Recent reviews by Nanno

They recommend a new save, but the base game hasn't changed, except for very minor things. You can't really expect people to replay 30+ hours for nothing.

So i loaded up my existing save. Everything seems to work fine..

I haven't played that far, but flying up to the space platform you arent allowed to take anything with you. It forces you to play a certain way. It takes away a bit from the sandbox experience that i had with the base game.

I find the price a bit too high as well. Dyson Sphere Program can be bought for just 14 euros. Compared to 32 euros base game and 32 euros dlc

Great game and i really appreciate the offline play!

A bit of feedback:
- Its difficult to find buildings. They are unique but also look a like. Maybe having the ability to show the names or something would be good
- Text under the the icons in the building menu would be great too. Now i have to keep hovering to find out what everything is

Maybe this gets better when you know all buildings eventually though

As a positive: i love the UI, it looks great

Bought this on a deep sale for less than 10 euros and it's now the great casual pvp shooter experience i want. It runs great and haven't encountered any issues so far. Glad they removed most of the cringy voicelines pre and post game.

The gameplay pacing is a little on the fast side for me, but i've gotten used to it.

One of the few modern ARPGs thats fully moddable and can be played fully offline

Classic ARPG with nice controls and a good gameplay loop. You can save anywhere at any time and also resume from there. The skill / perk system is a bit like tetris and looks good so far. There are different ways to boost your character and gear (rerolling etc). So everything you'd expect from a ARPG is there.

It took some updates to click for me, but i really like playing the Exorcist which feels like a Diablo 3 mage to me. I'm personally not too fond of asian culture (no offense) and more into standard fantasy, but it's also nice to see something else for a change.

The recent update of the Orang Bunian was a cool surprise too.

Slower paced arpg with a nice gameplay loop. Great voice acting as well.

Cozy low stress exploration experience

Edit: I encountered a huge bug. After the game crashed during the act 4 boss battle, i appareantly lost all act 4 progress as well (the ahriman bar was reset). Therefor i don't feel like playing another 5h just to get to the same point again. I feel conflicted to recommend this game.


Initial review:
Wolcen reminds me a lot of Last Epoch in terms of visuals and general gameplay. It clicked with me a bit more than Last Epoch though. I feel like it's another fresh take on the genre focusing on making it fun with some casual quality of life improvements

The good parts:
- Extensive campaign with many cinematics and good voice acting
- Visually very nice. Especially the general dark theme. Very Diablo-esque
- Game is very optimized. Runs very smooth on my RTX 3060 laptop and RTX 3070 desktop
- The spells i used so far are nice and straight forward to use. The look great as well
- It seems to have nice endgame systems. A lot more meat to it than Diablo 3 for example
- No micro transactions!

Great quality of life features:
- Generous with respeccing and trying different skills and changing damage types
- Summons auto (re)summon (very nice quality of life feature!)
- You have 3 'lives' meaning you can revive yourself a couple of times in a battle. This means you can play with more risk and when killed play more carefully to not lose the fight

Some critiques:
- The long animations and not being able to cancel them means that you constantly feel stuck to the ground for 1 second or so
- My game crashed in the last boss battle and i lost progress in that play session :/
- I did have some small visual issues with cinematics having desynced sound, spell effects dissapearing, placeholder text variables. No major issues for me. I played offline by the way.
- The maps feels very linear just like Last Epoch. I prefer the slightly more openness of Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2
- Playing offline does not save your character to the steam cloud. So to play between 2 PC's i had to set up a sync of the savegame folder through my NAS
- The community in general is bad. Lots of negativity

Has become a major addiction in the last 3 weeks. It shares similarities with other automation games like Satisfactory and Factorio (haven't played Factorio myself). So it's about gathering resources, making parts with it which can be used in new parts, which can be combined with new resources etc.

I got kinda addicted to it in the last 3 weeks with some points of frustration due to bottlenecks in the production pipeline and my personal goals seeming close, but also so far away. I did push through in resolving those issues and still having fun with it. It's kinda relaxing to play as there is no time pressure or enemies. So you can take all the time you want to think, plan, rebuild.

My only advice is to not be tempted to restart too quickly as the midgame (40h in) changes dramatically due to new logistic options (planetary and inter planetary logisctics stations) and there are many other planets to continue building on or move production to.

Early access
Didn't encounter any bugs or issues myself. Felt really polished. Only minor negative was the bad english translations (the developers are Chinese), but it didn't really bother me.

A lot of depth
It has a crazy amount of depth (never got past 30h in Satisfactory by the way). At some point you get new logistic options and the ability to expand to other planets which adds a cool dimension. Then there's the whole energy part which revolves around harvesting energy from the sun which has a lot of sub systems adding to the depth.

Pacing
Not sure how to describe this, but the pacing of the tech tree and new things to play with felt pretty good to me.

(re)building and quality of life features
I found that (re)building in this game is a lot easier than Satisfory due to the top down camera and ability to do things in bulk. This becomes especially easy when using mods like 'CopyInserters'. This allows you to focus in the strategic aspect and not have to fiddle around as you do in Satisfactory.

Performance
I have heard many reports of people getting only 25fps or so in the endgame (maybe try the mod 'BetterFPS' in this case). For me the game runs really really well with a planet thats almost complete full and some partially filled other planets in the same system. Still getting around a 100fps, but i have a beefy PC (8700k and RTX 3070).

One last tip
Consider automating nearly everything. You'll need a lot of everything like belts, sorters, power poles, buildings etc (pretty much everything). If you have them automated and put into storage boxes you can just keep grabbing them and have a lot more fun.