Conclusion

Lords of the Fallen is new material for lovers of the souls-like genre. Following the release of Lies of P, just a few weeks ago this means we now have two titles to keep us busy this season. As expected, there's challenging gameplay with tough bosses and immersive environments that have a lot to discover. While Lies of P was mostly linear, Lords of the Fallen is less linear, but not nearly as open as Elden Ring, for example. While the story is forgettable, gameplay is very decent, and the title doesn't even try hard to be different than From Software games. This can be a good thing, as many gameplay mechanics will feel familiar to you. What's definitely new is that two worlds exist at the same time and you can seamlessly switch between them, which creates an interesting new gameplay element. This "Umbral" realm offers intriguing exploration dynamics. Holding a button transports you, revealing hidden paths and combat opportunities. However, prolonged stay summons enemies, adding risk to the game. Umbral also serves as a second chance—after dying you'll respawn there, with all your currency intact and a full health bar, ready to continue the fight or run away.

In terms of technology we're getting Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and Lumen activated, which is the most modern game engine tech available today. Looking at our screenshots I can confirm that this is one of the best-looking games ever released. The details on the environments are extremely impressive and are giving me H.R. Giger vibes in many zones. The map designers did a good job creating beautiful environments, even though they are not as well thought out as what we've seen in Elden Ring. Thanks to Nanite, geometry always looks richly detailed and the LODs are applied seamlessly. The Umbral world is available instantly, without loading, and it merges perfectly with the main world—possible only through the use of Unreal Engine's Nanite tech—highly impressive. While the main character's rendering is great, NPCs don't look nearly as good, but still quite decent. While I usually complain about flat, boring, floors, this is not a problem in Lords of the Fallen—plenty of geometry to walk on—very nice.

"Compiling shaders" has always been a problem for Unreal Engine, especially version 4. With version 5 that's much improved because developers can ship precompiled shader objects with their game. On startup there's still a short 30 second delay to compile some shaders. Also, once you're entering a zone for the first time there's a few seconds of stuttering for shaders. During actual gameplay I didn't notice any significant stuttering, but some people are reporting a lot of issues with that. Generally, there's a lot of technical problems with this release and people are punishing the developer with low Steam Ratings (and rightfully so). Hexworks has released several patches already, so it looks like they are willing to improve their game, unlike many other studios that take weeks or even months for a first patch.

Lords of the Fallen ships with support for DLSS and FSR upscaling. You also get support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which has been disabled after the first patch: "Despite our eagerness to provide players with the latest technologies, Sentry noticed that Frame Generation is also leading to crashes under specific conditions. We have decided to temporarily deactivate Frame Generation until our collaboration with NVIDIA allows us to deliver more stable drivers. This action is intended to prevent the crashes that some players are experiencing with their brand-new 40 series GPUs." Blaming NVIDIA is certainly easy, I didn't encounter a single crash while playing with DLSS 3 enabled. After a lot of community backlash, the DLSS Frame Generation setting has been reactivated, but requires command-line switch -DLSSFG to show up in-game.

Despite being an Unreal Engine title, some settings are a bit confusing. There's no separate switches for ray tracing, but "Reflections" and "Global Illumination" have a somewhat vague mention of "use more accurate ray tracing methods" for settings of "high" and above. That's why I've decided to do two test runs. First, Ultra with those two settings set to "medium", to disable hardware ray tracing, and a second run with the Ultra profile activated, which sets those two settings to "Ultra," too.

We did not test the unfinished press review version, but the public Steam release, including the first two patches. We also used the newest ready drivers. All three major GPU makers, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel have released drivers with optimizations for Lords of the Fallen.

Hardware requirements of the game are pretty crazy—similar to other UE5 titles. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with highest settings you need a RTX 3080, RX 7800 XT or faster, and that's with RT disabled. Yup.. lol.. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you've gotta bring the big guns—only the RX 7900 XTX, RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 can achieve 60 FPS at that resolution. 4K60? No way, RTX 4090 gets kinda close with 55 FPS. AMD's best, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is far behind with just 37 FPS. Once we've turned on ray tracing, performance suffers even more, but the performance drop is relatively small compared to what we're seeing in other titles with RT. I suspect that Lords of the Fallen's RT implementation uses RT only partially, to enhance what Lumen does, instead of relying on pure RT for these effects. Unreal Engine 5 has a ton of config options for Lumen, I only wish Hexworks made it more clear in settings, possibly separating the options.

With RT enabled, at maximum settings, RTX 4090 gets 105 FPS at 1080p, 79 FPS at 1440p and 4K runs at 46 FPS. This basically means that you must enable upscaling and frame generation for 4K gaming. A base FPS of 46 FPS is too low for frame generation to give you a good experience, especially when you have to time the I-Frames. It's good to see plenty of upscaling options here—we'll look at those in more detail in a separate article.

The performance scaling from "Ultra" to "Low" is pretty good, you can roughly double your FPS, but depending on the location, there's pretty serious compromises in terms of image quality. Especially, effects like shadow, lighting and reflections look pretty terrible on the lowest setting, with a lot of jitter and pop-in. For mouse+keyboard gamers, the default keybinds are pretty terrible, but they can be remapped easily.

Surprisingly, VRAM requirements are very reasonable. At lowest settings a 4 GB card will be sufficient, but there will be quite some pop-in. For maximum settings a 8 GB card is a good choice, but that also means that cards with more VRAM, which are the only option to achieve decent FPS at 1440p and 4K, won't be able to benefit from their larger VRAM pools.