Recent reviews by [HobGoblin] Gabagool

This is a modern day Symphony of the Night. Genuinely one of my favorite games in my steam library.

Fun game, but the devs abandoned their update roadmap. If they get off their asses and do what they promised I will update this review.

It feels more like unreal tournament with portals than halo with portals, but it is extremely fun nonetheless. I can already tell this game will have an insane skill ceiling with a relatively low amount of skill required to actually have fun and understand what is going on.

It is a good game but recently the game crashed my whole desktop and when everything booted back up i got this error: lowlevelfatalerror [file unknown] [Line: 724] Bulkdata compressed header read error. This package may be corrupt.

Now my cloud save is so bricked that any time I launch the game, regardless on which computer I use, the game will give me this error and immediately close. I have looked over the discussion section on steam and a BUNCH of other people have this same issue and no one has been able to fix it without permanently deleting their cloud save data, reinstalling the game and then starting completely over (only for some of them to have the same error happen again and their game be bricked again). I would like an official statement from the developers on this because they have been completely silent while a bunch of players are essentially unable to play the game.

I will update the review if my issue gets fixed.

Edit: I reset my save and disabled cloud savings but now my game will crash my computer and force it to power off my computer after every level...

This game is actually way more fun than I expected. I really enjoy making classes, editing their abilities, and trying to balance everything so there are no classes that are too over/under powered. The depth and customizability makes this a really fun game to stream to friends while they help you create enemies and npc's. My friends and I joke about hating squirrels, and worshiping worms, so my friends helped me make all of the different squirrel enemies to slaughter and all of the worm npc's to give quests and guard the towns (The spiffing brit had a lot of fun with this as well as he made coffee beans the enemy in his game so it isn't just me). With more features, this game could seriously be well worth the money. For now, it is only just worth it, but I have hope as the developers are doing a good job so far.


Some things I don't currently like in this version of the game:
-Starting zones get crowded way too easily and player characters often don't move onto level appropriate zones.
-I want way more ability customization options -aoe abiltiies, effects, the ability to make classes that are tanks, healers or dps (you can sort of do this now but not really) and a few other things would be nice
- The current progression system is kind of wonky, the most efficient way to progress the game is to spam click one scenery option in a zone 1000 times to get to the next game feature. This is just bad game design and rewards you for making really ugly games.
- The game sort of runs out of features to progress with and the feature upgrades are kind of uninteresting. I really like the features that actually change things in game (parties and PVP). I think it would be awesome to add player dungeons, raids, and world bosses that huge groups could try to defeat. You can kind of do this now, but its really only possible to get 5-8 people to fight a boss enemy at once.
- The player AI could use some tweaks, I made a zone that could only be accessed via flight path that would give quests with huge xp bonuses compared to the starting zone, but not a single of my games 22k subscribers flew to that zone, even when i lowered the cost to players to 5 in game dollars (meanwhile I can charge characters 50 dollars to have a more convenient respawn location). So the player character AI just does not make sense some times. The AI is actually really good most other times, which surprised me a lot.
- The network section of the game is kind of lame and a little bit unintuitive. Since people have a tendency to never leave the starting zone, I have to add a bunch of server space in the starting zone and almost none in other zones. I have been forced to add two more starting zones just to handle how much of a network load it is due to this issue. I would prefer a system where you buy more server space, and maybe have a separate dev management to handle sever load whenever you launch a new patch of the game. This is a way to make it less complex but still interesting.
- Once you get a lot of concurrent players, dealing with cheaters in your game is annoying and not worth the time, you should be able to pay a dev to track down cheaters and ban them. Also, there doesn't really seem to be a detriment with letting cheaters run rampant (in the summary section, I have never seen a character complain about cheaters)

PROS
- Great visuals
- Great soundtrack
- Story is entertaining with many twists
- Endgame city management system is a fresh mechanic for an ARPG
- It was fun, for awhile

(Quickly Fixable) Cons
- Bugs, from small ones to game breaking/bricking issues
- Massive balance issues
- Almost every endgame build comes down to stacking ailments
- Unclear skill descriptions makes it hard to understand how good a passive ability will be
- Loot system is annoying
- Unique items are usually worse than yellow items
- So much yellow loot and no filtering options is almost unforgivable
- Endgame content bosses often give very little loot

Really Bad Cons
- 40 abilities means little build variety
- Endgame content is a grind, and unfulfilling
- Very few things to do in endgame
- Economy is perpetually screwed because of early gold bugs that weren't rolled back

Looking past the bugs (of which I experienced many) and other issues, and looking purely at the gameplay/endgame content, this game is not worth playing. I think the storyline, graphics and initial experience with the game is definitely a lot of fun, but once you start getting to the endgame with expeditions it quickly loses its luster.

In games like PoE, map grinding is tedious, but there is at least a sense of progression with multiple routes, goals and objectives along the way. In games like Diablo, pushing greater rifts is quick at first, but then quickly slows down once your build reaches its peak. In Wolcen, it sort of takes the worst aspects from both of these systems. This game has the city management system, maps, and expeditions; all of which move along very slowly. City management is caught behind grinding for gold and primordial essence (which unless you bugged yourself to have infinite gold can be kind of hard to manage). Even when you complete another part of the city management, there is no sense of accomplishment, achievement or that much that changes to impact your game. Sure you unlock an extra ability slot, a new way to upgrade weapons and a few other nifty features, but it the grind that preceeds it is by no means worth it.

I just finished killing the first uber boss, and am sitting around 93 in the expeditions page, and I don't see how this game is going to be fun if I keep pushing. The number of abilities (40) is rather limited and you can get all of them within the first few hours of playing the game. Characters in endgame can practically spec into new talents and abilities with very few resources, making the sense of character progression or archetypes useless and disposable. Decisions you make regarding your character do not matter.

In order to make this game worth it I would have to see some major changes to end game progression to make it more entertaining, as of right now, the game necessitates a very unfun grind.

I beat the game and expansion with a level 89 pirate finally and i have to say that the game is fun but there is one major flaw that makes it so i can not recommend this game... It is hard. Not a skill kind of hard where oh okay if i were better at teh game i could have beaten that boss. No it is unfair kind of hard. There are multiple later level mobs that will one shot you after a run that you start from scratch and have 20 relics. This aspect of the game makes it so i can not really recommend it. If you want to play a skill rougelike that isn't unfair go play binding of isaac and FTL. They are both better rougelikes. But this, game if you do want to hear the upside to it, has lots of good qualities to it. It has very unique classes that have very different abilities and it also has lots of interesting items that you can get that shape each run differently from the last. And finally it has potential. This game in the future may have more content such as heroes and game modes that could really improve upon this already good game. So in conclusion, fun game that you can grind and pass time along, but be ready to have an infurating death to some random mob that one shots you.

YES absolutely YES this game is so in depth and has the variety to do so much more then any other game around. ive been playing for a short amount of time and havent even delved into a minute amount of the game. Its vast, its fun, its addictive, its cheap, its what any basic gamer would play.