Everything Wrong With Lords of Fallen In One Fight

Here is a little bit of context for those who played the Elden Ring or Dark Souls series. Lords of the Fallen is a new souls-like game made by Hexworks.

The studio has a history of making souls-like games, with this being a second installment in the series or, more accurately, a remake of the lore, world, and pretty much everything else.

While I find a new installment an improvement on every aspect over the first Lords of The Fallen, the game definitely has some issues. In my opinion, it doesn’t come close to any releases from From Software Studio.

Overall, I find Lords of the Fallen to be a fun experience, but what I’m about to describe is everything wrong with the game contained in a single boss fight, so here we go.

Fief of the Chill Curse

This is the area where our troubles start… and they start not even with a big true boss. They begin with a mini-boss named Kinrangr Guardian Folard. 

This thing later in the zone just becomes a normal trash mob you have to deal with, and before you start laughing and tell me to GIT GUD, it took me three tries to kill this “boss.”

Now, if I killed him so fast, what could possibly make this article and voice such a bold claim? 

Well, here is my explanation.

The very first time I entered this room, I saw the boss and three dogs lying around him, so at first, I thought, I’m going to shoot these bitches with my crossbow. Well, that was my second thought.

My first one was, “OMG, not another shitty boss with ads.” So even though I am a unga bunga, I hit things with my big weapon strength build guy I got and upgraded my crossbow because ads are a nightmare to deal with my slow, colossal weapon.

So I shoot the first one and notice an umbral parasite protecting them and the boss.

Fine, I think to myself and start moving towards it to siphon it with my lamp. Then I noticed the second thing: the whole area that you fight a boss in is in shallow water, which makes your character move at a walking sleep, making you a slow fat target, and that is a problem if you are trying to get to the other side of the room to take care of the parasite to make boss and ads vulnerable. 

I try anyway, and while holding the lamp, I get attacked from the back and die. Fine, I think to myself and run towards the area again, and then I have an excellent idea.

You know what? I think to myself, I’m just going to risk it and go straight into Umbral so I don’t get slowed down by the water. I will run through and get the parasite quickly and finish this. So I do just that, and guess what? I kid you not: there is another mini-boss called Mendacious Visage in Umbral. 

You know them, right? It’s the most annoying walking face rock thing that you have to hit in the back or wait for it to open its face so you can do damage to it. Needless to say, unlike some godlike gamers who are sure to spawn another in the comment section, that ad and mini-boss were impossible for me to deal with, so I died again after a brief fight.

And here comes my point… Every time you try to deal with a “mechanic” (more like annoyance) that devs put into this boss room, the same devs deny you. Instead of getting rewarded for thinking of a solution to deal with ads or the poodle of water, they put some cheap mechanic in to deny you. 

So what are you left with? 

How do you fight this boss? 

Well, you run in roll towards the enemies, lure them away by rolling through the puddle back to the fog wall you just came from, and then roll back towards the parasite and pull out your lamp to try to get rid of it before the ads come back and smack you as you are helplessly holding the lamp up, sucking out the parasite. 

Then you wait for an opening dogging through attacks of three ads and a boss that takes forever, and then you can finally fight this mini-boss one-on-one and try to learn his attack patterns.

Now I ask you, in what universe does any of this sound fun? 

Fun difficult vs annoying difficult

I have a saying about games and difficulty: there is “fun difficult,” and then there is “annoying difficult“. Fun difficult is something Souls series have mastered over the years, and it includes throwing yourself at the boss until you learn his movements and patterns and eventually kill him, whether this takes ten pulls or 100 pulls. 

Fun difficult includes well-telegraphed move sets, and if there are annoying or one shooting mechanics, fun difficult gives you the tools to counter them (a perfect example of this is Mohg’s “NIHILLLLLL!!” in Elden Ring that can be countered by an item that you can put in your flask or sacrificing 3 of potions). You can also bind him with a shackle, stunning him for a few seconds.

Now, annoying difficult (well, to be honest, just annoying as the mini-boss is not that hard) is what we have in Lords of the Fallen. There are several annoying mechanics put together in the same boss room. When you try to counter them using tools the game gives you, the devs show you the middle finger. 

At the same time, they cackle and make you deal with it the hard way: “No counters, pls mister.” Otherwise, the boss will be too easy as it’s just a buffed up trash mob that we put in here for God knows what reason and it feels like playing the game against the developer rather than playing a game against the game. 

It’s almost like the Lords of the Fallen devs are trying to defeat a player rather than designing a challenge for the player to overcome. 

The bright spot in this is the devs seem to be extremely receptive to feedback, and we can only hope that future DLCs and the next game will have stuff like this removed and will bring it closer to the perfection that is Elden Ring because who would not want another one of those.

Am I right? Have a nice day, reader, and thanks for reading my rant.