but it never lasts. I looked to reviewers and the subreddit to see if anyone else has the same issues with the design and general "feel" of the game. I was disappointed to find that most people on the subreddit didn't seem to acknowledge the game's flaws.
I plan on finishing the game still, but it's just nice to see someone voice my critiques in a coherent manner.
I truly think it's something that takes time to get used to.
Also, I'm on the subeddit all the time and people complain like crazy. I don't get that point.
It's sad how common a subreddit doesn't acknowledge criticism of the game that the subreddit is about, and any discussion about it is thrown out the window
@@Nhileishere "It's sad how common a subreddit doesn't acknowledge criticism of the game that the subreddit is about, and any discussion about it is thrown out the window." Have any of you been on the subreddit, lmao.
@highdo2244 I just finished cleansing the 5 beacons. I actually have had a lot more fun playing the game. I think the level design and enemy density improved a lot. I hated the area attached to skyrest and the snow area. Imo they started players out in the worst places. Also now that I have a build online I feel like I can explore normally.
I fired up for the first time tonight (on PC RTX4070ti). Controller integration is really bad for me, as in either super sensitive or ignoring button presses. Tried to build a character and it crashed, restarted started the game and locked in the starting pool. Went Umbral to get out. Started the tutorial area and absolutely hated everything about how it controls. The camera is way to finicky, the jumping is silly. I'm not even sure I can be bothered to go back through the chore to actually start properly! The original Lords of The Fallen was OK, just way too easy, this new one is too finicky
Thank you. You’ve been able to voice things I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on. I’ve been watching streamers play and heard so much positive reviews, but nothing I watched got me interested to play at all. You’ve nailed many of the reasons. I’ll happily continue on with my upteenth playthrough of Lies of P.
1:1 the way it is for me
I liked lies of P but I still feel the game would be better with a more generous parry window, or some significant stamina costs reductions for parry/guard maybe idk
@@feircy No I do agree completely, it could be more rewarding or at least less costly if they're going to make the window so small, that's true
I like this more than Lies of P, but I enjoy them both.
@@feircy Just to clarify, you think the parry window in Lies of P is generous?
Pressing L1 + dpad for hotkey spellcasting would be major QoL for Elden Ring.
yeah it's a great idea
I am about 50 hours into the game and I'm loving it. I understand it's not for everyone but the thing that I really love the most is how big and interconnected the world is just like DS1 but bigger. It's cool seeing places that you've visited in the distance knowing that pretty much every landmark you see in the distance is a place you can go to.
Yeah bro the world is friggin huge
I'm having a great time .. not as hardcore as dark souls as far as difficulty but that's more of my style. I can explore, find some lore stuff and not get frustrated by overwhelming cheese from mobs
@@LegendRonkbut my dude, that s exactly what this game does, spamms mobs at you, are you sure you played this game?
@@zagaant7233He probably just adapted and used the tools the game gives you for dealing with multiple enemies at once. Frankly this complaint puzzles me every time I see it. It's pretty easy to deal with if you bother to learn how.
@@zagaant7233 It's honestly just not as bad as people like you are making it out to be. It's definitely a higher density of enemies than people are probably used to but you guys act like it's a never-ending parade of enemies, which is not the case unless in the Umbral, where the whole schtick and theme is _supposed to be_ that it's literally never safe.
my main issue with it is that for some reason my frame rate is so incredibly low and the animations are so incredibly choppy it sometimes gets me killed and even makes the game unplayable despite me playing on performance mode
Nah this game is pretty fucking cool man. Lots of people shitting on it, and it's got its problems, but similar to DS2--it doesn't deserve so much hate. This is a COOL game. I definitely disagree about the world, this is one of the best dark fantasy worlds I've seen and experienced. Combat is also very fun, with lots of mechanics and player agency, although it's not all perfectly polished. Bosses need a few more moves, they lack some complexity, but they're still pretty good outside of the gank fights. Speaking of ganks, that's probably the game's biggest issue. And it needs more enemy variety for such a huge world.
Yea the hate is bonkers, this dude rails about ambushes and ganks and in another video praises Lies of P even though LoP is the most gank/ambush happy soulslike ever made.
@@alexDD-j6e I like both Lords and Lies. Lords has the better world and is the better RPG, Lies is tighter and more polished with better bosses. Both games are good.
Really interesting upload. Your points on combat are very well explained. I absolutely love Lies of P. I am still likely gonna pick up Lords of the fallen but on sale and way down the line when its all patched up. It just does not look like my thing. I hate the speed of it. I like my souls styles heavier and slower. That said I am curious about it and it seems like it will be a good filler title when I crave more souls style stuff. Anyway I digress. Keep up the great content dude.
This might be wild but this is my first ever souls like game I’ve ever played and I absolutely love it, sure the performance isn’t the greatest and that alone should be enough to diss on the game especially these days when devs release half baked games but idk I’m just really loving the gameplay. I enjoy the fast paced combat as well, not sure how it differs from actual from soft games cause again I’ve never played it. I would definitely wait a while tho cause there is a lot of frame drops that go on.(I’m on Xbox) but all in all I’m enjoying very thoroughly. I do have a feeling tho that the more I play the easier it will get. And I don’t mean by just being higher level but just figuring out parries and what not. That’s one thing I’ll agree is it’s probably easier than other souls likes
just pick up all the fromsoft games before even thinking about this shit fr they are all better (ok maybe not demons souls or dark souls2) but yea these copycats dont even come close at all
You should go ahead and get it. It's a really good game. Don't let critics effect your perception. If you do, you _will_ end up skipping tons of really good releases just because of what amounts to nit picking.
Reviewers and critics obsessively overly fixate on things, especially negatives, and over time due to the nature of hyper-comparative analysis they develop these boxes they end up putting every game in and in doing so they end up letting those things ruin their experience unnecessarily.
I'm not even saying their critiques are necessarily wrong or invalid, that's not the point I'm trying to make.
I love reviewers, and I have a small, curated list of them that I watch consistently (like Ratatoskr, I genuinely love this dude and his takes despite regularly disagreeing with him, same with ShillUp and Austin) (though I also wouldn't necessarily call Ratatoskr a dedicated reviewer but he does do reviews obviously), but I have learned over the years as a life-long hardcore gaming enthusiast that if you look at games from the perspective of critics (or really of any one other than yourself) then you will absolutely end up screwing yourself out of good experiences.
This game has flaws, as any game does, but overall it's a fantastic experience and one of the best additions to the souls-like genre to date.
Definitely wait for sales if you're unsure. The game has a lot of good things going for it, followed by mildly to extremely frustrating approaaches to certain things. If you're sure you want to play the game though go ahead, I think it's worth it.
Wait a week or two, till they fix most of the things, at least I hope they do, because right now in order to play this game for a long session you need to be a masochist
You definitely nailed on your comment about the levels, even admiting you don't have the skills for elaborating on it. Specially when you said about the lack of negative space.
It was something I noticed from the first trailer: the game seems to want to evoke "Dark Fantasy vibes" at any cost. "Hey, look at me, like at how dark I am, I even put spikes on my head", but the art design team has no clue on what makes Dark Fantasy "Dark" (or someone who aproves what the art team shows is clueless, It happens A LOT). The art direction seems to try to mimic the Aesthetic of Dark Souls, also putting a lot of elements inspired by Blasphemous with the pointy helmets, masks and spikes. Blasphemous has a very dense and well made research on Spanish Sacra art and that's what makes it unique.
It just feels generic and bland with no fundamentals. The whole game just looks like a Death Metal logo rendered in 3D.
It's incredibly edgy, in a similar way to how Shadow the Hedgehog is edgy 😂
There are definitely moments in a game where it feels like the base design for something came from asking a particularly “edgy” 12 year old what it should look like.
Dark fantasy is just a fantasy that’s dark, there is nothing else to it. There is no your own specific thing that separates real dark fantasy, from “fake” dark fantasy.
Really, spikes has been a huge part of the western dark fantasies. Also, it’s not spikes, it’s thorns.
@@DumahTheSeeker When everything is covered in spikes, nothing is.
I have no idea what you're on about. They completely nailed the dark fantasy aesthetic.
I think the controls are too floaty, it's laggy and slightly buggy and I don't like most bosses so far. But I still have fun with it.
Metacritic gives the game a 7/10 and I thinks that pretty acurate. Lies of P was way better tho.
In a world in which anything less than 8/10 is a disappointment I'd say 7 is probably fair. On my scale, I would give it a 5 or 6 for being middling overall.
I really have to agree unfortunately. I managed to cleanse 4 of the beacons but after this point i found there to be a massive increase in the amount of enemies and the combat is too janky/floaty for me.
nothng janky/floaty about it sounds just like a skill issue tbh
- Shields are useless.
- Enemies have INSANE tracking. If you don’t use I-frames, you are getting hit.
It’s Dark Souls, but unfair.
- there are no shields
- if you get roll (well, dash) caught outside s you take stupendous counter dmg
BB's no souls? Still, unfair imho.
I say less tracking for enemies and for the player, make it fair, game!
@@justaquietpeacefuldance
Bloodborne doesn’t have shields because it never wanted shields. Dashing is much fairer because enemies don’t have insane tracking, positioning is as important as the dash, meanwhile LOTF EVERY ENEMY can track 360° to hit you as long as you don’t roll.
@@extremelyboredtatsumaki.495 that's some serious freaking tracking, f^ck my spacing.
maybe it's a roll-souls? 350 mm rolls and 360s with tracking, oh my rolls!
Not my type.
Let's just say that some of the developers that worked on this had a better understanding of what they were making than others. Though it's mostly the director's fault if something is under par for allowing it (and the deadline's considering how bad much of the late game is).
I enjoyed a lot of the game but yeah it needed more time in the oven, the endings are... i don't want to say bad but they aren't good
The late game being bad is a souls staple though, FS has been perfecting that since DS1.
Agree with everything you said. I thought lies of p would be mediocore, while this would be the stand out game, but it was the other way around. I too couldn't force myself to finish it. It's so tedious and unenjoyable.
Same. I was hyped for this and meh about Lies of P. Turns out Lies of P is a masterpiece and LOTF is Diablo 4 levels of disappointment.
@@thrashhhhh felt like they only made this game cause of money, can't feel the heart of the devs at all
your explanation of how the mob density and enemy placements make me feel as a player is spot on and its such a bummer. I was so excited to explore this game but my will to do so was quickly worn down by the endless eries of ganks, trash mob spam and annoying encounters. Add to that the "frantic" feel of combat due to the animation speed and it contributes to this overall spastic feeling.
edit: I also feel like the way the levels are so "samey" looking with lack of landmarks also makes me feel like i cant stop playing until ive fully cleared a zone and found the next major vestige or boss. Because I know that even one day later ill be completely lost and unsure of which pathways ive taken already and which remain to be explored. And that feeling of wanting to stop playing but feeling like I cant kills my enjoyment.
They fixed enemy density
@@apollodingo3583fixed is a strong word
Don't worry Ratatoskr. I'm in the same boat as you. What's funny is Lies of P EXCEEDED my expectations in every way, and made me super excited for Lords of the Fallen. Lords of the Fallen really disappointed me mainly through the bosses, mobs, and story telling. I am surprised that so many souls TH-camrs gave this game such high reviews and some even said it was the best souslike. For the first time I felt a huge disconnect with many of them.
The character moves so fast it looks like driving a car in neutral, he doesn't give any weight sensation, as the weapons too look like made of cardboard lol
The distance the character travels when attacking or dodging is ridiculous to the point the devs had to make a patch fixing the "falling from a ledge when attacking".
The s from the dodge are on point tho.
Hate the fact that you can't hold a catalyst and a crossbow, since they both use the same slot of "distance weapon".
THANK YOU!!! As someone who adores the game its so nice to hear someone say WORD FOR WORD BAR FOR BAR what I'm saying about the levels in this game, it doesn't matter how well intricately and carefully constructed the physical space of the levels are designed when you simply don't get to take your time enjoying exploring them. It's so frustrating walking through a level taking in how amazingly it is made, how it wraps around to somewhere you've already been and looking back at the vista behind you tracing out the journey you took to get there only to then look around you sighing in frustration at the 75 enemies that surround you on top of the 50 more that will be there in a short minute because the umbral mechanic is a continuous swarm.
This is the only Soulslike I've ever played that actively made me NOT want to explore the areas.
That wither damage system, that is pretty much the same thing as the guard regain in Lies of P, is a fantastic system that complements souls combat very very well. I wish all new souls games, including FromSoft ones, implement something like that. It really gives a new flavor to combat.
Some people like flavorless protein powder
With one major caveat. You can still die even if you block in Lies of P to chip damage. It’s more like Charmless Sekiro in LoP than wither damage.
@@Random-PaperManthe most fun way to play Sekiro too
@@Random-PaperMan There are other differences too, like you lose your guard regain over time in LoP, but the concept is still the same.
are you alright in the brain? that mechanic was stolen straight from bloodborne. its not something lies of p did and this game does it but just better.
for the enemy layout, I think it's due to how much more important the ranged attacks are. you can pick off those 2 ranged units with 3-4 thrown attacks and can usually kill one or two melees before they reach you. there's not many if you spend a few resources, the trick being to spend as little as possible while still keeping in good enough shape to fight the boss you're headed towards. On the bosses themselves, I noticed they get harder as i progress, with the strongest i saw in your video here being the hushed saint which is only the first beacon boss. I think you went into it as a veteran souls fan but only played the amount that was made to introduce new players to the game before ramping it up, so of course it felt fairly easy. as for the rest, I guess that's mostly subjective. I prefer the faster combat, I like having plenty of enemies to farm through so I'm not bored while going through the same area again, and Personally I have no real opinion on the looks of the levels themselves. some views are pretty cool, like looking from where you killed the crimson rector percival over the stone bridge, whereas I always HATE swamp levels, but overall it was all fine IMO. it's not elden ring, but a solid souls game nonetheless.
all the bosses are super easy... with the possible exception of the sundered monarch if you made the choice of playing an inferno build. in fact, sundered monarch was the only half decent boss in the entire game.
@@powerbeard5653 if it takes more than 2 tries to beat, it's not "super easy". I don't think there's a single boss besides crimson rector Percival that i beat first try, and even then i kinda knew his patterns from one of the dev gameplay videos. I'm not looking to fight the same enemy 9-10 times, or to beat them first go. 3-5 attempts is my range of "that was a good boss", and LOTF hit that range with most of their bosses. and even with all these things making it "easier" we still have people dropping the game and negative reviews for the game being "too freaking hard". some dark souls vets found it too easy, but some new players can't even get through the first area. they did their best to make the game assessable without dropping all the challenge from it, and from the looks of it they hit a pretty good balance.
@@phrozonphoenix5894 imo the player just move way too goddamn fast for the boss,as in i can sidestep or start moving out of the way exactly when i see the boss winding up any attack ,same deal for any other encounter like oh i fuck up my great sword heavy i should be scratched in the face but i can just backstep the heck out of there, i think thats why they have so much mobs going around cuz if 4 mobs takes podshot at you one might land
Having not played Lords of the Fallen, my commentary here is purely academic and obviously has no basis in any understanding of the actual feel of the game, but I will say a faster swing speed and recovery on attacks may be intentional to make the game's combat feel somewhat more realistic to real world swordplay. I'm a huge fan of the Soulsborn games, and have beaten all 3 Dark Souls, including having played Dark Souls 3 up to NG+7, beat Bloodborn multiple times, and Elden Ring 4 times. I understand the appeal of the commitment system on attacks and I do love it as a system for learning and improving in the combat, but as someone who's also a huge fan of historical swordsmanship, it has little to no bearing on how actual fighting is done with swords.
From what I can see in your gameplay, Lords of the Fallen definitely isn't one to one representative of actual historical swordsmanship, but the way the character moves and stepping into their strikes IS fairly typical of actual swordsmanship. Typically in real swordsmanship, over commitment to a strike is a huge novice mistake, and even something like a greatsword does move a lot more like a katana does in Elden Ring. Does that necessarily mean that translating more realistic speed to combat into a game makes for a good combat system? No idea, as I said I haven't played the game, but that may be what they're going for just looking at the gameplay.
One thing worth mentioning as well about the parry is that if the attack you're parrying has any type of hit-conditional effect (like a secondary explosion that only happens if it hits you) then the parry will NOT absorb that damage and you will be guaranteed to take that damage fully, as well as cancelling the withered hp you could have regained from hitting after the parry.
I also fully agree with the part about FromSoft's way to handling spells and I do feel LoTF is an improvement; however, I think games like Code Vein still do it even better. Allowing full quickslotting of spells makes things so much more accessible and engaging to cycle through attack combos, and the ichor system heavily encourages melee aggression even for magic users.
As a whole, I was also very disappointed, especially because I mainly got the game due to its stellar reviews. I even cleared the game's secret ending (Umbral) because I really wanted to get the boss weapon from the secret final boss, I beat that boss and got the weapon, my game crashed soon after and the weapon self-deleted. I uninstalled and bought Lies of P to help me cope through the trauma.
They patched the parries recently to absorb status effect buildup.
umbral ending isn't secret, and it's even the easiest and quickest ending.
@@Choryrth I can't tell if you're trolling or simply incorrect, but in case it's the latter: The umbral ending first requires you travel through a side area, then acquire a non-descript item to enter Mother's Lull, then later you have to know to get the Withered Rune of Adyr without it telling you to do so, then you have to figure out that Pieta is the one referred to by the story as the person you need to soulflay, which you either know from other side dialogue interactions unrelated to the questline OR from just randomly going up to NPC's until it works. If that's not a "secret" ending to you, then I'm guessing the only secret endings are ones like the DS3 dark ending where all you do is phase through a single illusory wall in a side area and grab an item. As for the "quickest" ending: The other two endings literally just have you do the mainline objectives of the game and either cleanse or not cleanse the beacons. The umbral ending has you do all of the same objectives, except you have double the steps in between and a different final boss from the other two endings.
@@nephorium6160 it's not secret, because everyone was blatant told about it. convolution does not equal secrecy. we were told by developers about all 3 endings, AND the fact that they unlock classes, weeks, if not more, before the game even came out.
as for easiest and quickest, it doesn't require all the things the others do. the other endings require you to go to ALL 5 beacons. this one doesn't require you to visit any of them (other than Hush, obviously), and you can do it in much less time. it only requires 2 bosses that the other endings don't, Harrower, and Ellianne. meanwhile you're skipping multiple bosses the other endings require, including Crow, Cleric, AND Tanrec, the entire frost area, so on and so forth.
if you know what to do? it's the easiest and the quickest. easiest is subjective, of course, i personally think it's easiest, but it is factually the quickest, assuming you know how to do all 3 endings.
@@Choryrth
One, you're simply wrong about being able to skip the frost area, because you literally need Harkyn's parasite from there. Two, you also need to fight the wraith trio which you wouldn't need to fight otherwise. Three, you can say it's "factually" quicker when you provide some clear times, because the quickest speed runs I've seen so far are roughly 3 hours for Radiant and Inferno and 4 hours for Umbral. Finally, if you want to have that definition of a secret ending, fine, but it such an obviously stupid definition that not I nor anyone else is going to use it. By that definition, literally any "secret" ending would no longer be secret the moment anybody made a TH-cam video about how to do it. The secrecy of an in-game objective should be measured relative to the game's content, not information available outside of the game.
It's very rare that I happen to disagree with you on matters of taste, Rata, but I suppose that it was bound to happen eventually-and that's fine! Everyone comes into a game looking for something a little different, after all.
I'm enjoying the game quite a bit, myself, and none of the flaws that you've detailed (and honestly, all of them are entirely valid complaints) have had enough of a negative impact on my enjoyment of the game that I could see myself quitting.
At the end of the day, I just feel bad that you didn't enjoy your time with the game as much as I am.
i also agree, except, the game decided to reset all my levels cause i was playing with a friend, 100 to 11 gone, so many hours done
So how do u enjoy the game wit all those flaws u just decide to ignore it ? and because u supposedly ignoring it those flaws suddenly disappear ? it's not a matter of taste when it's plain facts everyone can agree on
So aimbot enemies that wait till you roll ends to attack you infinite farming glitches to reach high levels trivalizing the game ranged enemies with infinite vision and 50 enemies every 25ft is fun to you? Hate to see what kinks you have lol
Exactly, im not mad here. I just disagree mostly but his opinion is still super valid because the game is no where near perfect, shit lies of p is better by far. But its not at all like dark souls 2, thats a terrible comparison mostly.
@@Thiccness_Is_Delicious 🤡🤡🤡
This review is spot on. I'm enjoying the game but I agree with everything you said. I am enjoying all of the tie ins with the first game. They did more then I thought they would so it's easier for me to stay invested in the game.
I feel like one of the very few weirdos who disagrees, personally after beating it today it's easily become one of my favourite Souls-likes. I personally love the level design, exploration, interconnected world, combat, enemy types, Umbral, build variety, etc. While it absolutely has its faults like performance, being too easy and such, everything it does hits just right for me personally. It also helps that I'm also one of those weirdos who liked the OG LotF, and seeing a ton of lore, character stories and main events tie back to it in really meaningful ways honestly put a smile on my face and even got a few feels out of me at times. Felt like the game catered to me and what I want in a Souls-like almost every step of the way.
I hate being stuck in animations, I always feel like it's not my fault when I get hit cuz I could've moved but the animations didn't allow me, it's why I loved nioh2 combat, I always felt that if I got killed there it was totally my fault
gotta love that cancelling animation with Yokai Skill/Burst Counter!
Completely agreed, animation cancel should be a must in every souls game, or souls like rather, also the input itself lags sometimes ill press the button and nothing, then i press it again and the dude does it twice......
The spell system in lords of the fallen reminds me of the way magic vocations use their spells in Dragon's Dogma, you should give that game a shot if you haven't yet ;)
Dragon's dogma!!!? Aw shit I'm moist now
I didn't like the game tbh I hate it it aged bad btw amazing game as well I c why it was so good before when it released but like the game I don't like now
@@dijik123I played it for the first time last year. There are some things about it that I think it does best than any modern game: I like the psychotic level of customisation in character creation, allowing you to go adventuring as a wispy 10 year old boy or a seven foot tall muscular woman with shoulders large enough to intimidate a bear. The playable classes are also a ton of fun, and I love that you can respec at any moment with little to no cost.
What I don't like is that the story is kinda eh
hes said on stream hes already played it and is looking forward to dd2
@@brodericksiz625 I don't like the save point tbh like the dark souls bonfire was like amazing it's so good tbh I want it in every games I don't want to manually save everytime
100% agree. If they made the mob density a bit less atrocious I would love this game. And no, it’s not just in the umbral world, it is everywhere, every corner, every champion enemy who used to be a boss with 2 archers that run away from you, 2 regular enemies, and just for shits and giggles, the fire crossbow bitch. It’s artificial difficulty and it feels like “Got ya! We are a soulslike- The game”
I'm glad you mentioned the sound! It was the first thing I noticed when watching your stream. This game is a good example of what happens when a lesser designer handles the sound, stuff just feels *off* (It also shows just how good Fromsoft sound design is). There's some good stuff in there but their sound designer definitely could have done better.
There's nothing bad about the sound design at all...Maybe try turning up your headphones.🤡🤡🤡
This is not a Souls game, you do know that!
This is not a Souls game, you do know that!
@@googleplaynow9608 If you want positives then the Umbral world is quite impressive, loved most everything there. I'd love to see the sword foley (listen to the opening cinematic), and particularly the foot steps reworked.
@@GMitchell2012 Sure but regardless I'd still have issues with the sound
Funny how a lot of the negative opinions you have are how I felt after playing the game for about half an hour. The mobs are obnoxious
git gud is a pretty good fix
fully agree with everything and it was pretty much my exact experience
one thing I would add is that the lantern mechanic also adds to the tediousness of the levels, you pretty much have to go through them twice for each world to get everything
I've completed it this today and beyond some fairly irritating issues, I enjoyed it a lot.
- Some of the enemy design is straight up bullshit. That gets on my nerves.
- Max of four fully upgraded weapons a playthrough. Ditto.
- By far my biggest gripe - and when I first realised I didn't think it would be that bad - is the NG+ system regarding checkpoints.
And its doing my nut in. It's really killing my enjoyment of the NG+ aspect hard and historically that's been my favourite element of the Soulslikes (obviously not limited to that "genre" but you know what I mean).
However, I did enjoy it and I like that it follows Remnant 2 and rewards new classes to start new playthroughs with. I think that's a really neat touch.
Overall, I'm a fan. But it's not been without points that have frustrated tbe fuck out of me. 😂
I always thought that fast combat doesn't mix terribly well with the original souls mechanics from Ds1. You need BIG adjustments to the formula to make it fun.
In Ds3 and Bb it became a rithym game of roll and r1.
Sekiro managed to do it by changing a lot of the mechanics like removing stamina and letting you cancel attacks and Elden Ring managed to do it by forcing you to use more mechanics like heavy attacks, running, jumping and other stuff during battles.
BB did well by having rally, aggressive enemies and things that encourage you to stick to enemies rather than back away. DS3 did well by encouraging successive well timed rolls in a number of boss fights (Dancer, Pontiff and NK coming to mind immediately). This just has very little of that, it's a hodge podge of mechanics that don't seem to form a cohesive whole to me.
Sekiro is just dance dance revolution the extreme edition lol you can stand in place and beat majority of the bosses that's shit design in itself as for the rhythm for ds3 and bloodborne it's a perfect dance of death that rewards you for focusing (same as sekiro)
@@fastenedcarrot9570nameless king not so much that forward slash attack they admitted they didn't program the hitbox properly and while his model swings forward the actual hidden box that causes damage to register is slightly delayed by like 1.5 seconds which is why people said he was so hard they were rolling in time with the model but they hadn't attacked the hitbox to it 😂
@@Thiccness_Is_Delicious Huh? Do you have a link to that? Surely they could have fixed that?
lol Elden Ring didn't really do all that well forcing people to use those mechanics though. The opposite is in fact the case. There are just _way_ too many overpowered weapons and ashes of war which let players spam boss disintegrating abilities nearly endlessly or allow the player to avoid or otherwise disregard mechanics that might otherwise instagib them. This ultimately makes it totally unnecessary for players to actually interact with difficult mechanics or learn patterns and develop strategies unless you intentionally handicap yourself by ignoring those (very numerous) options to avoid ruining your own good time.
*I'm not hating.*
ER is one of my favorite games of all time, not just for it's game play but for the unbelievable depth and density of it's narrative and world-building and everything else about it. I don't even fault it for the things I just brought up because I believe the whole wildly exceeds the sum of its parts. Regardless, this didn't detract from the fact that it was definitely way too easy to trivialize the game without really trying to.
Also just to clarify I'm not a souls-veteran with years of experience with the franchise or with build crafting or anything, Sekiro was actually my very first foray into souls-like territory until the release of Elden Ring.
ER is just highly exploitable.
FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT, after i beat Lies of P i was excited to play again! but just WATCHING people play Lords of the Fallen made me decide to wait for it to go on sale or after i finish the games i have already before i buy it, so after finishing my 2nd run of Lies of P and Excited to play the 3rd time, im on Spiderman 2 rn because it was more hype lol.
I'm on my 2nd playthrough as well, man I love this game
I love the game, way more than Lies of P. You will play it on sale and wonder what Rat was talking about.
I love Lies of P big time, but LotF is also incredible. I'm not saying Ratatoskr is necessarily wrong in his analysis and I'm certainly not faulting him for his perception of the game, but you really should give it a shot for yourself and not let his take persuade you.
This is one of the bigger problems I think gamers face today. They have no idea what they're truly missing out on because they allow the opinions and critiques of other people weigh to heavily on their opinion before they've even had the chance to form one for themselves in the first place.
LotF is absolutely a great buy even at full price.
*I swear* I'm not trying to play you, my friend! I am just genuinely concerned that I see so many of my fellow gamers being prematurely swayed away from what has turned out to be a spectacular release for the souls-like genre. I would seriously buy you this game if I could, I am that confident in my own assertions here.
Man this review is so accurate it's scary, like, it describes my exact feelings about the game with a gargantuan 90% hit rate (aside from the environments and magic mechanics in FROM games in general). Especially that forward momentum thing you described in LOTF23, it annoyed the hell of me during my playthrough. It was like I wasn't moving around but balleting during attack animations. Attack animations that lacked proper impact. Add low commitment to the attacks to this, and the combat feels worse than in the original LOTF, where I actually liked that clumsy, over encumbered, extremely weighty combat that many players actively hated back then.
Another thing in LOTF23 combat that I find frustrating is this strange hit magnetism that affects both the player character and the mobs, where hit animations sometimes wind up far away (further than objective weapon reach of the combatants), but then the game almost teleports one of them (or both, depends on attack state of PC and mobs in question) closer to each other, and the hit lands with an unrealistic precision. I also suspect it ties up with extremely cheap tracking which enemies are utilizing.
Yet another thing that bothers and frustrates me is inconsistent poise behavior after successfully landing a hit on smaller enemies. I understand that larger mobs, bosses, and maybe some inhuman/monstrous adversaries (plus unique, mini-boss-turned-mob enemies), in theory, can 'eat up' my hits without blinking an eye, it's (probably) fine. But even normal humanoid-sized mobs sometimes don't react to charged attacks at all, their attack animations cannot be interrupted no matter how much damage they suffer - all that while player character does have it all, it can be poise-broken with ease, and even with low attack commitment 'advantage' I can be as easily staggered when bunch of overly-poised (hmm, if that's even a word) mobs pile up & hit all at once. It's not the damage, or me being hit that annoys me there, but inconsistency of it. In fact, I can apply this term to the game as a whole, and it probably describes my overall feelings about it in general: LOTF23 just feels inconsistent in many ways. Sometimes it's beautiful, sometimes it's intriguing to explore, sometimes it's even fun to swing & slash, but many times it feels unfair (where it shouldn't be), boring, and tedious. The areas feel more like decorated combat arenas rather than lived up places once corrupted by ill presence and now withering away, decaying into pitiful mess.
It all really lacks a clear vision as a project, and after all it feels inconsistent as a soulslike in many aspects. I had extremely high hopes about it, I believed the game would scratch the itch in the best way possible. The trailers looked fantastic, the anticipation was huge, first reviews lent me faith in it... but then I tried it myself, and felt disappointed in its combat feel.
Again, the game is brutally beautiful, I absolutely dig its design & artistic strengths, but the combat is so underwhelming to me, it hurts. Such a heartbreaking letdown, indeed. Suddenly, the wait for the game is over, yet I play it in very short sessions, and I'm not feeling like enjoying it, thus not feeling like returning to it more often, mournfully.
The point about not restricting level design to the narrow physical space, but also to encompas enemy encounters, and the way these incentivize or thwart exploration, was masterfully made. Finished the game twice, and found myself in wholehearted agreement with your well-thought takedown.
I always thought the “skill” on a catalyst in ER could be “multi spell”. You hold down L2 like you would on the moonveil, but then you hit a,b, square, R1, whatever spell was attached to that button. Been wishing for that for a year.
This is almost literally how it works in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. You hold R2 and then press one of the face buttons (square, triangle, circle, X or A, B, X, Y) and cast the associated spell. And by pressing L2 while holding R2, you can swap to another set of 4 spells, for a total of 8. Your weapons also have skills that work the same way, just with R1, and with the number of skills dictated by the weapon's rarity (one for 1*, two for 2*, and so on up to 6*), but it makes for a pretty smooth system.
That said, I personally prefer Nioh 2's approach, where your spells, consumables, and whatnot were assigned to the D-pad, so it was a single button press to cast a spell, throw a kunai, what have you. You could have up to 16 items hotkeyed to the D-pad, with sets of 4 swappable through R1 + left or right on the D-pad (changing weapons was R1 + down for melee and R1 + up for ranged). It takes a bit to get used to after Soulsborne's simplistic (and tedious) cycling, but it's an insanely convenient system in comparison (plus, you can assign a single item to multiple hotkeys, so you could assign your healing items to the same spot on all pages so that if you hit down on the D-pad, you're always going to heal, no matter what).
This is also how Code Vein does its Gifts system, it really should just be in FromSoft Souls games, it's very nice and made me actually want to try spells
4 year student of aikdo and have done some parrying in my day. Regarding the sound, ll i can say is that parrying is all based on timing and leverage and if you parry poorly, you have poorer leverage and will tent to require more effort and will thus make a louder sound.
We were also told to listen to our techniques as well, because the noise in the technique was where there was wasted energy. So a louder parry is usually a sign of a weaker one.
Bah! Is this 4real? When a low kick sinks into the muscle and you can't hear the SLAP on the impact, it was a good one. As far as my combat experience goes, anyway 😂
I've done karate and I understand that the best parries are very smooth as you just guide someone's arm/leg in a different direction. But in a game you ultimately juse need a clear signal that you pressed a button in time of which the result doesn't really reflect reality either.
Perhaps it's just that why I tend not to like parry mechanics that much unless they don't even pretend to be like actual parrying.
I‘m pretty much in the same boat. Good review. In regards to the environments, I think part of them looking so hideous might be because they are so „noisy“ - they are overstuffed with, well, stuff, and this visual oppression doesn’t give you any room to breathe in the environment.
Overdesigned is a phrase practically created for this game.
@@fastenedcarrot9570 oh yeah, overdesigned is the perfect word!
It is a “more is more” game to a fault.
Elden Ring has a similar amount of detail but it pays careful attention to where it allocates that detail, because most of the gameplay will comprise of fighting enemies that will occupy the upper half of your screen almost every vista you're treated is gonna have their visual interest points invested at that region. That way it doesn't tear your attention this and that way and keeps you focused on what matters. By contrast there's too much clutter going on in the bottom of half of Lord of the Fallen's environments.
I actually like moving forward for the most part, it helps you close distance. I like this game honestly, yeah it’s not the greatest, but it has earned my respect in one huge way, what you see is what you get in regards to armor and weapons
I enjoyed the game. The first half the game especially felt like a fight to earn ground. I really appreciated the balance between vestiage seeds, your mobile checkpoint, being rare to acquire, but seedbeds are rather common. This was the best way to handle that, as it allows you to really consider where you want to risk putting your one of your one or two seedbeds down. The Umbral really invoked a sense of dread, the audio design got more tense the longer you stayed there and the constant threats you push through only further added to that fighting for ground theory, desperately trying to find a vestiage or a way to return from umbral. I like it.
The bosses in my opinion were hard to get into at first. Pieta and The Hushed Saint were my favourite fights in the game and I loved their designs so much. Took me several good attempts to finally beat both of them. Afterwards, when I got Fitzroy's sword, most bosses took me one attempt, some managing to make 2, the Spurned Progeny was the hardest, mostly because his final attack I didn't understand. But I enjoyed the bosses. Easy as they may be, I thought each was really well designed. I am saddened that some of the lesser bosses did become frequent enemies with less health, but it seems to be an issue entirely with the lack of enemy diversity. If they could add some and switch out the bosses, I'd be happy for that.
Yeah, the segment about levels is exactly why I ended up dropping the game. Maybe I'll come back to it at a later date, but once I got to a point at which I was mostly running past enemies instead of exploring levels carefully as I am wont to do, I wasn't having fun anymore. Bosses weren't exactly making up for it either. It's a shame, because there's a solid foundation here for the most part.
If nothing else, this game did make me want to get Lies of P. But I decided I'd wait until that one's done with patches since I believe there's a roadmap for it.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. Although the bosses were rather easy, I did enjoy em quite a bit, though mostly by design/visuals. One example was the Hushed Saint, how the camera kinda shifts when he's about to attack you from behind after he sends his horse to distract you or how you can use your lantern to knock him off his horse with those root looking things nearby. I just think that was pretty cool. Most things are just well telegraphed, some of course were not so well done. I also didn't finish the game, I got to the very last area of the game and all the negatives you brought up is amplified by a fuck ton. I just straight up gave up since there were so many enemies and a lot of them were just the super strong ones, aka previously bosses. Sometimes you get like 3 or 4 of them in a room. I swear at some point it was even more. I did give that area a good solid few hours before calling it.
The game does many things well but certain design choices really kills it. Respect/hats off to anyone who actually beat this game. At some point the frustration with dealing with the hordes and hordes of enemies becomes not worth it. Even just running past enemies was annoying cuz there was so much and they can end up blocking your way if you're not careful. The game overall wasn't the worse but not something I can really recommend to a souls fan exactly.
the last area of the gmae was miserable, i slogged through with a friend and we didnt pick up a single items for probably like 4 hours, the final "boss" is just ad clear, and the one before hat was horrible
@@GhostMan407 I salute you and your friend. Yea that area was the first time I just said Nope, I'm not doing this. It was unnecessarily long and a total maze. I got as far as getting the royal key and then unlocking like 5 different shortcuts back to an area I was just at making me wonder what was even the point of the shortcut. You save like maybe 20 seconds. I just got lost a lot. I didn't particularly want to look up a guide since if a game needs a guide in order to progress then maybe they should rethink their level design. Either that or I am just really bad at figuring out where to go, which was what most of the game was for me lol.
I am on ng+3 rn apparently I like to torture myself , the Bosses get way harder in ng+ that’s why I don’t understand most negative reviews ofc they are very easy in first playthrough i mean some of the later bosses took me like up to 4-5h but maybe that’s just me lmao , also after you got the royal key you might want to check a leaver that turns the steaks in the room to get further 🫡
@@Eliquis885 Definite respect to you for reaching NG+3, kudos bruv and thanks for the tip!. I don't think of the bosses being easy as a bad thing, I enjoyed them quite a bit as an overall experience, I would expect it to be harder as you go into NG+ and onwards. I was informed that in NG+ you don't actually have any vestiges and you have to just constantly put down your own and that seems to be a big complaint, so I'm curious on how you feel about that since you've gotten up to NG+3.
@@tomislol thank you , yeah you have no vestiges in ng+ only the seedling you put down and your hub vestige + the shrine of adyr vestige you are able to access , was a real pain to do the alternative ending haha hope they change that
I totally agree about the block/parry system in this and Lies of P. I think it's vastly superior to how parrying works in most previous souls/soulslike games. I always liked challenging myself by trying to parry every enemy and boss in Elden Ring and other games, but it always felt too gimmicky to seem truly viable.
Parry is not done well in souls games. The only one that mastered it is Sekiro, and i think thats because of the way it works. Sekiro parry is low risk medium reward instead of very high risk high reward of other souls games. If you miss the parry you still block the attack. Missing one isnt a huge issue and if you miss too many you just loose momentum instead of loosing the fight. Souls parries trivializes the game if you are good at them but getting there is painful and not a good experience. Sekiro parries have the same thing mentioned in the video, they feel incredibly satisfying auditorially. It makes you want to get more of them and more and more. They are accessible and core part of the intended experience, not an afterthought mechanic
@@silvershine2261that's why lies is better
I think one of the things about fromsoft parrying is how you’re mostly using it on trash enemies that you’d kill in a couple hits anyways because it’s wildly inconsistent on what miniboss or boss enemies can be parried. LOTF and LoP implement it as a solid mechanic against everything so you’re not always guessing and both reward doing it repeatedly to get the hang of it, instead of a one and done “you can now riposte” which feels cheesy to certain enemies like black knights or havel.
@@kylele23 That's true but they have gradually increased its viability with newer games ever since DS1. In DS1 the only boss you could parry is Gwyn, but in Elden Ring, for example, you can parry against the majority of bosses and it usually takes several parries to fully stagger them. I think the logical direction they are going in should result in a system like LoP or LoTF has.
I started off not particularly enjoying LotF so much.. for a lot of the reasons as you mentioned... but then I found as I moved on from the earlier areas, I started to enjoy the game more and more.. I ended up having a really good time with it.
My biggest gripe is that areas tend to stick to one colour palete and they feel samey.. you don't get this sense of marvel around the corner (which doesn't need to be every corner..)
Still, I really enjoyed it and it's a worthy Soulslike for me.
Like DS2, this is definitely a game that is an acquired taste. It does get better the more you play it. And then suddenly you find you actually love it.
I don’t care about the Lord of the Fallen. In fact I’m tired of these high derivative games. Yet, this just sounds like a “it doesn’t feel like a FromSoftware therefore is bad” typical nonsense.
So tired of this community. Make it very close to FromSoftware: “copycat”, brings its on twist “the developers don’t understand what they are doing unlike my personal god Miyazaki”. Let these games be themselves for crying out loud.
Yeah, some people should broaden their horizons and try other games outside of Fromsoftware titles. I personally think 2D metroidvania's will always be better than 3D metroidvania(what souls games claim to be).
i’m playing though dark souls 2, and I’ve just gotten through iron keep and shrine of amana. the latter especially was some of the only time that i skipped enemies entirely and just ran past them. i also did it in the last hallway before the boss in undead crypt admittedly
In the crypt you can stop the ghosts from spawning if you kill the hollows by the bell.
Yeah, I also had a problem with how the game looks. It's very grim with a muted palette. Forsaken Fen was genuinely hard for me to navigate, especially when Umbral paints everything in a blue hue. The enemy encounters are absurd and relentless. It leads to a game with very few opportunities for respite. As weak as the mobs are, you're still taking two hits or more to clear them out. It's an investment in time and resources just to make the smallest of gains.
The hell are you on about?! There are umbral flowerbeds everywhere and entering umbral is basically a full heal. Sounds like your refusal to understand the game's mechanics has led to your own downfall. When you use the flowerbeds, there are more "checkpoints" than in fromsoft's games...
I wouldn't say it's bad. It has its problems, yes. But it does a lot more right than it does wrong and it's a blast to play. I've been having some fun with it!
I have a theory as to what caused the insane enemy density. I'm guessing that once they were near the end of development and started playtesting, it turned out that the game was super easy, with playtesters breezing through everything. There was not enough time to rework combat system or bosses so, to artifically inflate the difficulty, they just doubled/tripled the number of enemies and/or increased their health.
If that's the case, I really hope that they have the original encounters setup saved somewhere and will release it in some patch as an alternative game mode, maybe then I could actually be bothered to finish the game. While soulslikes are typically known for their difficulty, they can also occasionally serve as a power fantasy. In fact, I would argue that some of them (ekhm, Steelrising) were even remotely playable only thanks to being easy, as otherwise all the jank would be insanely fustrating.
But if they want to reduce the enemy count they need to rebalance the combat to be weightier and more meaningful or it really will be too easy, then they also need areas that are actually interesting to explore and look at, and perhaps other types of gameplay such as the souls patented "falling onto weird stuff which ends up being a secret pathway," not to mention more interesting enemies and more enemy variety, and just generally more interesting encounters rather than presenting to the player the same exact experience over and over... and I don't see any of that happening.
@@I-ONLY-BUILD-MECHS-AND-DUSTERS that can't be done, cause "weightier" means slowing down the movement, the attack and the commitment (where you can't dodge a bit after attacking)
it's like reworking the whole game at that point, the ones that did like the fast edit will complain
EXACTLY THIS. The game is UNFINISHED. There are broken animations, even the parry sound was non-existent before release. Loading screen when resting? Fairly confident that's not an intended design.
So to save face, they are making an excuse of "this is our vision" when in fact the game is just plain unfinished. Enemies are slow and easy, but instead of maybe tweaking their attack speed and aggression, they instead spammed their numbers. I guess clicking one's mouse on the map to define a spawn point is far faster and easier than tweaking enemies.
Another very obvious indicators are the bosses. They had a band-aid solution for the common trash mobs, but reworking bosses to be faster or more aggressive required more work, so a lot of the bosses can LITERALLY be 1-tried, while in the overworld, you're guaranteed to die atleast once in each area between vestiges.
And the patches? These were obviously already in the works way back before the game released. Of course, before you release a patch, there needs to be some form of QA behind it, and now they're releasing it in trickle to make it look like they are hustling. I mean sure, they ARE hustling, but not to the extent these fanbois are thinking. They were already there, ready to be released, they just needed to test them before they released, and it just so happened the QA phase finished AFTER the game launched.
Kudos to developers though, they were able to hide it very well. But unfinished it plainly unfinished.
Yea... in game dev you dont just wait until development ends to start playtesting lol.
I don't think I have ever tried so hard to like I game as I did with LOTF. What really sealed the deal and made me sour on this game to the point of quitting, was having my level 60 something character be bugged out and sent back to nearly the very beginning of the game after countless hours of play. I understand that they have put in a new patch and added ways for people to gain their levels back, but it is honestly just too little and not the change needed.
This game is sort of like a smoothie made out of bits and pieces of chopped off limbs and body parts of other souls games, then once blended it was put into a fishbowl with a label slapped onto it that said "SOULS GAME". LOTF is like the person who is just trying too hard all of the time and everyone knows it, but everyone also doesn't want to confront them and state that.
i bought both lies of p and lords of the fallen the day of release, and have 100 hours on lies of p and 40 on lords of the fallen. i beat lies of p once, and intend to beat lords of the fallen. i am lvl 105 and have about two beacons left. for background, ive played nearly every fromsoft titles, primarily dark souls 3 and elden ring.
i can say that out of the two, currently lies of p has provided me with the higher quality soulslike experience. i like the world of lords of the fallen more, its big, interconnected and it does feel like its had thought put behind it. but there are many things lackluster about lords of the fallen.
- its a shame that the first 15 enemies you encounter in a few levels are the same enemies you will be encountering throughout the rest of the game, just inconveniently placed in the worst spots with either limitless range or umbral parasites that are impossible to get rid of because you are constantly being attacked every second.
- i would be lying if i said that i havent occasionally got sent off the edge of a cliff because of the fast weapon attack speed, there should either be cliff protection or reduced swing distance.
- the maps feel empty and useless, most of them dont show you 95% of the area, with the exception of a couple that show you which trail to take to get to a beacon that was mildly helpful.
- im actually kind of glad the bosses werent over the top difficult because id feel like to accomplish that each one would spam aoe's or some bs. i didnt really dislike that they were easy, i disliked that they felt easy because they werent all neatly designed (looking at you hollowed crow). like iudex from ds3 is objectively not difficult, but if you dont know the mechanics of him or your own character he will be difficult. theres a learning curve. lotf doesnt really feel like it has a learning curve. you can exploit bosses really easily and sometimes not even intentionally. too many bosses summon dogs to make the fight more of a slog, not to be more difficult.
- yeah the performance issues really arent justifiable but im glad they are working double time to take care of them
- some levels genuinely feel like a maze and make me go insane. same mobs, same tunnels same stuff, bleh.
- assisted suicide has better co op functionality than lotf multiplayer.
overall, ive spent more of my gameplay in lotf being frustrated at bugs, poor functionality or outright bullshit. i dont have that much time to play games in general so i dont really feel bothered to spend what time i do have slogging through bullshit. souls titles and lies of p had a lot of frustration, but at the end it felt worth it going through that because they had something exciting and conclusive to offer. lords of the fallen just teases and edges me all the time, its like using a fleshlight with no holes. also heard ng+ doesnt have vestiges, wtf?
- assisted suicide has better co op functionality than lotf multiplayer
Hilarious. Can you explain more? I was hoping to play it coop.
@@Tackitt i am on pc, so i can only say for pc. when co op functions, its pretty decent. summoning a friend is your best bet, its the most seamless. a lot of people complain that you cant pick up quest or boss items as a non-host, but imo you shouldnt really be able to. randomly however, sometimes it will take up to 45 minutes just to summon one person, either for them to leave or disconnect. invaders will either disconnect or be way too overleveled and one shot you. invading yourself either disconnects you or its super laggy. on paper its not a bad system, its just bug infested and feels unfinished. seems to be an unfortunate habit for this game
@@zzenqi34 I'm on pc as well. I'd mostly be playing with the wife, maybe a friend if I can find one to run through it. The boss/quest item thing isn't a big deal since I'm used to it with Souls. But doing each level twice sounds potentially tedious in this. I appreciate your feedback.
So everything you described actually really sold the game for me. I don't think you're wrong about what you said, I just am not a roomba player, and I've been missing ds1 world design ever since I played it. The only thing I am still wondering is how the story is for the game.
Story is a more blatant version of elden ring: theological schizobabble.
I’ve got some solid hours in, and can honestly say if you enjoyed ds 1 you’ll like this game as you can definitely see it’s influence on world design. The story so far is decent enough it’s somewhat of a generic dark fantasy theme but it’s kept my attention. On ps5 I haven’t had any game breaking bugs only a few textures not loading properly here or there but I play offline so idk if multiplayer adds to the bugs. Overall I’d say the game is a solid 8/10 for me.
trust me, it doesn't reach DS1 world design. its better than more recent fromsoft games (so decent), but its not ds1. the interconnectivity within individual areas is actually really good, like the shortcut design can be very cool (though sometimes useless). the interconnectivity BETWEEN those areas exists, however its next to useless since you can just fast travel most places anyway. its like DS1's interconnectivity post-lordvessel. it sometimes matters since you cant fast travel everywhere, but very rarely.
What's the appeal of DS1 world design if you aren't someone who enjoys exploring the areas' nooks and crannies? Or do you just like the sound of a game's levels connecting to each other and find it worth being impressed by that alone? It still isn't like DS1 in that regard, and concerning level design or just about anything there was nothing said in this review that gives off the impression that LotF is anything like DS1, which it isn't. There's maybe 20-25 enemy types tops too if you include all the enemies that have shown up as minibosses.
@@lumberdumperslamlets-go1179 ds1s earlygame world design matters no matter how you play it
LotF doesn't need the same high commitment as other soulslikes, you need to keep in mind that LotF throws way more enemies at you. You should see it more as an action RPG with soulslike elements. If attacking and dodging were as high commitment as Dark Souls it would just not be balanced around all the waves of enemies you're constantly dealing with.
Uhhhh, there would be less enemies then genius. That's better design
That is true but I think the point he's making is that it would be more enjoyable if the attacks were higher commitment and also there were less enemies.
Good review, just finished the game and I share almost all the feelings you have on the game. The lasts bosses are not worth enduring the pain of the last zones which are overwhelmed with too many mobs and especially previous bosses mobs. I enjoyed the journey but not enough to try NG+ or see the other ends.
I have been ground down to that conclusion as well. I’m a radiance build with 70 radiance. My best spells are hitting for over two-thousand damage and that isn’t enough to bring down a freaking rhogar witch. The amount of damage these enemies can do on top of how much health they have, is ridiculous. I had to stop and take a break. It’s worse than DS2 in this regard.
What's worst is that the extra classes are locked behind the endings smh. I don't think im even half way through the game and I stopped because i was getting frustrated with enemy placements. This is the second game I regret buying this year.
@@DWN-024ShadowMan
I don’t think enemy placement is too bad, it’s the fact that once you get to the end game, virtually every single enemy has a strong ranged attack. Witch? Barrages of fireballs and aoe spam. Proselytes? Fire-spike barrages that shred half your health bar in just one volley. Even the zombies shoot fireballs that tear off a third of your health bar, and they are everywhere. Bramis Castle was the first rage quit I had during the entire game. It’s bs.
@@DWN-024ShadowManwhat was the first one?
@@roachies4242 Baldur's Gate 3.
Id give this game another chance after 1.5 patch. Enemy density among other things have been re-tuned and it feels pretty manageable for the most part imo and I could explore a good deal of the areas like in other souls type games when I played recently. Especially since every build has good range options and the games designed around that.
Id keep going just for Judge Cleric if you didnt get to her. Shes a From quality boss imo. Speaking of apparently bosses got moves added that some were missing and were made all around stronger but most are still not too tough.
Game still has rough patches like enemy variety being sparse a lot of the time, reuse of minor bosses way too liberally, the way umbral works can still be a ganky mess, vestige seed system is still kind of nonsense, and the interconnected world isnt really beneficial like in DS1 because fast travel is unlimited from the getgo. But I still kinda dig it. I wasnt for the first like 10 hours similar to you but suddenly I couldnt stop playing it was odd but yeah its aight Lies of P was better but this is still worthwhile on like a sale.
I go back and forth between liking this game and just being disappointed. Everything you’ve said is what I said when I was streaming it and I got so much hate for it. And there were TH-camrs that I enjoy watching who shilled for this so hard. I feel like I’m wasting my time and energy trying to get through it
You've actually sold me to look more into this game and prolly get it when a sale hits. As you explained it sounds like it plays like Remnant 1/2 but your melee now
but remnant 2 is great though
as well as 1!
I am normally a quite picky gamer, im not gonna play a game that i dont enjoy just to play it and this game sure does have its problems and ive gotten frustrated at times but i am still enjoying the game. I just cant decide if i rly like the game or if its insanely mid.
and now
Disagree for most of your negatives here.
Especially when you said something along the lines of: "Good level design isn't supposed to make you want to run through the levels and not explore"
The level design in Lord of the Fallen creating a decision for the player to either try and clear an area or explore while actively on the run is a super novel design that I am very much happy mad it into a souls-like game.
The garbage enemies building up creating a pressure for you to keep moving helps take the more boring methodical edge that is so typical of souls-likes and puts the player in more situations to make split decisions.
This situation is suuuper rewarding for a souls-like veteran because we aren't spending time panicing to figure out controls, we are really just gaging what fights we think we want to take, and what we would rather ignore. At the risk of missing items or secrets no less. It is a very compelling premise, one that I hope makes it into many more souls-likes!
I 100% completed the first original game, and DLC, on xbox. And loved it. It took 3 full playthroughs and loved it.
It is so ****** TEDIOUS to explore and kill all the enemies, again again and again... I completely agree with you there. Pieta's sword that you get is a pure faith short sword with reach of a zweihander. Most of the time I ended up out DPSing a boss or enemies because of how fast I can swing and how much damage I can put out in such a short window.
I restated into a quality build (40/40) and since the game gives me ranged options and so many ammunition bags & pouches, I just end up using my flying Mjolnir of a hammer to kill everything because it does 1k damage. What is the point of engaging in close combat with a giant sword, when I can spam ranged weapons endlessly ? And I have to use ranged weapons to deal with absurd amount of enemies to not get overwhelmed.
Agree, I want to explore, loot all things, learn more about the lore and unlock secrets. I just get what I can, speed run the umbral area and get to the boss. repeat again and again
First time I have agree with 💯 of a review. And you even made me appreciate a little bit the Parry/Guard mechanic of this game. Well done!
I cant say i agree with the takes on visual design as well as the level design. I do think attack speed could probably slow down. The boss fights in my playthrough were fairly difficult enough but speeding up heavy weapons can somewhat make light weapons and daggers obsolete by comparison. One thing that i didnt see mentioned in other people’s vids/reviews was some of the voice acting being a little sub-par (at least for the characters i’ve seen thus far). I think Pieta’s voice acting (not the actress herself) is pretty weak. I dont think the slightly European but mostly american-ized accent really pulls me out of the game. I wish that they went in a different direction or spent more time for her character considering shes basically our ‘firekeeper’ npc that we likely interact with the most. Nonetheless i respect ratatoskr’s opinion on the game even if i disagree in a few areas. Keep up the detailed reviews and great vids!
this company is like having obsession with darksoul 2, every single game they make either clunky or mob density or something both
Actually one of the things I disliked the most about Lords of the Fallen is that there is a particular boss in the game that is a straight rip off of the Twin Princes Fight from DS3. Sure the mechanics of the fight are different but from the boss room, to the intro cutscene, to the mage/knight duo setup, to the second merging phase, to the second phase's cutscene EVERYTHING felt the same from an aesthetic point of view. The boss design barely feels inspired and borders on plagiarism.
All excellent points. Actually, my main beef is disorientation. I get lost constantly and the cluttered environments and enemy density/frequency makes it hard to get my bearings again. Will try it again in a few months when they’ve had time to implement all the player feedback.
I am playing it at the moment and I am enjoying it. Really appreciate the fact that it's not trying to be a Dark Souls/Elden Ring while having similarities.
Interesting idea with the spellswapping only thing that would be weird when it comes to implementing that sort of system in elden ring would be how it interacts with charged spells.
First thing I thought of. In any other DS game, it'd probably work well, but charged spells mean a different shortcut key is needed.
A is default hot key for your default slotted spell. To charge any others hold down the hot key. 🤷♂️
At this point people are just hating on the game because its popular to hate on it.
No thanks, I'd like to keep 100% phys block instead. Block if you want to play passively, parry if you want to play aggressively.
Yeah idk why they insisted on this, even if you get successful parries you still receive wither damage. It’s really dumb.
It’s why Dark Souls is super popular to begin with, they don’t really care how you approach combat, everything is valid. No idea why LotF insists on punishing players that want to use a shield for safety on their first play-through.