Face-Off: Lords of the Fallen

[Administrator]

Beginning life as a PS3 and Xbox 360 project, Lords of the Fallen and its proprietary Fledge engine underwent a dramatic transformation during production, pushed forward onto the new wave of consoles. The team at Deck13 has delivered an advanced visual experience with a focus on high-quality volumetric lighting, GPU-accelerated physics and a swathe of Nvidia Gameworks-exclusive features - in fact, the results partially call to mind the impressive Elemental demo used to showcase Unreal Engine 4. There's no doubt the final result is often gorgeous but, unfortunately, these cutting-edge features come at a steep price, severely impacting game performance.
In what has become a bit of a standard announcement these days, the developers confirmed in September that Lords of the Fallen operates at 1080p on PlayStation 4 and 900p on Xbox One, and we can confirm that this is the case - not that the presentation is immediately obvious. In fact, first impressions actually suggest something below the suggested resolutions, with all the hallmarks of upscaling present on both consoles. The presentation is so murky, we actually had to fall back on good old-fashioned pixel-counting to absolutely confirm the resolution.
So what's going on? Well, Deck13 went a bit overboard with its implementation of chromatic aberration, to the point that the end results give the impression of a significantly lower resolution. We aren't huge fans of this type of filter, but it has its place - unfortunately, we can't help feel that an ancient monastery isn't the best venue for it. In Lords of the Fallen, the aberration is sometimes absurd to the point that it feels as if we were meant to don a pair of anaglyph 3D glasses.
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