Recent reviews by Straata

Look a lot of these reviews have like no game time played, compare it to other games that it shares almost nothing in common with (I guess because reasons?), or complain about the systems and style that it is VERY upfront about. Its 2023, it takes less than 5 minutes to get an idea of what the game is and is about even without sitting through another "hey gamers, its your boy..." content farm video.

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Heres the dirty TLDR for the impatient: Its EA, stuff is getting fixed rapidly, things are being added, look up some info to see if the game is for you, buy the $20 if youre on the fence, buy the $150 if you want to support the team and really like the cosmetics, wait for F2P if youre tight on cash or think that an EA Game should basically be a feature rich demo

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This is Early Access, so the usual applies, but the Devs are super open and communicative, and they have a clear roadmap of things to come, as well as player access to give feedback in many many ways. Sure the launch was super rough, but honestly, there are bigger AAA games from much much larger teams with issues like this, and they dont comminicate nearly as openly or as frequently. (btw, you just have to laugh at entitled players QQing about not getting all their perks immediately, while the servers are basically on fire, those guys really know how to prioritize ;) )

Before we get into more of the real stuff lets be super, SUPER clear


Sorry, not sorry, but having a cash MTX shop is not automatically P2W. Warframe has done it for 10 years, and it works out just fine, and is among the most consumer friendly shops out there. Wayfinder is a lot like Warframe in that they do allow you to pay to skip out on farming up Characters and Weapons...thats it. Anything related to your build MUST be earned by playing the game. As for the $150 Founders Pack, sure the exclusive Heroic version of Kyros will remain unobtainable after the Founders Early Access, but a 5% bump in your Weapon and Ability Power is hardly paying to win.

That out of the way, the game is a lot of fun, the farming borrows heavily from Warframe, but the gameplay of doing their Lost Zones is more appealing than that. They are procedurally generated, feature random gameplay events, as well as traps and puzzles, and unless you random queue into it, you decide what gameplay altering effects to have before hand. Some are simple Dodge the Bomb Circle, others Poison puddles around spawned mushrooms, and some require you to actively interact with them. There are technically 30 of these effects, gained by combining up to 2 of 5 "elements", and once inside a Lost Zone you can even buff yourself with one of these "elements" to gain a passive stat buff depending on the one you give as tribute.



The combat itself is reminiscent of Warframe as well, but with much smaller and more deliberate combos, and the ability to augment your Skills to suit your needs. It is also entirely focused on using one weapon at a time, with Melee given equal footing to Ranged. Its a very HacknSlash meets Souls-lite-lite
The pace is much slower than your typical Warframe mission, and it is much better for it. No more mad dash to the objective, steamroll through it, and then more mad dashing to the extraction. Even accessing the exit requires you to complete an event, killing waves of enemies and sometimes a miniboss.
Wayfinder allows you to enjoy playing the game, rather than trying to race through it like a manic speedrunning robot.



Player progression is multi-faceted.
Your Character and Weapon each level up as you play, gaining power, Skills, and 2 kinds of points used to augment your skills, and your character passively. You can also upgrade your weapon increasing its stats in three category sets, each up to 10 times.
You have their version of the Mod system from Warframe, Echoes. Echoes function very similarly to Mods, but there are some key differences, Echoes can have levels and rarities that affect their stat contribution. Much like Mods you can fuse unwanted and unused Echoes into others, increasing their stat values, but also their cost to equip. Echoes can be socketed into Your Character, Weapon, and gear Accessories, giving you a huge potential to build as you choose. One thing that Echoes bring that is new for this kind of Mod/gem type system is active abilities and effects. Most of the Bosses can drop an Echo of themselves, and these can have effects like AoE damage on your Combo Finisher once every 20s, or 10% Ability Power for 10s every 45s when you double jump in combat.
Finally, you have accessories. These are various items you can pick up from nearly anything in game, enemies, quests, events, etc. They have stats that they provide, gain Echo slots at specific level breakpoints, and in some cases can have set bonuses that offer up 5 or 10% bonus to specific stats.

That all means to make a build, you choose the Character you want, give them a specific weapon (for the stats and for its Weapon Ability), spend skill points, augment your Passive Affinities, equip Accessories, socket your Echoes, and enable any Artifacts you have placed in your Housing.

Quick list of things im not covering in depth here:

Housing, its decent, its getting expanded, it sounds like it will be a great feature
Art style, I love it, its clearly an Airship Syndicate game
Story, hard to say, its still light on content, but you can see some threads being woven
MMO aspects, think Destiny, there are people around who can help you do stuff in the world, also you can queue into instanced content
World, its open, for now its not too large but theres enough to see, and its more focused on verticality and wide expanses so far, as more zones are released it will really start to feel like a bigger more MMO type game.