Lords of the Fallen Previews
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In anticipation of its tomorrow release, we have rounded up a few more previews of City Interactive and Deck13's fantasy action-RPG, Lords of the Fallen.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a brief write-up from Rich Stanton, who will apparently also write the review:
The feel of combat is also distinct, surprisingly so given how much it borrows, with encounters neither as deadly nor as fast as those in any Souls game. The key tactic for Souls, in my opinion, is never getting hit which makes mastering how to roll an essential skill. LotF features three different rolling speeds (as in Souls) but the slower pace of battles means that even the fastest roll feels sluggish by comparison and anyway, blocking is much more viable and your dude can take more of a beating. I cannot emphasise this aspect enough: in Souls you can be wearing the fanciest armour in the game, and still get slaughtered by a guy in a loincloth with a pointy stick. Here the minor enemies feel much more like cannon fodder, doing relatively little damage and easy to dispatch with random swinging.
What all this adds up to is a kind of Souls-lite combat system where the elements are the same but something's slightly off about the rhythm. This may very well be to do with the fact that the preview build had only the first location in the game to wander around in, so obviously the enemies are going to be weaker than what's to come. But even then the bosses were something of a disappointment. Both had a tower shield gimmick that meant you had to wait for their attacks, get a swing in, then back off and do the same until they were dead maybe I'm missing something but I couldn't find another tactic. Things got even worse when trying to do them using the dual-wieldable weapons, which depend on your building up a perfect combo to deal out a third super-damaging strike, because the window to get hits in was too small for that strike to ever happen. This was particularly disappointing because the Souls games allow such divergent playstyles to work pretty much any weapon can be used to defeat any enemy, and your approach to the huge bosses can be either super-cautious or all-out. Here it seemed like there was one strategy to pwn them all.
YouTuber "VaatiVidya" calls it "Clunky Souls", though apparently that's not meant as a negative:
While Force Strategy Gaming has a couple of videos, one showing some general gameplay, and the other showing the "Worshiper" boss fight:
