His name is Harkyn. He exits conversation not with a
goodbye, but with a gruff "I don't care," as if he can barely be
bothered to embark on the quest at hand. Harkyn may not be delighted by
the adventure he's been thrust into, but I can claim no such apathy:
Lords of the Fallen is a dark-fantasy pleasure, cut from the same cloth
as Dark Souls,
yet distinct enough to earn its own spotlight and, perhaps, to earn
your affection as well. Harkyn himself is not easy to love, but
ultimately, he doesn't matter as much as the world he serves and the
hammers he swings.
"World" might be too generous a word,
actually: You spend most of your time in corridors and combat arenas,
not gazing onto spacious landscapes. Lords of the Fallen's dramatic
citadel and hushed monastery are suffering from the invasion of
otherworldly flesh-monsters and armored behemoths. Snowy peaks may rise
in the distance, but you will not be breathing in their refreshing air.
Lords of the Fallen means to choke you with smoke and poison, and to
crush you between the stone slabs that line its monumental suspended
bridge. The view from this bridge says more about this world than words
can convey. Ahead of you lies the gaping maw of a demonic temple hungry
for your flesh. The massive chains that connect your destination to the
bridge must have taken hundreds of hours to forge. Two colossal soldiers
are carved into the mountain on either side of the entrance, warning
you of the blood that will soon be spilled. This is Lords of the Fallen:
ponderous and unwelcoming. There is no hiding from its dangers.
Unwisely, the game insists on trying to weave a coherent
story into these spaces, with each of Harkyn's cohorts and various audio
logs tossing up a word salad that does little to get you invested. In
time, the story begins to make sense, but this cliched tale of the
balance between good and evil isn't the reason to press on. Instead,
it's better to let the frozen walkways and giant braziers speak for
themselves. You may begin your adventure in a holy sanctuary, but this
place seeks to murder you. Consider the titles of the bosses you fight.
Guardian. Beast. Champion. Who needs proper names, when "Annihilator"
gets the point across? These titans and their lesser cohorts have no
other purpose than to kill.
You
fight several such rivals in the first few hours (out of 20 or so)
alone, though it takes time to reach the most formidable ones. In the
meanwhile, you roam the game's corridors from a third-person
perspective, swinging an axe or sword, dodging or blocking incoming
attacks, and occasionally calling on the gods of magic to give you a
hand when you most need it. It's almost impossible not to draw the
obvious comparisons to the Souls series here. An energy meter depletes
when you block, roll, and attack, forcing you to closely manage your
defenses lest you leave yourself vulnerable to damage. Different melee
weapons require different approaches, but Lords of the Fallen gives each
of them an authentic sense of weight. Combat requires understanding of
how long it takes to swing that humongous greatsword you carry, and how
much time that fire-breathing thing you're fighting takes to prepare its next blow.
Lords of
the Fallen's dramatic citadel and hushed monastery are suffering from
the invasion of otherworldly flesh-monsters and armored behemoths.
So
far, so Dark Souls then. Compared head to head, Souls games are
superior to Lords of the Fallen in most given areas: Dark Souls is more
mysterious, more difficult, and more diverse, and Lords of the Fallen
features no online connectivity. To call Lords of the Fallen a poor
man's Dark Souls sells it entirely too short, however. For one, Lords of
the Fallen strikes a different kind of tone. It is moody and
oppressive, but rarely terrifying; it is a power fantasy, not a
heart-wrenching death simulator that rolls deadly boulders at you as if
you are a single, miniscule bowling pin. The art style reflects the
difference: armor and architecture is less Medieval, chunkier and
excessively ornate, mirroring Harkyn's strength and confidence. Lords of
the Fallen has a few challenges, but it's rare for you to feel frail or
afraid: the game simply isn't hard enough to make your blood boil.
That's at least true in the main world; the visits you make to a shadowy
and sinister otherworld are more frightening.
Those
visits bring great reward if you can conquer the darkness. Traversing
this otherworld is like exploring a foggy dessert during the witching
hour: you can barely see further than the tip of your blade, which make
the occasional glimpse of light a true ray of hope. There is tribulation
to undergo, however, before you reach possible treasure. Your steps
into the beyond lead you first to easily-dispatched knights and mutants,
which require only that you put the finicky targeting system to good
use. Soon, though, you could encounter a rolling fire demon whose
flaming carapace will quickly scorch your flesh. Your introduction to
this dimension is a limited one, fortunately: you open a few treasure
chests in the hope of finding a rune for upgrading your equipment, a new
armor set, or an item that temporarily protects you from poison, and
then return to the land of women and men. You reach this realm by
entering portals that only unlock when you have killed some unknown
beast. You will come to identify an available nearby portal by the
crackles and creaks it makes as it opens, as if it's made of ancient
tendons that haven't often had a chance to stretch. The
grind to level up is minimal, and while death is likely, it's not
frequent enough to elicit heartache. When you perish, you leave behind
your ghost and (usually) revive at whichever ruby crystal you last saved
at. Your ghost contains all the experience you have accumulated since
the prior death, but it doesn't remain forever, so it's in your best
interests to go retrieve it, and to be timely about it, at least in the
early hours. Every fallen enemy will have respawned after your death,
but you will be armed with the knowledge of what lies ahead of you. You
will also be armed with some spells and a gauntlet that shoots out magic
projectiles, spews fire, and helps open new pathways. Selecting and
casting spells is a matter of pressing or holding a button: there's no
need to switch from a dagger to a wand if you want to punch a demon in
the groin with your quake skill. There are no bows and arrows in Lords
of the Fallen: it's all swords and sorcery. You can engorge on magic
when leveling up and make quick work of the three-legged freak known as
the infiltrator if you play your cards right. I prefer the heaviest
killing tools, however, coming close enough to my foes to smell their
breath.
You will probably not sob when your ghost
expires and you leave behind all your experience. Experience can be
regained easily, and in the last several hours, you accumulate too
little experience from killing enemies to mind the loss. The bosses may
parade around their ominous titles and roar with indignance, but most of
them are more bark than bite: if you have Souls experience, many will
go down on the first attempt. The challenge ramps up nicely during the
lead-up to the final showdown, however, beginning with a double-boss
encounter that signals trouble to come. The
greatest challenge Lords of the Fallen provides isn't a welcome one:
it's easy to lose yourself in the crypts and corridors, unsure of where
the game means for you to go. Every region cleverly connects with
others, and unlocking a new door often leads you to a familiar area,
provoking cries of "Eureka!" That interconnectedness can also be a
burden, however, particularly when a loading screen is there to
interrupt your travels. Dark Souls has no quest log, yet smartly uses
its visual diversity and clear environmental gating to direct you. Lords
of the Fallen tells you what you must do, but some areas are so
circuitous and same-ish, and some entrances so subtle, that the game can
become aimless. Backtracking is sometimes required, so you may not know
where the right path lies.
Intriguing subtleties
ultimately overcome any resulting tedium, however. You choose whether to
save a man's life by amputating his arm--and then, whether to offer him
a potion to help heal the wound you dealt him. Offering the potion
diminishes your available (and replenishable) health draught count by
one, but I was never sure if I had earned any reward for allowing him to
live. Soon afterwards, I convinced a fellow warrior to spare a monk's
life; I'm not sure there were any repercussions, but I was at least
content to know that Harkyn was not always the vile executioner others
insisted he was. Later, you get to make a more interesting life-or-death
decision, and in at least one case, can circumvent danger entirely.
Lords of the Fallen has a brief brush with mystery in these
circumstances, inspiring "what if" quandaries. What if I ignore the
order to request a group of deserters? What if I go around the monster
rather than meet it head-on? Should there be a Lords of the Fallen 2, I
hope for more what-ifs, and more-meaningful consequences to accompany
them.
The bosses may parade around their ominous titles and roar with indignance, but most of them are more bark than bite.
Superficially,
you could call Lords of the Fallen a Souls game for the meek and the
uninitiated. But it earns more respect than such a flippant description.
Lords of the Fallen isn't about the game that it isn't, but the game
that it is. It's about the ghoulish blacksmith, his glowing eyes, and
the long tufts of stiff hair that rise from his scalp. It's about the
crunches of iron against bone when your hammer finds its mark. It's
about taking in new sights and sounds, and about finding new ways to
travel to old ones. It's about that suspended bridge, the monuments that
guard it, and the creatures waiting within. Harkyn may have no use for
these places, but there are riches inside nonetheless.
MINIMUM REQUIREMENT:
CPU:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 @ 2.66GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3.0GHz
CPU Speed:
Info
RAM:
6 GB
OS:
Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7 (SP1) or Windows 8 (only 64 bit OSs)
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