It's a game that parks you in front of a loading screen for extended durations, only to exhibit severe texture streaming pop-in once finished. Throughout the adventure you will be faced with an onslaught of loading screens that can last anything from two to three minutes. Lichdom demands patience from its players. Then we come to loading times and it's here that the 'Cry' in CryEngine takes on new meaning. Against all odds, Lichdom: Battlemage actually manages to run slower than all of them. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the exceptionally poor Sonic Boom on Wii U plus the often dodgy last-gen ports of Crysis. Now, CryEngine doesn't exactly have the best track record on consoles but there have been some impressive releases over the years including Ryse: Son of Rome, which remains a beautiful-looking launch title, not to mention the visually lavish Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Lichdom is also one of the few games this generation running on CryEngine 3. The PC version - also featured - is actually pretty good and a lot of fun. Lichdom on console has to be seen to be believed. In comparison, while still very sluggish, v-sync is active on the PS4 version. The end result is a game with constant tearing - and it's a level of performance so poor that we actually found it difficult to look at the screen for more than a few minutes at a time. To make matters worse, if you're unlucky enough to play the game on Xbox One, you'll be treated to the same incredibly low frame-rate - and v-sync is disengaged too. We've run the rule over a multitude of titles since we started frame-rate testing console games back in 2008 - and we're pretty sure we've never seen anything quite as bad as this. On top of that, frame-time latencies can be astonishingly high with some remarkable stutter. In fact, the PlayStation 4 clocks up an average frame-rate of just 15fps across the run of play, with dips as low as 10fps.
There's no beating around the bush here - Lichdom is a game that rarely manages to deliver a frame-rate north of twenty frames per second. We've run through the likes of Broforce, The Last Tinker, Assassin's Creed Unity and even Shadow of Mordor on PlayStation 3 - but nothing quite matches what we're witnessing here. Lichdom is a console port of a two-year-old PC game that also happens to be one of the worst performing console games we've ever tested. You may not be familiar with Lichdom: Battlemage, but after reading this, you may not be able to forget it either.
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