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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →The new PS Plus RPG in this comparison is Lords of the Fallen (2023), which joined the PlayStation Plus monthly-games lineup in April 2026. It is a Soulslike action RPG, but it is not a smaller copy of Elden Ring: Lords of the Fallen channels its challenge through a more directed, interconnected journey and its two-realm Axiom/Umbral design, while Elden Ring is built around broad open-world wandering and optional discovery.
Choose Lords of the Fallen if you want layered routes, fast build-based combat, large bosses and the option to play online with up to three players. Choose Elden Ring if your priority is the widest sense of exploration, unrestricted detours and a world that continually rewards going somewhere you did not plan to visit. Neither game has an authoritative universal difficulty score, so the useful comparison is where each game creates pressure.
| # | Preview | Product | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Lords of the Fallen Standard Edition - PlayStation 5 | $17.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 2 |
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Lords Of The Fallen - Deluxe Edition (PlayStation 5) | $46.74 | Buy on Amazon |
| 3 |
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CI Games Lords of the Dies - PS5 Game | $33.74 | Buy on Amazon |
| 4 |
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Koch Distribution Lords of The Fallen | $19.30 | Buy on Amazon |
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What the PS Plus RPG actually is
Lords of the Fallen is the 2023 action RPG from Hexworks. Sony lists its PS5 release date as October 13, 2023, and included it among the three PlayStation Plus monthly games for April 2026. The PS Plus inclusion changes the value proposition for eligible subscribers, but it does not change the game itself: this remains a full Soulslike campaign designed around character builds, difficult encounters, interconnected areas and repeated mastery of routes.
PlayStation describes an “all-new, epic RPG adventure in a vast, interconnected world more than five times larger than the original game.” The same official description highlights “colossal boss battles” and “fast and challenging combat.” That wording is important because it identifies the game’s intended shape: demanding action-RPG combat inside a connected journey, rather than a conventional open-world checklist.
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- Overhauled Character Creator – Create more lifelike characters with improved facial detail, body shapes, and visual fidelity
- Shared-Progression Cross-Play Cooperative Play – Both players now save all main story progress as long as they’re on the same “New Game” and have defeated a similar number of main bosses within one. Both players retains all loot, 100 percent vigor, and can revive each other in all online sessions.
- Free Friend’s Pass – Invite any friend to join your adventure in online co-op even if they don’t own the game. Friends keep loot and character progress, plus get full offline access to the tutorial and character creator
- Revamped Combat and Movement – V2.0 adds smoother animations, better weapon response, refined lock-on, improved evasions, and new grievous strike prompts
The comparison with Elden Ring is therefore most useful when it is broken into separate questions. How does combat feel from one encounter to the next? How much freedom does exploration provide? Where does difficulty come from? How much does co-op change the experience? Treating those as different axes gives a more honest answer than declaring one game simply easier, harder or better.
Combat: familiar Soulslike foundations, different pacing and presentation
What Lords of the Fallen emphasizes
Lords of the Fallen uses the familiar Soulslike foundation of deliberate attacks, defensive timing, stamina management, build choices and boss learning, but its presentation is explicitly fast and aggressive. Sony and Hexworks center the game on challenging action combat, tactical encounters and major boss fights. The result is a combat loop in which weapon selection, spells and other combat abilities matter as much as recognizing an enemy’s attack pattern.
Build-based progression gives you several ways to solve the same fight. A character built around a different weapon or spell selection will create a different rhythm for spacing, recovery and damage opportunities. That does not make the game easy; it means difficulty is partly shaped by whether your chosen build fits the encounter and whether you understand what that build can safely do.
How that differs from Elden Ring
Elden Ring is the broader reference point for build experimentation because its open world lets players leave a difficult encounter, explore elsewhere and return with a different weapon, spell or level of preparation. Lords of the Fallen concentrates its Soulslike combat inside a more directed, interconnected route. You still make meaningful build decisions, but the surrounding journey gives those decisions a different context: the next challenge is usually connected to the path you are already learning rather than hidden somewhere across a giant optional landscape.
Calling one combat system objectively faster or superior would overstate what the available evidence establishes. A better distinction is one of emphasis:
| Combat question | Lords of the Fallen | Elden Ring |
|---|---|---|
| Basic identity | Fast, challenging Soulslike action RPG with build-based progression and large boss encounters. | Soulslike action RPG whose combat is integrated into a much broader open-world structure. |
| How build choice matters | Weapon, spell and combat-ability choices shape how you approach connected encounters. | Build experimentation is supported by the ability to roam, collect options and return to problems later. |
| What surrounds a fight | A directed but interconnected journey with route puzzles across two realms. | Extensive open-world exploration with optional areas, detours and discoveries. |
| Boss presentation | Official descriptions emphasize colossal boss battles. | Bosses are encountered across a large world with more freedom over when and how to approach many of them. |
Why the update history matters
The launch version is not the only version relevant to a 2026 player. The PlayStation Store listing records more than 70 updates, including version 2.0’s fully revamped combat system and difficulty balancing. That history means old launch-era videos or reviews may describe timing, enemy behavior or balance that no longer represents the current experience.
Hexworks says it has continued refining weapons, spells and other combat abilities using player feedback and internal telemetry. Combat should therefore be understood as an update-shaped system rather than a fixed snapshot from October 2023. If you are reading an older guide, check whether its recommendations were written before the version 2.0 changes.
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- Explore two vast, parallel worlds - Travel through two parallel worlds in your epic quest to topple Adyr. As the living kingdom presents its own brutal challenges, untold horrors lurk in the nightmarish realm of the dead
- Handle a device of unholy power: your lantern possesses the unholy power to cross worlds. Use this dark art to reach forgotten places, unearth legendary treasures, and manipulate your enemy's very soul
- Rise from Death - Fall in the world of the living, and rise again in the world of the dead. You have one last chance to know your state, for all kinds of hellish creatures descend upon you
- Unite or fight in online multiplayer: Face your entire quest side by side in uninterrupted online co-op, with appropriate rewards for completing community events. But be warned: heroes from other kingdoms can and will invade
- Fully customize and develop your own character: Fully customize the appearance of your characters, before selecting one of nine character classes. Whatever starting path you take, develop your character to your own style of play by improving stats, weapons, armor and spells
Exploration: open-world breadth versus two-realm route solving
Elden Ring’s exploration promise
Elden Ring is the stronger fit for players who define exploration as broad geographic freedom. Its appeal comes from seeing something on the horizon, abandoning your current objective and finding an optional cave, boss, item or route. The world encourages unscheduled detours and lets discovery itself become the main activity.
This is a preference distinction, not a claim that Elden Ring has more total content than Lords of the Fallen. The relevant difference is how the games organize discovery. Elden Ring spreads discovery across a huge open-world reference point; Lords of the Fallen layers discovery into connected spaces and realm transitions.
Axiom and Umbral in Lords of the Fallen
Lords of the Fallen’s defining exploration system is movement between the living realm, Axiom, and the dead realm, Umbral. Hexworks summarizes the idea as: “Fall in the world of the living, and rise again in the world of the dead.” Umbral is not merely a visual filter applied to the same map. It changes route finding, encounters and progression, so understanding when and where to enter it becomes part of navigation.
In practical terms, a route that appears blocked or incomplete in Axiom may become readable after you use the Umbral system. Conversely, shifting realms can expose additional threats and alter the safest way forward. Exploration therefore becomes a layered problem: read the physical space, inspect what the other realm reveals and decide whether the new route is worth the additional danger.
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The following is a gameplay illustration of the system rather than a claim about one specific named location. Imagine reaching a passage in Axiom that appears to end at an impassable obstruction. Instead of treating it as a dead end, you use your Umbral tool to inspect the corresponding space in the dead realm. A path, platform or interactable object may become available there, allowing you to advance or reach a previously hidden angle. The cost is that Umbral can introduce additional encounters, so the route decision is both a navigation puzzle and a risk calculation.
That structure produces a different kind of satisfaction from Elden Ring’s horizon-driven wandering. In Elden Ring, the question is often “What is over there?” In Lords of the Fallen, it is frequently “What is this space hiding in the other realm, and what will change if I cross into it?”
| Exploration preference | Better fit | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Wandering without a planned route | Elden Ring | Its broad open-world structure makes optional detours a central activity. |
| Learning a dense, connected path | Lords of the Fallen | Its journey links areas together and asks you to interpret both Axiom and Umbral. |
| Environmental discovery through a second layer | Lords of the Fallen | Umbral affects route finding, encounters and progression. |
| Choosing your own order of distant discoveries | Elden Ring | The open-world format gives more room to postpone, bypass or revisit many objectives. |
Difficulty: compare the source of pressure, not an invented ranking
There is no authoritative shared scale that can prove Lords of the Fallen is a fixed percentage easier or harder than Elden Ring. The games create difficulty through different combinations of boss learning, enemy density, navigation, death recovery, build choice and multiplayer support. A player who struggles with route ambiguity may find Lords of the Fallen more demanding; a player who prefers clear interconnected progression may find its structure easier to read than Elden Ring’s enormous world.
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How Lords of the Fallen’s difficulty has changed
Sony markets Lords of the Fallen as challenging, while Hexworks has documented continuing balance work. The developer says enemy-leashing changes were made to give players “more freedom for exploration.” It has also described ongoing refinements to weapons, spells and combat abilities, informed by player feedback and internal telemetry. The PlayStation Store listing refers to rigorous difficulty balancing in later updates.
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These changes matter because launch impressions may not describe the current pressure curve. Enemy behavior, combat balance and the usefulness of particular builds can be affected by updates. For a new player in 2026, the relevant question is not whether the launch version earned a particular reputation, but how the updated version handles the situations that personally cause trouble.
Where Elden Ring can feel harder
Elden Ring can overwhelm players through scale and optionality. A difficult encounter may be only one of many possible destinations, and the game’s freedom can make it harder to know whether you should persist, explore elsewhere or change your build. Its difficulty often includes the problem of choosing your next problem.
Where Lords of the Fallen can feel harder
Lords of the Fallen can place more pressure on your ability to read connected routes and use the Axiom/Umbral relationship. A player who misses what the second realm reveals may spend more time lost or enter encounters without understanding the intended path. The tighter journey can also make repeated mastery of a route feel more immediate because you are learning a linked sequence rather than surveying a continent-sized map.
Co-op changes the calculation
The PlayStation Store lists support for up to three online players. That is a practical difficulty variable, not a footnote. Cooperative play can change how you approach a boss or troublesome route, so a solo comparison and a co-op comparison are different experiences. If you intend to play with others, Lords of the Fallen may feel substantially more approachable than its solo reputation suggests; if you always play alone, evaluate its encounter and navigation pressure on those terms.
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- Prefer solving problems by changing builds? Consider how much you value Elden Ring’s broad opportunity to roam for alternatives.
- Prefer reducing pressure with friends? Lords of the Fallen’s support for up to three online players is a meaningful advantage.
- Dislike navigation puzzles? The Umbral layer may be more demanding than a conventional single-map route.
What more than 70 updates mean for a new player
The update count is not itself a quality score, but it is useful context. The current PlayStation Store listing records more than 70 updates, and version 2.0 is identified as a fully revamped combat system with difficulty balancing. That tells you to treat the present game as an actively revised version rather than relying on launch-week assumptions.
When consulting older advice, separate stable concepts from version-sensitive instructions. The existence of Axiom and Umbral, the interconnected-world structure and the game’s build-based identity are foundational. Exact enemy behavior, combat balance and the relative value of a particular weapon, spell or ability may have shifted through updates.
Rank #4
- Explore Two Vast, Parallel Worlds - Journey across two parallel worlds in your epic quest to overthrow Adyr. While the living realm presents its own brutal challenges, untold horrors lurk in the nightmarish realm of the dead.
- Wield a Device of Ungodly Power - Your lantern possesses the ungodly power to cross between worlds. Use this dark art to reach forgotten places, unearth fabled treasures, and manipulate the very soul of your foe.
- Rise from Death - Fall in the world of the living, and rise again… in the world of the dead. You now have one final chance to return to your living state, as all manner of hellish creatures descend upon you.
- Unite or Fight in Online Multiplayer - Brave your entire quest side-by-side in uninterrupted, online co-op, with fitting rewards for completing community events. But be warned - heroes from other realms can, and will invade.
- Fully Customise and Develop Your Own Character - Fully customise your character’s appearance, before selecting one of nine character classes. Whichever starting path you take, develop your character to your own playstyle by upgrading stats, weapons, armour and spells.
PS Plus value and ownership choices
Using the April 2026 monthly-game inclusion
For eligible subscribers, the April 2026 monthly-games placement is the lowest-friction way to try Lords of the Fallen during the relevant availability window. PlayStation Plus availability, tier rules and regional dates can change, so confirm the offer for your account and country rather than assuming that every region has identical access.
The subscription route is especially useful if you are undecided between the two games. You can test whether the directed two-realm structure suits you before spending separately on a copy. Your evaluation should include the parts that most distinguish it from Elden Ring: route reading, Umbral transitions, boss pacing and whether co-op is part of your plan.
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If you want to keep the game outside your PS Plus subscription, look for a Lords of the Fallen PS5 physical copy. Ownership gives you an independent product path if your subscription changes or the monthly-games availability window no longer applies. Check the current retailer price, region and edition at the time you buy; those details are not fixed by the April 2026 lineup.
A PS5 DualSense controller is an optional consideration for either action RPG, particularly if you expect to play online co-op, but it does not alter the underlying comparison. The important purchasing decision is whether you want subscription access for trying the game or a copy you can retain independently.
Which game fits which player?
| If you value… | Choose | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A vast open-world discovery loop | Elden Ring | Its central appeal is broad wandering, optional discoveries and freedom to change direction. |
| Interconnected routes with a second realm | Lords of the Fallen | Axiom and Umbral turn navigation into a layered progression system. |
| Trying the game with a PS Plus subscription | Lords of the Fallen | It was included in the April 2026 monthly-games lineup, subject to regional and tier availability. |
| Co-op as part of the difficulty solution | Lords of the Fallen | The PlayStation Store lists online play for up to three players. |
| Maximum freedom to postpone a hard fight | Elden Ring | The open-world structure makes detours and later returns a defining part of the experience. |
| A focused Soulslike campaign with major bosses | Lords of the Fallen | Its official presentation emphasizes fast, challenging combat and colossal boss encounters within a connected world. |
Is Lords of the Fallen worth playing after Elden Ring?
Yes, if you want a different form of Soulslike exploration rather than a replacement for Elden Ring. Finishing Elden Ring does not make Lords of the Fallen redundant because the games ask different spatial questions. Elden Ring rewards surveying a vast world and choosing your own detours. Lords of the Fallen asks you to understand how two realms overlap, how connected routes fold back on themselves and when a dangerous transition reveals progress.
The strongest reason to try it after Elden Ring is not a claim that its combat is universally better or its difficulty universally lower. It is that the surrounding structure changes the meaning of familiar combat fundamentals. Build selection, boss learning and route mastery happen in a more concentrated journey, and online support for up to three players gives you an option that can materially reshape difficult encounters.
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Approach it with the right expectation: this is a Soulslike with its own identity, not an Elden Ring sequel or a one-to-one substitute. The April 2026 PS Plus inclusion makes it particularly easy for eligible subscribers to test that identity for themselves, provided they verify the current regional terms.
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