There are niggles here, and a pretty steep price point, that are likely to put a lot of people off. And that's fair enough, because the game underneath it all just isn't strong enough to recommend.
There are moments when everything clicks, and you're having a lovely old time, but more often than not you just feel like you're going through the motions.
Fallen from graceThe game sees you trudging grimly through a series of locations and getting in fights with hulking, monstrous beasts.
You hack, you slash, you block, you dodge, you parry. You chip away at health bars while trying to protect your own.
The controls inevitably involve swiping and tapping. If you've played any super polished one on one action RPG on the App Store in the last few years then you know exactly what to expect.
There are a few twists here, like a move that knocks you down and forces you to roll out of the way of oncoming blows, and a combo system that's meant to make the action feel a bit livelier.
Except it doesn't work very well. And quite often you'll just flap out a few attacks and then jump back into the rhythm of dodge, block, or parry. Perform three of these in a row and your enemy gets stunned.
It's not just the controls that are on the weak side. The violence doesn't really have any solidity to it. And that's hampered by the fact that the finishing moves rarely actually connect in the way they're supposed to.
On more than one occasion I've slaughtered a terrifying beast by stabbing it in the gap between its legs.
Lordy lordThere are other technological problems as well. In my play through before starting this review, one fight came to a premature end when both my burly character and his drooling nemesis stopped doing anything.
As far as I know they're still just stood, staring at one another, swaying gently in a gothic castle full of dead bodies and strangely useful treasures.
Lords of the Fallen is okay. If it was free then I'd suggest picking it up. But it's not, so I'm not going to. For the price it's asking you to pay it's just not good enough.