Recent reviews by globinguy

My opinions on this game are really mixed.

The game has a lot of ideas that are pretty unique but maybe not executed perfectly. Having two worlds superimposed on each other that you can jump between to access new paths and find new items at the cost of having more enemies around is pretty neat. But enemies spawning non-stop can get kind of frustrating. You can usually walk past them, but they will often jam up door ways, or just get in the way when fighting other more threatening enemies. It's functionally equivalent to having a bunch of fruit flies buzzing around your face while you play.

The story and world is interesting and I like the design of a lot of the enemies in the game. But I couldn't really get into the story all too much. Like most souls games and souls-likes, much of the game's story is told in item descriptions, but the developers made the interesting decision to lock item descriptions for many items behind stat checks in Radiance and Inferno, the two magic-related stats. I generally like to play melee builds, and since there's no indication of how many points you need to unlock an item description, I just didn't bother. Maybe if it showed how many points you need in a stat unlock more of an item description I would have been more willing to put the points into other stats to see them.

As for more outright issues I had with the game, combat can feel frustrating most of the time. Most encounter's involve running into the fray to deal with some archers or an Umbral parasite. The camera lock-on can feel quite inconsistent at times. at times locking onto Umbral eggs or lamp interaction points that are nowhere near the player. I also often feel like the camera doesn't lock onto enemies that are right in front of you. In other souls-likes, swapping between lock-on targets is also very intuitive, simply hitting left or right to cycle between near by enemies, but in LotF, you have to flick the stick in the direction of the enemy you want to target, which is much more difficult to do when you are being swarmed with Remnants too. There are plenty of interesting bosses in the game but there's just as many ones that feel underwhelming. Most of the enemies you encounter with boss health bars become common enemies in the area immediately following them. After I realised this, the anticipation and excitement of fighting a new boss became a bit dampened if there wasn't a cut scene just before it. Combat is also just a bit too floaty? I feel like enemy attacks were just a bit too slow moving and would have been more engaging if the animations were tightened up. This goes for most bosses too. The general speed of fighting in this game just feels a bit slower than any other souls game I've played.

Another thing I haven't seen any other reviews mentioned is the sound and audio direction. The game just feels too quiet. Mechanically, enemies don't make very satisfying sounds when attacking or being hit. Ranged enemies have audio cues when they fire at you, but the audio cues have limited range, so I was often attacked from archers or mages from outside my audible range and had no way to react to them. The bosses don't really make much noise in combat or in cut scenes. I did like the way the ambiance picks up and builds a sense of urgency the longer you stay in Umbral though, that was a nice touch. Parrying attacks is actually much easier to do in this game, but with the time it can take to break stances and the damage you get out of actually landing a grievous strike doesn't really make parrying feel like its worth the risk.

And finally there's the performance issues. Everyone's already complained about them so there's not much left to say. I played the game on low settings and still dipped below 60 fps pretty frequently. The devs have been throwing out patches constantly since release so hopefully things will be resolved soon.

Ultimately, this game is pretty hard to recommend. At full price and in its current state (performance-wise) its just not really worth it. If you have other souls-likes to play, I'd recommend you just play those first.

Great game to play with friends or alone with an excellent library of mods that add significantly to the already great base game experience.

Platformer with frustrating controls.
Never again.