Lords of the Fallen tips and tricks to help you beat the game

Need some Lords of the Fallen tips and tricks? As a Souls-like RPG, Hexwork Studios’ newest title is expectedly challenging. You’ll be pushed to the limits of your performance and learning by this game. That said, part of the learning experience is expanding your knowledge, and what better way to do that than through some general guidance to help you acclimate to the game?

Here, we’re going to cover our best Lords of the Fallen tips and tricks, going over combat, utility, and more to help you overcome obstacles and beat the game. If you’re on the hunt for more specific guides though, like how to beat the Spurned Progeny or how to kick, we’ve got you covered.

Top tips and tricks for Lords of the Fallen

Here are our best tips to keep in mind when trying to beat Lords of the Fallen.

• Utilise your full moveset to exploit enemies.
• Test out different equipment and classes to find what’s right for you.
• Upgrade your gear to get ahead of the difficulty curve.
• Make prolific use of your Umbral Lamp and the Umbral Realm.
• Make use of the different status effects.

Let’s go over each of these in some more detail.

Utilise your full moveset

The tutorial for Lords of the Fallen will throw a lot at you, and consequently it’s easy to forget a thing or two as the game progresses. All your different moves are a good example – you’ve got a vast number of ways to deal with any threat that comes against you.

Kicks are a highly effective way to kill or at least momentarily remove any enemy near to a ledge, and ledges are plentiful throughout the game. You can also switch weapons and weapon stances at a button press, which is an excellent way to optimise your damage output if you’re focused on aggressive strategies.

It goes without saying that dodging and parrying are your most useful moves of all. As we mentioned in our Lords of the Fallen review, dodging is especially useful thanks to the generous iframes that all dodge moves offer. We’d recommend relying on and learning how to dodge if your build permits it. If not, or if you simply favour aggression and want to stagger enemies consistently, invest in a mobile shield like a light or medium shield and work on perfecting your parry timing. Be warned that learning how to parry is a little trickier though, and will require patience and practice.

Make sure you’re familiar with how to stagger enemies too. Staggering an enemy and performing a Grievous Strike is one of the strongest moves available to you, and offer profound openings against fast and aggressive enemies.

A final move to keep in mind as well is simple walking and sprinting. In cases where you’re facing off against larger enemies and bosses, you may often find that simple manoeuvring is enough to fall outside the hitboxes of certain attacks. This is a brilliant way to conserve stamina, if that’s a resource you’re in short supply of.

Test out different equipment and classes

There’s a massive arsenal available to you in Lords of the Fallen, suiting a variety of builds and classes. Once you’ve built upon the best starting class and best starting weapon for your tastes at the beginning of the game though, it’s easy to fall into a groove without exploring some of the other options at your disposal.

Crossbows and javelins are great examples of this. With different ammunition types, damage types and more, these ranged options provide a great method for dealing with enemies who challenge your progress in tight environments or through their own ranged capabilities. This is without even mentioning the myriad of spells at your disposal too.

If you find yourself consistently stuck on a level section or struggling with boss fights, think about trying something different. If you feel the situation is particularly drastic, you can even choose to respec your character and totally change your stats.

Be sure to explore as thoroughly as you can, both within and outside the Umbral Realm. Inevitably, you’ll find more loot this way, including rings and pendants. Both of these jewellery types can provide a variety of specific effects, and are often suited for supporting particular playstyles or traversing certain conditions. We’ve even put together a piece on the best rings we’ve found in-game so far, as well as some best builds that incorporate these items.

Finally, be sure to check out boss weapons once you’ve unlocked their Remembrances. These spells, swords and spikey things are among the strongest weapons in the game, and can transform a build if you invest in them properly.

Upgrade your gear consistently

As the game goes on, you’ll begin finding that getting your level up alone isn’t enough to combat the rising health bars of your enemies. If you want to maximise your chances of survival, it’s imperative to spend some Vigor to upgrade and update your weapons, armour and skills frequently. Through exploration and progression, you’ll gradually pick up the various rare items and resources needed for these upgrades. Be sure to keep an eye on the following.

• Make sure you’ve got the Deralium to upgrade weapons.
• Socket runes into your gear once you find blacksmith Gerlinde and start handing in Rune Tablets to her.
• Be on the lookout for Saintly Quintessences if you want to upgrade the Sanguinarix.
• Check in with Molhu and gather Antediluvian Chisels to see if you can upgrade the Umbral Lamp.

Keeping this equipment as high-level as possible will greatly expand your resources, boost your damage, and improve your endurance as you make your way through Mournstead. Be sure to explore both the Axiom and Umbral Realms frequently for special upgrade items.

Use the Umbral Lamp

Your Umbral Lamp is one of your most unique and powerful pieces of gear. Canonically, it’s the item that keeps you coming back to life after death, and it also grants you access to the realm of the dead: the Umbral Realm.

There’s an awful lot about this mechanic that gets thrown at you early on, often adding an unnecessary layer of confusion. Here’s the basics that you’ll need to understand in order to get the most out of it.

First, make sure you understand how to enter and exit the Umbral Realm. Getting in is easy enough, though getting out is a little trickier. From there, try to get used to traversing the Umbral Realm. You’ll notice certain common architecture such as bridges, blisters and branches, which often allow you to traverse to other previously inaccessible areas or complete puzzles.

Once you’re comfortable moving between dimensions, try to get to grips with the different functions of the lamp itself. Learning how to soulflay and recover Soulflay Charges is particularly useful, as it’s a needed skill for solving puzzles in the Umbral Realm, as well as a consistently powerful combat option for battling Umbral Enemies. You’ll also find bloated corpses which can be soulflayed into dropping powerful loot all around the Realm, and Umbral Entities who can only be overcome by soulflaying their roots.

Finally, make sure you’re familiar with how to create Vestiges using Vestige Seeds. This mechanic effectively allows you to set up your own Vestiges, which are this game’s equivalent of a Dark Souls bonfire. They’re vital checkpoint locations, allowing you to rest, healing back to full health and restoring all your spent Sanguinarix charges in the process. You can also level up at them, reorganise your storage, remove wither damage or status effects, leave the Umbral Realm, and travel to other Vestiges, like Skyrest Bridge, if you need to talk to NPCs like Pieta, Gerlinde or Molhu. Sufficed to say then that Seedbed Vestiges, even though they’re temporary, are immeasurably useful.

Try out different status effects

Status effects and different damage types are a common occurrence in Lords of the Fallen. While it’s important to defend against them, you can also use them to further your own ends. Different damage types inflict different status effects of course. Fire exposure will build up and eventually inflict the Burning status, poison will ultimately inflict the Poisoned status, bleed the Bleeding status, and so on.

As you explore Mourntstead, keep an eye out for two things: Salts, and weapons. Some weapons will innately be able to deal multiple damage types. Early game, holy weapons are the most common sort you’ll come across. This comes at the cost of their physical damage, though. You can even find special ammunition for ranged weapons that consume more ammo per shot but deal different damage types, if you explore thoroughly enough.

As well as specialised weapons, you’ll be able to find or even buy different Salts, which can be applied to weapons to temporarily deal a certain damage type. Some of these are easy to find – Fire Salts will always be found in or near to sources of fire, for example. Others might be more challenging to come across, but merchants may be able to cover for you.

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Did you know?

There are technically two types of Salts in Lords of the Fallen. One type will imbue a weapon with specific elemental damage for a time, such as fire or frost. The other kind of Salts will give weapons the ability to inflict a certain status buildup, such as bleed or smite, without inflicting the corresponding elemental damage.

Be sure to analyse bosses you come up against carefully. Their nature will often give clues about what types of damage they’re particularly vulnerable to. For example, The Ruiner is a demonic servant of Adyr, and as such is critically weak to sources of holy damage.

How to beat Lords of the Fallen

The most important advice we can give for a game like this is to be persistent. It’s a Souls-like after all, they’re designed to be challenging. Many bosses and levels are purposely crafted around the idea of learning through mistakes. New enemies and movesets, new mechanics, new effects, or new threats in the Umbral Realm will push you to come to grips time and again with problems and obstacles that require a mixture of skill and strategy to overcome. In some cases, the only way forward will be to keep trying until you find something that works for you.

That covers all our Lords of the Fallen tips and tricks – hopefully you found them helpful. There’s plenty more that we weren’t able to cover in this guide though. If you’re wondering where the best farming spots are, how to heal, where to find blacksmith Gerlinde, or even just want to know the best graphics settings, we can help you out with our additional guides.

Is Lords of the Fallen a hard game?

Lords of the Fallen is a Souls-like, and consequently quite challenging.

How long is Lords of the Fallen?

Lords of the Fallen will take most players roughly 35-40 hours to complete.