Why does Lords of the Fallen have "mixed" reviews on Steam?

CI Games and Hexworks' souls-like action role-playing game, Lords of the Fallen, was released recently to a mostly positive reception from critics. With a 76 on Metacritic, the game has quickly made its name amongst some of the best games in the souls-like genre, not coming from FromSoftware (akin to Lies of P, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and more).

However, despite the favorable critical reception, Lords of the Fallen is getting review bombed on Steam. Similar to some of the recent Unreal Engine 5 games like Immortals of Aveum and Remnant 2, the biggest complaint players have with CI Games' latest souls-like is its poor performance and a plethora of stability-related issues on PC.

While the console version of the game isn't free from its fair share of issues, the PC version (unsurprisingly) is where these technical shortcomings are more pronounced.

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Lords of the Fallen's poor technical state on PC resulted in the game getting review bombed by players

Lords of the Fallen is built on Unreal Engine 5.1, which, despite all its visual flourishes and graphical bells and whistles, is known for having notoriously bad performance on PCs and consoles alike. This is doubly true for users with lower-end PCs, especially for players with GPUs that have less than eight gigabytes of VRAM and lower-end SSDs.

Although the game recommends an 8GB VRAM GPU for best performance, it can barely hold a steady 60fps with that much VRAM. The biggest issues players with lower-end GPUs face are stuttering and hitches while the game tries to load in assets. On PC, the game also has several crashing issues, which can be attributed to memory leaks.

The issues with the game are compounded by the fact that at any given time, Lords of the Fallen has to render two entirely different levels. Although CI Games and Hexworks' idea of implementing a "world within a world" form of level design is quite ambitious, it doesn't sit well with most PCs, especially those with less than eight gigabytes of VRAM.

Even during my time with the game on PC, I've faced many issues due to the poor management of VRAM and absurdly high memory usage. Despite running the game off my gen3 m.2 SSD on a PC with Ryzen 5 5600, RX6600, and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, I barely maintained a steady 60fps on Medium-High settings.

The only way I found that helped me somewhat alleviate the performance issues is to use FSR, which I don't think is ideal, especially on 1080p. Although the game looks astounding and is arguably one of the best-looking souls-like to date, it's quite disappointing that Lords of the Fallen suffer from such severe technical flaws, hurting the game's reception.

Fortunately, CI Games and Hexworks are hard at work on updates for the game and have been constantly releasing big and small patches as well as hotfixes aimed at improving performance.

Hopefully, the developers can eliminate most, if not all issues with the game, since underneath all those technical shortcomings is quite a competent souls-like.