Who Dark Souls plays, will find quickly master.

Design and optics I find succeeded the venues are so far varied and beautiful. From the soundscape I am less convinced. Not because the music or the sound effects are intrinsically less well. Rather, I lack, especially in the Boss battles the grandiosity, the music often loiters just to himself.

The gameplay is far (about 5 hours played) quite simple: man gropes ideally cautious ahead and fight an opponent after another down. Kling banal, but do a lot of fun, because the fights can be very demanding. Again, one notices the parallels to the Souls series, but there is an important difference: the game is much, much less frustrating, on the other hand also just because it is so hard as Dark Souls is not less exciting. The whole system is essential beginner friendly, there are plenty of "savepoints" and especially before each boss battle. I find good, so you do not have the whole level again put behind when it has not even equal worked right away with the boss (and that happens rarely ^^).

Technology: I have successfully brought the game on 10.28.2014 and running. Many also complain on Steam about the fact that the game does not start / crashes shortly after takeoff on the desktop. The problem I had, only because I have rather thought on the Windows 10 Preview, as the cause (which is in my application). After about 10 minutes it was then but worked: I have the latest Catalyst beta drivers downloaded (from mid-October 2014) provided and the .exe file from the game on compatibility mode for Windows 8. In addition, I have turned off the wireless controller to the driver update and then again where the game has started successfully. Since then, everything is working properly, during the game, I had a single crash.

Performance: my Phenom II 3.0GHz and AMD 7950 Boost Video card (3GB VRAM), and 8GB of RAM are enough to play smoothly. I have not yet measured with Fraps, but felt I was getting about 30 FPS, on average more 40. From-and there were short stuttering, who am but less disturbed. Since I have the game on the release date downloaded directly via Steam I can not tell if the announced 5 GB patch is already integrated, which among other things is to screw on the performance. [Update 30/10/2014: a new patch (less than 100 MB) was published, I notice no difference in the game. Among other things, an NVidia-specific option is now deactivated but what probably is some increase the stability of the game.]

My conclusion: the game is a lot of fun and frustration * significantly * less (or not at all), as Dark Souls. Who DarkSouls liked to play, should be Lords of the Fallen a chance. Who was put off by Dark Soul, but like action RPG s play, it should also try. I hope very much that there will be a part 2, this must then also love to do something on the level of difficulty then upwards.
[Supplement 30/10/2014: on mouse + keyboard control myself I can not say anything to the controller it runs smoothly. In addition, the people who play with M + T have been expressed that it works better than in Dark Souls -> should therefore at least be very very OK.