My experience with the game so far:
- I'm trying to fight the 5th boss, but crashes happen. Bosses are "easy" but long to fight (only died once to a boss because he had a one-hit kill...).
- 5 deaths. Just two things to consider for evaluating the difficulty: I never use potions and rely on my Solace magic to heal + I'm a Souls player. I died mostly because I tried to go through an area I wasn't supposed to go to yet (I was obviously underleveled). I love Souls because I feel like I'm being a better player through and through. I'm learning nothing by playing LotF. The situations and the enemy aren't diversified enough to "get gud". Also, death has no meaning in LotF, contrary to DaS where death mechanics are justified by the story. So LotF definitely feels like another "video game with checkpoints".
- lacks enemy diversity. Same types of enemy over and over so far. At least they're not using the very bad trick DaS2 was using (overwhelming the player with enemies).
- 5 crashes. I consider this unacceptable. The goal of the game, its main feature is endurance: how long can you go without saving your game. Well, crashes broke that. When you lose 1 hour of gameplay because they didn't bother testing the game it makes me give up the game for the day. The same when you spend 15 min fighting a boss.
- repetitive environments, some layouts are overused. Along that, level design is either very bad (invisible walls, things I expect I could go through but I can't, which is unforgivable considering you're meant to flee from enemies sometimes) or good (actually I thought the level design indoors encourages using shields, and that's a thing I rarely do in Souls, so I'm enjoying that).
- good animations, clothes and particles effects
- good exploration. Some good secrets here and there.
- I like how it feels to control Harkyn.
- good combat mechanics
- bad cutscenes, lipsyncing and voice acting
- very bad camera
- average story and TERRIBLE storytelling. Couldn't care about it. Also, don't expect to learn anything of Harkyn.
- I have 0 bound with the world I'm roaming in. In Souls I thought the world itself was a kind of neutral God watching over me, putting helps and dangers (in one word: the game design was perfect). Souls were tense constantly for this reason. Here it's visually too "sophisticated" but it has no soul, no pun intended.