The rundown temples, dusty reliquaries, bleak caverns, and unhallowed abbeys all contribute to the grimdark aesthetic of the forsaken Kingdom of Mournstead. On an even stronger note, the art direction of Lords of the Fallen already looks inspired and impressive. Another battle against a pair of conjoined twins, Tancred and Reinhold, will remind Souls fans of the difficult fight against Lothric and Lorian. There was a large, lumbering monster called the Congregator of Flesh that tried to squash the player and became more dangerous as its health was chipped away. That said, the boss fights I saw looked right on par with what you might expect from a Souls-like. Given that the build was still in alpha, there’s still time for CI Games to polish the animations here. Furthermore, if you want to make your experience even easier, you can play the game with a friend in seamless co-op that won’t require you to fiddle around with summoning circles and co-op items.įrom what I saw throughout the demo, the game could improve enemy reactions to getting hit to make it clearer when an attack goes through. If it doesn’t go through, the maneuver will default to a block, so this should make defense less risky. Instead of a dedicated button for parries, pressing the block button right before getting hit will initiate a parry. The game also introduces a hotkey system to allow players to combine physical strikes with any assigned magical abilities more seamlessly, so long as you can nail down all the button presses. You can even mix one-handed and two-handed attacks within the same combo. Your character is proficient with pretty much any weapon, stringing together light and heavy attacks like a champ. While I can’t say with certainty how well Lords of the Fallen compares to Dark Souls in terms of combat, as I didn’t get any hands-on time with the game, it looks like CI Games has taken a lot of time to make fights feel solid and flexible. Souls searching Combat, whether with steel or magic, aims to be fast and fluid. The developers also wanted to point out the work they put into the opening tutorial section, which they felt was lacking in the original game. Either way, your character is put in the role of a dark crusader who is trying to prevent the resurrection of the demon God, Adyr. You can choose from among nine preset classes to make it easy to get straight into the game, or you can take the time to build a custom class to better suit your playstyle. In fact, within just the first five minutes of the demo, it became clear to me that this version of Lords of the Fallen might as well be an altogether different game to its predecessor.īefore delving into the gameplay, I was shown the character creator, which has a strong amount of customization options and a body shape slider that, with the power of Unreal Engine 5, will automatically change the shape of any armor to fit your character. This was largely because CI Games had a wealth of content to show in a very short period of time, especially when it came to the Umbral world (more of this later). The appointment I had with CI Games at GDC 2023, where the developer showed a roughly 30-minute hands-off alpha demo of the game on PC, was done at a blistering pace. After years of learning what fans want from the Souls series, this Lords of the Fallen reboot is their effort to improve upon its past work and craft what it believes a Dark Souls 4 might look like. Fast forward nine years to now and CI Games, along with new developer Hexworks, wants to take another crack at it. It was one of the first major attempts by a developer to create what we now call a “Souls-like,” though it concentrated on a specific character called Adyr and wasn’t as polished and fine-tuned as Dark Souls. If the name “Lords of the Fallen” rings a bell, that’s because it's a dark fantasy action RPG by CI Games and Deck13 that was released back in 2014 to a more or less mixed reception.
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