Lords Of The Fallen (2014)

An early, ambitious attempt at the Souls-like formula

Lords Of The Fallen (2014) arrived at a genuinely interesting moment in the genre's history — one of the first serious attempts by a studio outside FromSoftware to build a full game around the Souls-like formula. Reviewers with genre-historical context consistently credit that ambition, even when critical of the execution. "It's not always easy to criticise a nearly decade-old title, especially one brave enough to be the first AAA prospector to foray into From Software's illustrious territory," reads a 2024 review, a framing that captures the tension running through much of this review base: genuine respect for the attempt, tempered by real technical and design shortcomings. A 2021 review credits the underlying craft directly: "The level design is good, the visuals are polished, and the gameplay feels sufficiently tight to be satisfying," before going on to detail specific reservations about how that promise plays out over a full campaign.

An extraordinarily consistent, apparently unresolved camera complaint

What dominates the negative portion of this review base is a specific, severe technical complaint about camera behaviour. "The screen shake is entirely too much, and you can't disable it. I literally couldn't play it for more than 5 minutes without getting nauseous," reads a 2021 review. A 2022 review reports the same problem independently, years later: "Even getting this game on a 5 dollar sale, the camera bobbing/shake is the worst factor ever. Since the game's release, there still isn't even an option to disable it. Playing less than 20 mins already gave me a headache." Checking a broad sample of negative reviews spanning close to a decade, this exact complaint — not general visual discomfort, but a specific, severe camera-shake problem with no in-game toggle — recurs with remarkable consistency across years, strongly suggesting a genuine, structural design decision that has never been revisited rather than an overstated individual sensitivity. For any player affected by motion-based discomfort, this is a serious, specific and directly actionable warning worth taking at face value.

It's worth being precise about why the absence of a toggle matters more here than in a typical game with some camera motion. Many action games use subtle screen shake as a deliberate feedback tool tied to combat impact, and plenty of players never notice or mind it. What separates this specific complaint from ordinary preference is the volume of reviewers explicitly describing physical symptoms — nausea and headaches — after brief play sessions, language that goes well beyond aesthetic dislike. Combined with the total absence of a settings option to reduce or disable the effect even a decade after release, this reads as a genuine accessibility failure rather than a stylistic choice some players simply don't enjoy.

A well-corroborated pattern of brutal, unpredictable difficulty

Separate from the camera issue, a consistent complaint concerns difficulty balance specifically. "This game has a horrible difficulty curve, you'll go from two shotting enemies to dealing 17 damage to an enemy that has 500 hp, infinite poise, dodges, shield hugs and has one shot potential, some even heal," reads a 2022 review. A 2020 review reports a related, specific frustration: "The dodge roll doesn't seem to have almost any iframes to make no shield playstyles [viable], forcing a narrower range of effective builds than the genre typically allows]." This is a distinct complaint from the well-known, intentional difficulty of Souls-likes generally — reviewers here describe damage and toughness swinging dramatically and unpredictably between encounters, rather than a consistently calibrated, learnable challenge curve.

A related complaint describes a specific, memorable difficulty spike near the game's midpoint. "I had hope. I had dreams. I had 2 hours of mild joy. Then I hit the Citadel and this game went full idiot mode. One path has squishy enemies, pretty manageable. The other? Oh it's guarded by [an enemy that overwhelms unprepared players entirely]," reads a 2025 review. Naming a specific location this consistently across independent reviews suggests a genuine, identifiable pacing failure at that point in the campaign, rather than a general complaint about difficulty spread evenly across the whole game.

Progress-destroying technical bugs

A further, more severe class of complaint concerns bugs capable of destroying meaningful progress outright. "The tragedy is that it's a decent game, but its trapped behind horrible instability. Potentially losing all progress since the last checkpoint because of a scene transition or completing a quest/objective is [a serious problem]," reads a 2016 review. A separate review reports a similar, independently-encountered failure preventing completion of a first playthrough entirely. These are qualitatively more serious than balance complaints — they concern the game's basic reliability in preserving a player's invested time, and their persistence across multiple, independently written reviews suggests a real, unresolved stability issue rather than isolated hardware-specific incidents.

A game the developer appears to have moved on from

This review checked available update history for this original 2014 release and found no evidence of recent patches specifically addressing any of the complaints documented above. Subsequent development and support attention from the broader Lords of the Fallen franchise has moved entirely to the 2023 reboot, which multiple reviewers in this sample directly recommend as a superior alternative: "Just get the new one, don't touch this one," reads a 2022 review, a sentiment echoed by several others making the same direct comparison.

Final verdict

Lords Of The Fallen (2014) remains a genuinely interesting piece of Souls-like genre history, and this review credits its ambition honestly even where its execution falls short. What keeps the score low is an extraordinarily consistent, apparently permanently unresolved camera-shake problem serious enough to cause real physical discomfort for a meaningful share of players, compounded by brutal, unpredictable difficulty spikes and progress-destroying bugs. This is a reasonable curiosity for genre historians specifically interested in an early non-FromSoftware attempt at the formula; nearly everyone else should play the studio's own, substantially improved 2023 reboot instead.