YMMV / Lords of the Fallen

• Critic-Proof: Lords of the Fallen was a surprisingly huge commercial success, despite the fact that the general critical consensus was that it's So Okay, It's Average at best. Presumably because it shamelessly aimed to be a Dark Souls clone during a time when Dark Souls was the most popular franchise around.
• Difficulty Spike: The first area of Keystone just has a few easily-dispatched enemies, punctuated by a couple harder ones. Then you get to the game proper, and realize that the demons are mostly made up of the harder type. And then it gets worse.
• Fan Nickname: Fans of Dark Souls like to call this game "Clunky Souls".
• Game-Breaker: Flawless Luck Runes are by far the best runes to socket into a weapon. Raising the degree of a weapon's scaling, by endgame it vastly surpasses the comparatively small boosts in damage that other rune-types offer with the only thing coming near its value are Flawless Poison Runes. Because of this, the weapons with three rune slots each -Codex for Strength builds and Ishaluk for Agility builds- become incredibly potent come the endgame. Flawless runes can only be made with Large Runes earned after slaying bosses, but a lack of autosaving means once you meet the Crafter, you can savescum your way to hideously powerful weapons in no time!
• Once Original, Now Common: The game was already seen as mostly average once it came out, but it arguably had something of a niche as "that one game you could play if you wanted more Dark Souls", since there weren't really many games that had tried to capitalize on the series yet. As time has gone on this has stopped being the case and the "Soulslike" has become an increasingly crowded genre, which means the game is not only compared to From Software's games, but all the others that have taken inspiration from them and were more polished or had stronger hooks to differentiate them. In fact, the same developers would go on to make the The Surge, which was much better received.
  VaatiVidya, on various Soulslike games: "Lords of the Fallen contributed...uhh..."
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus about the game from reviews and players. While not really bad, it lacks the tight level design, enemy placement, art direction and atmosphere that won over people to the Souls series in the first place. Meanwhile, the aspects where it does diverge from Dark Souls such as its defined main character and more straightforward story aren't considered very well-done or interesting, which doesn't help the game stand out on its own.

---