Morbid: The Lords of Ire PS5 Review – The Soulsborne genre exploded onto the scene with Dark Souls, and many games along the way try to create that same magic by putting their own twists on the formula. Morbid: Lords of Ire is no exception to this. While it does bring some cool ideas to the table, it lacks a cohesiveness that puts this on the same level as the competition.
Morbid: The Lords of Ire Review (PS5) – A Main Course of Good Ideas With Some Odd Choices On The Side
The Gahars are malicious deities that bind their minds to creatures across the world, twisting them to do the Gahar’s bidding. That’s where you come in. As a Striver, you roam around the map in search of these Gahar-infested creatures and slay them. In particular, you seek out five Lords of Ire that rule over different zones so you can end their reign.
Narratively, that’s about it in terms of motivations: just go from zone to zone to clear out the bad guys. On a similar note, the game ends just as simply as it begins. You beat the final boss, go through the credits, then talk to your hub characters to start New Game+. Much like Souls games, you get to carry over your collected items and skills. What Morbid tries to do here is give you more control over what you can and can’t do on your next playthrough. Similar to the Tales of franchise, the game offers you a checklist of things you want to keep and then a list of challenges to make your next run harder. These options grant a level of control that other games like it don’t offer.
Between rounds of exploration, you return to a church where you upgrade weapons and obtain quests. As you progress through the game, you find new people that join you at the church, who then provide the upgrades for you. Much like the game map, the church also features a lot of empty space.
The church is visually pleasing enough and looks lived in, as it were, but getting around in it quickly grows into a chore. The main area is the nave, with different branches that take you to different vendors. In many cases, you need to go up several flights of winding staircases or through several different rooms to reach them. This design makes for an interesting building in and of itself, but it makes for a tedious central hub.
Each zone looks distinguishable from the others, with monsters reflecting that zone. For instance, the barren and desert area throws skeletons and Egyptian-looking humanoids at you, while the starting snowy area features bipedal, axe-wielding goats and bloated archers with winter cloaks. The Lords of Ire don’t really follow the same aesthetic pattern, but they all have their own distinct looks about them. Ultimately, this makes for some healthy enemy variety.
With the zones themselves, while they look and feel quite intriguing, they suffer from consistency when it comes to engagement. What I mean is that some areas are just packed with baddies while there are vast stretches of empty space between them. Opening up shortcuts makes navigating much easier, but you spend a good deal of time just running through places. There aren’t many secrets to find, so exploring never gets to a level of rewarding that merits continuous searching.
In terms of difficulty and progression, the flow of the game lacks natural growth. At the beginning, opponents feature somewhat limited combat tactics, making it easier to learn as you go. After a couple of zones, the game’s difficulty shoots up, sending enemies at you that use much more complicated tactics in comparison to previous opponents, and they also come equipped with massive health bars.
Then, once you reach the end sequences, you have the kind of resources to make the final sprint a cinch. The beginning of the game ends up feeling the best, with the rest being either frustrating or simple. With that said, combat in and of itself is rather simple but in a fun way. You use light attacks to inflict health damage, and you use strong attacks to stagger enemy balance.
Then there’s parrying. Once you get a feel for parrying, the game simplifies even further. Yes, you still need to determine when to parry and when to dodge against bosses, but general enemies fall victim to parries almost at will. This matters because countering right after a parry does huge health damage. It even got to the point where I let groups of baddies attack me one at a time, Assassin’s Creed-style, and I just parry and counter one after the other after the next.
The room for error with parries is an interesting point. Each parry spends a little of your stamina but not enough to truly affect your performance. This means you can spam the parry combo (L1 + R1) as enemies attack, giving you a very good chance of executing the parry. Then, during the counter animation, your stamina fully replenishes itself. Thankfully, bosses require a little more strategy than this, but doing this for basic enemies just feels good, no matter how many times it happens. If I had a qualm with countering, I just wish it were one button instead of two. With how simplistic much of the game is, needing to constantly press two buttons to counter just feels like adding difficulty for the sake of difficulty and not for organic challenge. With this in mind, controls cannot be remapped, which would have been a nice addition.
Morbid also features a Sanity system, which personally makes more of a visual difference than anything. When taking damage, your sanity goes down. This means you take more damage but do more damage in contrast. When you deal damage, your sanity goes up. As you would expect, the damage you take goes down. If your sanity goes way down, then the world takes on a deep purple hue, and spirits pop up from enemies that you defeat. These spirits do more damage but die much faster.
As I mentioned before, this creates more of a visual difference than anything due to the deep color change. The concept of hitting things in front of you never changes, so seeing another one pop up in front of you doesn’t adjust the gameplay loop much. In fact, the increase and decrease in damage doesn’t work quite as effectively as it could. The possible theory behind it is that you take less damage for getting hit more often, making things easier for you if you struggle. However, the Sanity bar resets after each death, eliminating any sort of difficulty change. This makes for an interesting idea, but the execution doesn’t quite do what it sets out to do.
Now, the final point I want to make comes with upgrading weapons. Hands down, this is the coolest part about Morbid: Lords of Ire. Each weapon has a set amount of slots available, and you place runes in those slots. These runes increase one of the four main stats and then reduces another one a smaller amount. In general, the basic runes go something like Attack +16%, Impact -6%. You then mix and match these runes to establish the stats you want. Once you fill all rune slots, you then upgrade the weapon to the next rank. This makes the rune’s stats permanently attached to the weapon and opens up a new set of runes.
This can be done with any weapon you find in the game. Having that level of control on your weapons is, by far, the coolest idea to come out of a Soulsborne game in a long time. This also plays into how the game simplifies leveling and managing stats. The runes are the only stats you earn. While you do level up, those levels only provide you skill points that you then apply to perks. Unfortunately, these perks take a lot of skill points to level. This means that you either spend a ton of time grinding for skill points or you lean heavily into stats and managing several weapons.
These perks replace the need to collect items to upgrade stamina and health or adjust how you gain and lose Sanity. Still, it takes a long, long time to build up the skill points needed to level your perks (what with no perk costing fewer than 5 points). Personally, I would rather find upgrade collectibles on the map, especially in this game where large chunks of the map are empty.
A Solid Soulsborne Try
All in all, Morbid: Lords of Ire offers up a fun but simplistic combat that can easily grip you. Combine that with how you upgrade weapons, and you have a real recipe for success. However, many of the aspects of Morbid don’t mess nearly as well, like the Sanity system and how it corresponds with gameplay, how overpowered parrying is, how empty much of the map is, and how long it takes to level up your perks. In a lot of ways, these systems feel more like mixing water with oil, but they can somehow still work for the right person, especially with the game’s combat in the mix. Considering its price point of $30, Morbid: Lords of Ire comes at a good time between large title releases, offering a fun excursion for Soulsborne fans looking for some new takes on the genre.