Lords of the Fallen (2023) sticks very close to the Dark Souls formula

2014’s Lords of the Fallen was one of the earlier makes an attempt on the half of studios hoping to emulate the success of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, the forbidding classics that fashioned the foundational inspiration for the “Soulslike” subgenre of motion role-playing video games. It was… wonderful? Coming from small-time Polish writer CI Games and German developer Deck13, Lords of the Fallen was, most reviewers agreed, a strong, workmanlike try at the Souls formula that made it a little bit simpler, a little bit crunchier, and a little bit extra colourful, with out bringing a lot new to the desk.

Now we’ve a reboot — first introduced as The Lords of the Fallen, now reverting to the plain previous definite-article-free model of the title. In the intervening 9 years (or 1,000 years, inside the sport’s world), issues haven’t gotten any extra cheerful, or much less in thrall to the works of Hidetaka Miyazaki and his staff. It appears that CI Games has determined the downside with Lords of the Fallen (2014) was that it wasn’t sufficient like Dark Souls.

I’m being a little bit unfair. Lords of the Fallen (2023) does introduce some fascinating mechanical twists of its personal, together with a parallel worlds conceit that suggestions its hat to The Legend of Zelda and makes the affect of Nintendo’s video games on FromSoft’s even clearer. But, primarily based on a preview that concerned enjoying via its first few hours, the new sport — made by HexWorks, a Spanish-Romanian developer based by CI Games for the goal — strains onerous to get as close to the structural intricacy, cautious fight, and dank, despairing vibe of the Dark Souls trilogy because it probably can. In doing so, HexWorks bumps up towards the incontrovertible fact that imitating FromSoft’s artistry is one factor, however capturing its essence is kind of one other.

Image: HexWorks/CI Games

One of Lords of the Fallen’s largest jumps towards Dark Souls is obvious as quickly as you begin a brand new sport. The unique had a preset lead character, however right here you’ll be able to fiddle with a personality creator to forge your individual, working from 9 class archetypes. Participants in the preview had been suggested to start with one of the 4 melee lessons (a typical knight, a barbarian sort, a flail-and-crossbow-wielding Partisan, and a extra dextrous infantryman); additionally out there had been an murderer, a jack-of-all-trades ranger, magic customers specializing in hearth and light-weight spells, and the mysterious, fiendish Condemned class.

Whichever you select, you can be a Dark Crusader, toiling via the cursed world on a quest to overthrow the demon god Adyr. Everything about the setting is imbued with an intense, doom-filled cheerlessness, proper down to the title of the realm: Mournstead. In the writing and artwork, HexWorks is clearly going for FromSoft’s mix of ruined excessive fantasy, ornate language, and epic melancholy. (Even the fonts and the association of the person interface are familiarly sad-looking.) But FromSoft’s distinctive tone is inconceivable to replicate completely, and the try on this case ceaselessly wobbles over into metal-album-cover overkill or Renaissance-fair camp, as characters with spikes throughout their helmets start traces with “thusly” or talk about “the bestowment of this subsequent boon.” Hooks by which you’ll pull platforms towards you might be incarnated as wailing specters; defeat a miniboss, and “Heresy purged!” is blazoned throughout the display screen.

Dark Souls gamers will really feel more and more at house as they make their means via the tutorial, die as meant at the first boss, and start selecting cautious routes via a semi-linear, interconnected world with vertiginous verticality. Lords of the Fallen’s strongest promoting level may be that it maintains the circuitous, detailed, nearly Metroidvania-like degree design of Demon’s and Dark Souls in the face of Elden Ring’s extra open strategy, even when it might probably’t declare to function on the identical degree. It gives a lot of alternatives to comically fall off ledges in the midst of a combat, as custom calls for.

Image: HexWorks/CI Games

Its gimmick, nonetheless, is that the participant can transfer between the realms of the residing (Axiom) and the lifeless (Umbral), utilizing the sport’s key merchandise, an Umbral Lantern. You can peek into Umbral utilizing the lantern, and cross into it in the event you see a route ahead not current in Axiom — a platform (made of bones and rotting flesh, of course), maybe, or an empty lake mattress. But you’ll be able to solely make the return journey at preset factors, together with the Vestiges that play the half of bonfires in Lords of the Fallen.

Umbral additionally softens the issue degree of its chosen style — up to a degree. If you die in Axiom, you might be resurrected in Umbral, then given one other likelihood to defeat your enemy earlier than you hand over the ghost utterly and wish to corpse-run from the final Vestige to reclaim your Vigor (Lords of the Fallen’s souls). This doesn’t refresh your therapeutic gadgets, although, and the longer you spend in Umbral, the extra Dread builds up, and the trickier issues get. Enemies get harder, and rising numbers of zombielike creatures materialize in your path — they’re simple to kill, however their presence complicates the battlefield significantly.

Lords of the Fallen isn’t impressed, however it’s a well-sorted sport: responsive, playable, balanced, and honest, which on this style is not any simple feat. The fight is exact, fluid, and sooner than the unique sport’s, situated someplace between Dark Souls’ defensiveness and Bloodborne’s aggression. I think it’ll come into its personal in the extra fragile and showy caster lessons, however it’ll take extra time and a extra expert participant than I’m to check that hunch.

Image: HexWorks/CI Games

It is, maybe, a little bit overdesigned, heaping on a spread of ideas. There’s posture harm and a stagger system. There’s withered harm, which is sustained in a spread of circumstances and reduces your most well being, not not like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s gloom, however which will be partly reclaimed in the event you hit your enemy first (it’s fuzzily defined, and I didn’t get my head round it throughout these first hours). Soul Flay — a transfer that makes use of your lantern to extract enemies’ souls from their our bodies, permitting you to pile on additional harm to their incorporeal kind — comes with its personal useful resource that may solely be topped up by Soul Siphoning from enemies and useful resource nodes. There are stances, combos, backstabs, and so forth.

It’s too early to inform how properly this initially unintuitive design will gel collectively. But complexity like that is grist to the seasoned Soulslike participant’s mill, and it’s to HexWorks’ credit score that, at the very least, the complexity doesn’t overly get in the means of the moment-to-moment fight, which feels robust, consequential, and crisp. Based on these first impressions, Lords of the Fallen doesn’t have a persona of its personal — not in the means Team Ninja’s takes on the style, Nioh and Wo Long, do, for instance — however maybe “pretty good Soulslike, for people who really like Soulslikes” is all the persona it wants.

Lords of the Fallen can be launched on Oct. 13 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.