Then there's the 'wither' mechanic, which prevents turtling. Once it's empty, you can trigger a satisfying counterblow by either parrying them again or hitting them with a fully-charged melee attack. You can also time your blocks a la Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, whittling away at an enemy's posture. More than once I slammed someone with my knight's big stonking sword and cackled with joy as their corpse was flung halfway across the room. Everything feels tactile, and the harder you hit enemies, the harder they ragdoll. The claymore I used for the latter half of my playthrough threw enemies into the air and flattened them into the dirt. If you're using lighter weapons, you feel nice and nimble, while heavier weapons have satisfying heft and a good amount of stagger to them. When you sprint you really motor, blitzing across the battlefield like a bat out of hell. A lot of that's owed to your character's movement-even at medium encumbrance, my lamp bearer turned on a dime.

When Lords of the Fallen feels good, it feels really good. I can't really say the system accomplishes anything that more thoughtfully-placed vestiges wouldn't have. Vestiges are very few and far between, and unless you want to tear your hair out, you'll be wanting two to three seedlings in your backpack at all times. In practice it's just a mandatory Vigor tax. In theory, this lets you set your own difficulty based on how much Vigor-the game's currency-you're willing to spend on seeds. You can plant your own vestiges (bonfires, for Dark Souls vets) at certain flower beds with a consumable item, though you're only allowed to have one planted at a time. One thing I could've done without, however, is the Umbral Seeds system. In general, the game seems well put together-I ran it smoothly (bar some strange framerate tanks in certain areas) on a Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 and only encountered a handful of bugs, only one or two of which required a restart.

The game recommends an SSD at minimum-it does say it supports hard drives, though I imagine you'll have trouble if you haven't yet made the leap. I'd expected the dual-world elements to throw a spanner into the game's performance, but using the Lamp was a shockingly smooth experience. I once came to a chasm, died, went to the Umbral, and just had to stop and stare at the artfully-arranged corpse giants clinging to the cliff face.

It really feels like an alien world-and the horizon always holds some unnerving husk of a giant doing something cryptic.

For apple download Lords of the Fallen