Recent reviews by Arthoz

Should you buy this game today? NO.
Should you buy this game in a week/month/year? Maybe.

As much as i want there to be more good ARPGs, it is painfully clear that Wolcen is not yet out of early access. In 10 hours of campaign i encountered 3 bugs that forced me to restart the game. 1) The Act II starting cutscene didnt play and the screen stayed black 2) My entire stash was reset (very scary bug in an arpg) 3) The final boss disappeared and didnt reappear

Apart from that the game has an insane amount of small but still annoying bugs in nearly every moment of gameplay that you will experience. It constantly gave me the feeling that i should be playing something else and just wait for this game to get fixed because a bugfree version of Wolcen might actually be a pretty decent game.

P.S. If your projectiles sometimes seem to miss, even with <30ms ping, then check if you have the projectile bounce keystone (White Arrow -> Wintry Hail) and unspec it.

Unavoidable DoTs as a gear check, no thanks

Bought for the art. Quit because of the gameplay.

It honestly suprised me that the credits listed 15 testers. On release this game had obvious problems and wasted a lot of its potential.
Now only one month later there were already 8 updates. Normally a good sign for most games.
But the core gameplay problems are still persistent.

Phantom Rose is a "roguelike deckbuilding card game".

Most roguelikes have some form of permanent progression to make the runs feel different and support the player in some way.
In Phantom Rose you can unlock 6 different starting items. Thats it. All other items / cards you can find in the run are already unlocked.
So every run you choose your starting item the barrier item and play the next run in hopes of good RNG.

The "deckbuilding" is a rather bold statement. You start with a standard set of cards and after every successful battle you can
choose from 2 random combinations of attack and defense cards. Boss battle rewards dont even leave you a choice but instead
just give you more random cards.
At camps or after boss battles you can then try to fix your deck of mostly random cards.
You can dissolve cards you dont want for "roses" and copy cards you have for said roses.
But not all cards are created equal and there are 4 different tiers. Higher tiers cost more to copy than lower tiers.
Dissolving any card on the other hand always gives the same amount of roses regardless of its tier.

To copy a single tier 4 card you need to dissolve 10 other cards. In a deck that normally holds 60 cards.
The only other way you can gain roses is by winning battles. But there are also other ways to spend them.
Got a card in your hand you dont want? Reroll for 1 rose.
Have a locked card in your hand that you need? Unlock for 2 roses.
Failed a treasure mini game? Retry for 2 roses.
Found a mystery event? Better have some roses ready if you dont get a free event.

And the best way to lose roses. Meet an enemy that can destroys 2 of them each time you take damage and flees if you dont win fast enough. Resulting in no rewards after the battle.
On the contrary, the best way to spend your roses is at the randomly appearing shops. There you can choose from 4 cards (random ofc) and reroll the selection up to 3 times. The prices for the cards are cheaper than copying them and you can buy the same card until you run out of roses.

Now you could try to spend your roses on the higher tier cards. Obviously they should be the best cards, right? Losing 10 bad cards for 1 really good card sounds like it should be worth it the long run, correct?
Well no. For some reason this "deckbuilding" game deletes your cards from your deck after only one use. Yes, gone. Not just for the rest of the battle but permanently.
Also did i mention that you cant copy cards if you dont have at least 1 of them in your deck?

The only cards that you dont lose are the basic cardtypes that also have no tier and cant be copied/dissolved.
They are attack/barrier/heal and you get a handful of each in your starting deck. So thankfully you cant completely run out of cards.
Just dont expect to beat the game with those cards alone.

There are actually a lot of cards that have good synergies, at least on paper. But getting them into your deck and then into your hand in the correct order while battling requires way to much rng. Most of the time you end up with a strange deck of cards that have no synergy at all. Then you dissolve most of them and copy the few cards that are good on their own.

This causes enemy encounters to very quickly become frustrating battles of attrition. You have to watch your deck turn into dust while you fight against an enemy with an endless amount of cards. Which also have actual working synergies.
Your decisions often boil down to "lose your good cards and save your hp" or "save your good cards and lose your hp".

The items you can find also dont help most of the time. Most of them have low impact or require specific cards to shine.
There are just a handful of items that actually change your playstyle.
The enemies on the other hand often have passive buffs that work very well with their deck.

Overall not an enjoyable deckbuilding experience. After unlocking the first ending i have no more motivation to play.

Maybe one of the future updates introduces some meaningful changes to the core gameplay. Currently most of the updates are only bandages to try and make the faulty gameplay work.

EPIC = bad

For the people that are out of the loop:
Take Two, the publishers of GTA V, sent a cease and desist letter to the makers of a mod called OpenIV for GTA V. This mod is needed for the majority of other mods in GTA V, which means that they are basically destroying the GTA V modding community.

Game works fine for me 40-60 fps (2xAA high settings with shadows turned down to medium). I can only report on 2 Bugs:
1. Using Steam Overlay in Fullscreen uses a lower Resolution and makes it hard to read chat messages
2. Cut Scenes turn the game down to 30 fps and sometimes drop even lower (vsync is enabled, could be a reason)

Edit: If you have any kind of performance problems, i highly recommend using the "FAR" mod from Kaldaien until the game gets an update. Im using version 0.3.0.1 and it fixed every problem i had with the game.

System: R9 280x / i5-6500 / 8GB DDR-4