There was recently a decent article over on Waypoint from Patrick about how Dark Souls had not only been a phenomenon, but that it invented an entirely new sub-genre.

As more and more games like Lords or the Fallen come out - or Nioh in the case of the article - and we refer to them as being "Dark Souls clones" or "like Dark Souls" eventually we'll have to accept these games on their own merits and no longer compare them to their originator. In the early days of the PS2, we had a lot of "GTA clones." After Gears of War was the hottest third person shooter around, "Gears-cover system" was a common phrase. "Monster Hunter clone" is another that springs out of Japan from time to time. There is an entire era from the the PS1 to the PS2 where third person, fixed-perspective horror games were "Resident Evil clones." Eventually, the phrases that rely on familiarity with the source material fade, and we accept the game just for being what it is. No one is really calling anything a "GTA clone" anymore. They're just urban open world games now. Or to borrow Patrick's example: We say "first person shooter" now, not "Doom clone."

So for lacking a better term at this point, Lords of the Fallen is a "Soulslike." And that's okay. But so long as we're borrowing phrases, we may as well appropriate another: When you come at the king, you best not miss. Lords of the Fallen is a pretty hard miss.

• The control fundamentals of this subgenre are already established, and this game fudges them all.

As I've tried to establish above, and in my head before I even began playing, it's perfectly okay to emulate an existing franchise. The act of the imitation, which I don't use as a derogatory word, isn't a bad thing. I don't hold being derivative, alone, against something. Most art is derivative! Games, however, are an inherently more mechanical medium than something more passive like books or film, and so a baseline of control competence is expected right out of the gate. If you're a first person shooter coming out in the year 2017, for instance, your game cannot control worse than Call of Duty. This is just an unwritten rule. The baseline level of competence is already established and it is no longer excusable to come under it. There are plenty of spins on the formula you can have, and plenty of room for improvement, but every year the bar gets raised. Lords of the Fallen's controls come well below this bar.

Harkyn, the game's protagonist, moves like he's carrying 120 pounds of luggage. When sprinting, the camera goes into a Gears-esque Rhody Run, causing the camera to bounce and bob around the whole time. Camera control overall is incredibly swimmy, moving at an inconsistent speed and taking half a second or so to actually come to a stop once you finish moving it. And look, the Dark Souls camera has had plenty of criticisms, many of which are legitimate, but the Lords of the Fallen camera is like the difference between playing as Luigi or Mario. One moves at a consistent speed and can make precise, tight movements, and one has a greater top speed but always moves like it's on ice. It also helps that the Dark Souls camera will focus like a laser on what you're locked onto, whereas the Lords of the Fallen camera has a nasty tendency to take what you're locked onto more as a vague suggestion of where it's supposed to be facing.

In general, it's difficult to puzzle out Lords of the Fallen's "rules." Hit detection isn't the greatest here, with many enemies managing to clip you with attacks that very evidently did not actually connect to your body at all. Another constant frustration throughout the game was that the enemies you encounter never seem to play by the same stamina or staggering rules as you do. I played through more or less the entirety of the game with varying combinations of Heavy and Medium armor that kept me under the threshold for the mid-level dodge roll, with plenty of defense and poise, but even the wimpiest of attacks, with plenty of stamina, consistently knocked me out of attack animations. On the flip side, enemies will almost never stagger. You can wail on something physically smaller than you with three solid hits from your axe, and they'll just keep going through the motions, no reaction to your damage at all. It's sloppy all over the place, and just isn't much fun.

• But to try and play devil's advocate for a moment...

There is one little "control" improvement (if you could call it that) over the Souls games that I appreciated: When you knock an enemy down after a backstab, there's no bullshit invincibility frames on its recovery. Backstab it, knock it down, and just slash the shit out of him while its trying to stand up. Because of course, why would it be arbitrarily invincible during this time? Answer me, Dark Souls! Answer me!

I also appreciate the flipping on its head of the checkpoint system, which is neither better nor worse than bonfires, but a nice change of pace. As opposed to respawning the area's enemies when you hit a checkpoint and recover, you'll only regain a limited amount of health points, maintaining your progress through the zone. Until you die, at least. The flow of progression here, then, is to very carefully pick off enemy after enemy at a time, slowly chipping your way through the zone without dying, instead of always doing the whole zone in one attempt. To try and balance this, Lords of the Fallen puts a timer on your dropped experience on death, slowly deteriorating, putting a time pressure on getting back to where you were, but there are several ways to mitigate this, and honestly, since you can bank this experience at any time at a checkpoint, there's much less sacrifice involved. But still, it's a fresh idea that a later game could refine and put to good use.

There is value, too, in having a pre-defined character, presented in a more conventionally told narrative, and dialogue choices that are more in depth than weirdly out of place Yes or No answers like in the Souls games. On the technical side, this game also compresses its data to a mere handful of gigs, unlike the bloated, fifty gig monstrosities of other games this generation that really don't look like they deserve to be so huge. So kudos.

• It's just a shame that the story kind of sucks, and Lords of the Fallen's world feels so tiny.

What put a bad taste in my mouth pretty much immediately was the naming conventions put to use throughout the game. The demon horde ravaging the tiny little repetitive castle the world the game takes place in are called "Rhogar." Something about this just landed with me as some sort of lame, bland naming style my boring ass would've thought was cool as a fourteen year old, or what an RPG's "random name generator, just hit the Y button for a new name!" would've given you. It's like how Brad names his Souls characters "Floogan." It just smacks as something that isn't really their specialty, if you get what I mean. The random made-up naming of things reminded me a little of Two Worlds, except where Two Worlds is leaning hard into its camp value, this game is trying to be deadly serious.

To be truthful, I don't really understand or remember a whole lot about the story. So far as I can tell, the protagonist Harkyn is an ex-convict who escapes from captivity during a demon invasion with some dude named Kaslo, who I think is supposed to be his friend, but at the same time barely speaks to him? Leading the Rhogar are demonic generals termed "Lords" in service of the God of the demon realm whose name I have already forgotten. Ardyn? Adyr? I think that's it. This is the problem with random-name-generator names. You're tasked with felling the Lords, which leads up to plot revelations that don't have much impact whatsoever, and I think there's a moral choice at the end you can make on which side of this conflict you can ultimately help over the other.

I don't know, man. Sometimes less is more, especially if you're not exactly going to knock it out of the park with what you've got as it is. My level of comprehension with the story wasn't helped by the fact that on two separate occasions when playing Lords of the Fallen, the audio on all voices completely broke.

I was surprised, as well, by how often this game re-uses environments. For the first half of the game, I felt somewhat hopeful, looking forward to the new zones that were to come, but it became very clear that Lords of the Fallen insists you backtrack through zones you've already been in, and cuts off portions of zones with locked doors and arbitrary magic progress blockers instead of creating wholly new places. (And frankly, even what original zones exist are often claustrophobic, indoor spaces with repetitive, maze-like layouts.) In fact, near the end of the game, a random square area functioning more as the Citadel's basement suddenly becomes a boss arena. The two mobs just leap into frame out of nowhere with no explanation and suddenly, bam, re-used zone for a boss fight that has no context. Which is kind of this game in a nutshell.

• In an alternate reality, when Souls games had long come and gone, Lords of the Fallen might've been special.

Imitating the style of something as closely as Lords of the Fallen does is not without merit, but it has so much more impact in an environment when the audience you're targeting is under-served. I think back to 2009, when Torchlight released to everyone's pleasant surprise, and what a delightful little game that was. Torchlight, like this game in a way, was relatively small in scale and budget, but unlike Lords of the Fallen, it was hitting an audience that was starving for a game so blatantly like Diablo 2. There weren't really many games like that anymore, and even though Diablo 3 was in the works, it was still a ways off, and there was a perfectly opened window of opportunity for a similar style of game to thrive, even if it wasn't some massive, AAA undertaking.

Had Lords of the Fallen released in an era where Soulslikes had fallen on hard times, and that audience was starving for a new, fresh experience in that same vein, all of its faults may have been easier to overlook. Its small scope, it's messy controls, a story that doesn't really hit super well, but is still serviceable enough, etc, would've been minor details in reminding everyone "Hey, there are still people who want games like this!" Instead, though, Lords of the Fallen released just months after Dark Souls 2, and just months before Bloodborne and Scholar of the First Sin released mere days apart.

Maybe if I had been there on Day 1, it might've hit differently with me, especially since 2014 was the Year of Low Expectations, but at this stage, with the subgenre still thriving as it is, I struggle to find ways to recommend this game to people. If you want an experience like this, there are so many miles better options, with superior controls, level design, narratives, and build variety than anything Lords of the Fallen can offer. This game is outclassed by its contemporaries in almost every way. In the present environment, Lords of the Fallen is thoroughly mediocre.

Grow Home.

There's very little you could go on at length about with Grow Home, it being developed basically as a neat little experiment in some corner of an office by a handful of bored Ubisoft employees. Clocking in at only a few hours, Grow Home is the perfect kind of palate cleanser after playing through something as drab and frustrating as Lords of the Fallen, as it is anything but drab. It's a 3D platformer with a very simple mission: As a planet exploring robot, your job is to start at the surface of the planet and induce growth on a "Star Flower" so it reaches the upper atmosphere and produces seeds to send back home to Earth.

Presumably Earth at this point is a nightmarish hellhole that desperately needs new plants to continue sustaining life, but it's best not knowing.

• Grow Home is a colorful and innovative good time, but the wobbly controls are a borderline deal-breaker.

3D platformers seem like they're threatening to make a bit of a comeback in the last year or two, which would be a trend I welcome with open arms. Grow Home is, for the most part, a nice slow-paced platformer; collecting crystals, different items for travel throughout the environment, and ultimately growing the central objective, the Star Flower, way up into the sky. As a bite-sized experience, it's something I had a bunch of fun with for an afternoon, and since I've been progressing through the Giant Bombcasts all the way back from the very beginning, Grow Home is about as perfect a "podcast game" as games come.

As heartbreaking as this is for me to say, though, the single thing that holds this game back is simply that BUD, the cute little red robot protagonist, controls like his legs are made of jelly. This is a choice I simply don't understand, because I can't see how giving the player precise, tight controls would've made the experience anything but objectively better. I take no issue with the wall-climbing controls, those can stay just as they are even if they are a bit slow, but simply the act of standing up straight seems to be BUD's greatest nemesis, and any elevation makes him stumble around for his footing like he's completely wasted. I would've been happy to continue exploring Grow Home's fantastic looking environment had I been able to walk around normally, because anytime I'm carefully trying to climb and mantle my way over to a crystal I can clearly see stuck on the ceiling, and stumble and fall at the last moment, negating several minutes of painstaking, struggling effort to get there, it just instantly repels me from ever wanting to do it again.

Grow Home being just a couple hours long to complete the main objective brings things to a stop just as the frustration is beginning to overwhelm the happy fun time, which is for the best. It's a shame, though, because I would be thrilled to spend a dozen hours more in this environment if I had decent control over my movement, and I just don't understand why it has to be this way. But as a proof of concept, Grow Home is a bright and fun afternoon, with a caveat or two.

Lords was a game I would have liked it if was easier to play. You can argue that the first Dark Souls was obtuse about what all the stats did and meant, but I was at least able to find out on my own that the heavier I am, the slower I get and roll. I didn't see any change in gameplay when I was wearing nothing to wearing full gear in Lords and that was ultimately too frustrating. The first boss was where I saw this sluggish movement to be an actual problem. Attacks and swings that would have been easy to dodge with Dark Souls mechanics were difficult and would catch me mid-roll. It felt like my character was swimming in air to the ground rather than throwing himself out of the way. The difficulty in the Souls series, for me at least, was never in learning or combating the controls and in Lords that's exactly what it felt like. If the movement and/or animations were just a bit faster, I could've easily had a lot more fun with it.

All I remember about Lords of the Fallen was that I talked to some half-naked lady about Things and then half an hour later when I met her again, the characters acted like they'd never met before. Clearly continuity was something the devs couldn't be arsed with.

Just generally. that game violates the Cardinal Rule of Homages and Remakes: If you're going to associate yourself so closely with a pre-existing thing, then you'd damn well better be at least as good as that thing.

This was a rule violated by Lords of the Fallen, Might No. 9, Axiom Verge, and the recent Ghostbusters movie.

This is one of those games that looked interesting when it came out but which I never bothered to go back and check out when it got cheaper (if it has gotten cheaper?). One thing I know for sure is that we really need to come up with a better term than "Dark Souls clones." My idea: take From Software, throw in the word "homage," and voila: Frommage. It also means "cheese" in French.

I made it about halfway through the game before putting it down; I liked some parts and I really disliked some parts.

I thought the controls were serviceable enough and I agree, the characters were forgettable, as was the story, the level design and environments.... but some of the fights and special abilities were good fun and I enjoyed my time with it for the most part.

Though, after some particularly bad encounters, frustration set in and the game just didn't seem worthy of extended exercises of patience so I put it down.

I got a few hours into Lords and was turned off by the swimmy controls, unsurprisingly enough. There's something to be said for the way that game makes everything feel weighty, from the way Harkyn moves to the impact of most weapons, but there's another thing entirely when that comes at the expense of responsiveness.

You could say that imitation is a sincerest form of mediocrity :/ thanks for the review!

I enjoyed it but there's not a lot that's memorable about it. They were the first to imitate and ultimately the first to fall. Hopefully they learn from it and make The Surge more of it's own thing. That's where the other clones have succeeded. Ska do 2D combat well so they create a Souls Metroidvania. Grasshopper do style so they make a stylish dungeon crawler with a low bar to entry. Team Ninja do tight, twitchy combat so they fit that around a Souls blueprint.

Deck 13 stayed too close to the original and, even if they did it right, you're going to have the fans you're chasing being turned off by the fact it's not a Souls game. It was a good 15 hours and turns into a complete power fantasy. In isolation it'd be the kinda of B-tier game THQ would push out and grab a few 7/10s. As for the controls, you're a beef tank that puts everything behind his swings. He's never going to be graceful and you can take the hits.

I played through all of Lords of the Fallen back when it was free with PS+ and yeah, it's not great. It was okay for a bit, but the whole thing felt like they were imitating From, but didn't have nearly the skill in any department. The generic setting and overwrought art style did the game no favours. The animations especially bothered me, everything was so slow, but nothing had any sort of acceleration. Slow, heavy weapons in Dark Souls are only slow in the windup/recovery, the actual swing is fast. In Lords of the Fallen, everyone moved like their armour was made of glue. Everything moved slow, steady and smooth. It made the whole game just feel bad.

Sadly The Surge seems to have similar animation issues so far.

I played Lords of the Fallen near release, it wasn't any better then.

The controls sucked and the story/characters were low grade crap. I got about 8 hours into it and I just couldn't play anymore. Souls games require too much patience to play something that aggravating.

I don't know why I keep buying Deck 13 games. None of them end up being that great. I guess I just saw the hint of greatness in Venetica and keep wondering when they are finally going to turn the corner.

I feel more or less the same way about Grow Home, which is why the last thing I want to do is play Grow Up (the much longer sequel). I get why Ubi made it control like that, but I think they took it a little too far. I really did like the game though, the growing mechanic was pretty cool. Kinda fun in a Simcity meets mario 64 kinda way.

It feels harsh to say this, but it's totally true. If you're going to ape something so hard, but fail to hit that basic standard of what you're imitating, then there's almost no way to recommend anything about your product. It sounds dismissive, but there's no other conclusion I can draw. LoTF is just inferior Souls, and there's 5 games of that formula, so why would I ever spend time with this game ever again?

@slag: I honestly am confused why they made him control like that to begin with. I'm just not sure what the goal was. To make things take longer, to make the pace of the game really slow and deliberate? I guess. But if BUD controlled tight like Mario, I would've rushed to play the sequel. As it is though...

@brackstone: Yes yes yes on your points about how Souls makes viable giant two-handed weapons and LoTF fundamentally misunderstands how it works. This game feels utterly impossible to play with something like a Greataxe, especially with how easily Harkyn is knocked out of animations by enemies that don't play by the same staggering rules. It's the clearest example in this game of how they're trying to emulate Souls combat without really knowing what they're doing.

@burncoat: Not understanding how any of the systems underneath the hood in LoTF works was easily my biggest issue with it, because things like heavy armor seemed to make absolutely no difference in how I could tank hits. The protagonist is meant to feel like a walking tank, slow and beefy and heavily armored, but in combat that never feels like the case. Instead, it just feels like I'm punishing myself by being slower with no other benefit.

@applegong: Thanks! And thanks to everyone else for reading.

just some speculation/vague memories here

I think the idea was to use Grow Home as a test for procedural movement animation instead of just using a canned walk/jog/run animation for Bud, with the idea that if it worked then you could potentially have more organic looking movement on odd terrain for Assassin's Creed etc in the future (probably cheaper too in the long run versus having artists have to hand render those). So Grow Home is very protypey in that regard and why he felt so swimmy just walking.

i.e. grow Home is kind of like Goat Simulator in that it probably was initially an internal tech demo that they decided to flesh out a bit to see how it would be received as a product.

Then for the climbing, I think the idea there was to better capture the feel of actually scaling a vertical surface like a rock wall which is a very deliberate process.

Potentially neat ideas but I'm not sure they found a way to make either thing fun. The part I found fun was growing the plant, navigating Bud was something I tolerated in order to be able to do that.