The combat behaves like an arcade take on the Souls games, or a hybrid between them and Darksiders, if you prefer. While the moral choices are not generally as significant as you'd face in a game like Mass Effect, they are just stimulating and ambiguous enough to encourage players to pause before making them. Some of these choices seem to make very little difference early in the game, though there is some pay off at the end when the storyline is tidied up. There are opportunities to interact with characters and even make some moral choices (such as to spare a man's infected arm or to remove it in order to save his life). Harkyn continues to prove himself a wise if gruff risk on the part of those who set him free, as he doesn't take long to become every bit as powerful as those he's fighting against.

You learn early on that he was a marked man, a criminal who was freed from prison because it was believed that he and others like him might be the keys to the survival of everyone. However, Harkyn's current tale is in the here and now. Players take on the role of Harkyn, a man whose backstory could also have been further explored and has the potential to be quite interesting. People who liked puzzling through the meaning and uncovering the rich-but-not-obvious narrative of the Souls games will be very disappointed by this, however. Some people will prefer this, because while the story is not the most riveting I have ever participated in, it does behave like a fully crafted fantasy world. Lords of the Fallen has a more structured narrative to it, spelling itself out far more clearly to the audience that the Souls' love of wrapping meaning behind a veil of fog. The atmosphere of Lords of the Fallen is very similar to these games, and anyone who has played a Souls game will probably feel that familiarity right out of the gates. I absolutely loved Demon's Souls when it came out years ago for the PlayStation 3, and while Dark Souls did not hook me the way its spiritual predecessor had, Dark Souls 2 has been one of my favourite games of 2014. The good news is that while Lords of the Fallen definitely takes a good number of cues from the Souls games, it has enough of its own ideas to stand on its own as a perfectly acceptable game. However, there is a fine line between imitation being a form of flattery or simply aping another game's successful design without understanding really what made the original such a hit. It takes very little time to figure out what inspired Lords of the Fallen (it's Dark Souls).

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