Enshrouded

I've seen some down-votes due to a misunderstanding with the co-op. Ppl are saying that you cant make your own base/chests/etc. This isn't a MMO-lite with multiple guilds/tribes. Its a single player or CO-OP game. Co-op meaning the game and world is shared, not at each persons own pace. No one will probably see this but I thought it was worth saying something for those that may get discouraged over someone else's misunderstanding.
Edit: Didn't expect this much from a simple comment. Thanks for the positive feedback and awards!!

A friend of mine gifted me a copy of this game.
At the time of writing of this review, I've put about 50 hours into this game.
Here are the Pros:
The game is beautiful. The building, is simple, but very fun. Homes can be as complex or as basic as you want. While I believe that Valheims building was vastly more complex, not every game needs to have building like Valheims. I can still make my grandiose homes with ease in Enshrouded.
I enjoy the Souls-Like stamina based combat. As well as the perk/skill tree. And the lore is fantastic. I'm a lore junkie and I LOVE archaeological storytelling which this game has in spades.
The map is massive, and filled with so much to do. It's rare to find dead zones on the map. I'm always stumbling across enemies to fight, mats to farm, and ruins to explore.
The Shroud mechanic is great.
The performance of the game is excellent too. I have had zero crashes, lag, screen tearing, none of it.
I've discovered less than a handful of bugs, which is unheard of for an Early Access game.
Oh, and finally, the Glider is a BLAST to use. I get massive amounts of enjoyment out of flying all across the map with the glider.
The Cons:
Magic and Ranged are so overpowered it's not even funny. I'm a Tank main, so I was very excited to see that there were perks/skills for Tanking. Except that Melee players get completely shit on the farther you go into the game. Despite massive levels of Con, and Armor, I don't feel any Tankier than I did when I started the game in rags. So the classes need more balancing, badly.
The AI is very stupid, and extremely easy to cheese. Just get a little bit of elevation and you are untouchable.
The difficulty spikes are quite unbalanced. You go from feeling insanely overpowered, to hitting like a wet noodle and getting deleted when an enemy looks at you. *Glares are the poison coated dual-wielding enemies*
There's punishing difficulty, and then there is unbalanced difficulty. I want the former, but currently it's the latter.
The parry timing is inconsistent. I parried the world in Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. I Mikiri Countered my way through Sekiro. I think I'm qualified to judge the timing on this games parries. Lol
Conclusion:
The game is one of the best Early Access games I have ever had the privilege to play. The devs know what they're doing and are consistently pushing out hotfixes and updates.
Enshrouded is vastly more polished than most AAA games that release these days, it's massive, filled with content, and very fun to play.
For the asking price, you will definitely get your monies worth and hours upon hours of content.
I give Enshrouded an 8/10

To "complete" the Early access game, it took me about 110 hours; all quests; unlocking all achievements and a lot of building stuff. Now to wait for more content...
So what kind of game is this, its basically a survival game, where one can build at your own pace, its also a voxel world, so everything can be mined and destroyed. You can build uniquely in your own style. Plenty to discover, and lots of enemies to kill, although there are only a limited amount of different enemies and bosses for the moment.
You can completely play this solo or with friends, lots of classes to explore, It also uses a valheim saving system, so you only need to create one guy if you dont want to start over, playing with friends or on a public server.
great looking vistas, fun way to travel around, really fun and easy building system, voxel world, great soundtrack to get you into the mood, and lots of lore to discover through questing.
definitely recommended if you are into a new valheim kind of game

I am a 58 years old woman who started casual gaming in 2019. My favourite games are Medieval Dynasty (damage off), No Man's Sky (pirates off), The Sims4, as well as all kinds of games like anno, foundation, ostriv and more. I really suck at jump and run (never played Mario etc.) and I never ever played a fighting game. So I am definitely not the target group for this game.
But I watched some letsplays and I really wanted to give it a try, because of the beautiful huge world, the scenery, the building system, the gliding and more.
So I gave it a try and I love it. At the same time I never played a game that was so frustrating because of my lack of skills. In the forums I feel even more frustrated by all those comments who say it's too easy. I would REALLY appreciate if the devs added some difficulty settings, so I could reduce the number of enemies or make them less powerful (and those who think it's too easy could add more power to their enemies).
I love that I can play together with my husband (who is even slower to find the right keys than me), I love that there's a protected area where we can build and that there are no base raids. I love that dying isn't too punishing. I love exploring and trying to find a location (which is mostly right behind a steep high mountain). The skill tree still feels like a miracle to me, mostly because I don't know what most of the words mean, but I don't care and just try things out.
It is a very well made game with a lot of content even though it's still in EA, and it's super fun, so I'd totally recommend it.

Overall is a fun game to play.
However, there is no pause function in single player. Developer should consider add in this feature as some of us are parents and need to attend our kids

Valheim comparisons, in general, aren't doing anyone any favors. I purchased V Rising because of all the reviewers calling it "Valheim with vampires". V Rising isn't remotely like Valheim, and I couldn't squeeze even 2 hours out of it. Valheim has good game mechanics, but a significant reason for its mesmerizing immersion is its art style. The musical score could inspire Dvorak or Mendelssohn, the subtle pixelation combined with masterful lighting makes it less like computer animation than impressionistic painting, and the creature design looks like it was taken from a 9th century tome. Only a shameless copy could hope to re-evoke the same feelings.
Enshrouded is instead its own game. The graphics are appealing, reminiscent of Immortals Fenix Rising. The voxel building & landscaping is innovative and fun. The map is interesting and large (although EA boundaries are discovered pretty quickly). If you want to explore a new world, or if you want to engage in veratile base building, Enshrouded may be for you. It is quite good. And the shroud mechainc I find quite compelling.
There are some immersion breakers, which hopefully will get addressed during EA. First, resource respawning is way too quick and without variation, much like Conan Exiles. Your character in the early game (which is all I know) seems overpowered. Mobile assets like animals and bosses frequently get stuck quivering in complex landscapes. You can't drop inventory items, but istead must delete them. The day-night transitions are beautiful, but seem too rapid.
I find many of the criticisms less than generous, considering this is early access and not intended to be a Valheim clone. Even with its problems I find it more compelling than most AAA titles that debut at 2x the price.

This will be kind of long but informative review, coming from someone who played the game since it came out and beat it in the normal difficulty as well as the hardest difficulty (500% dmg, 500% hp etc...) as well as having played every possible class combination there is.
PROS:
- It has very nice graphics, the landscapes and visuals are beautiful.
- The building is very nice, the architecture of buildings and generated structures is amazing.
- The map design is cool, although there are a few rough areas to traverse around i would say overall it's a decent map.
- The progression of the game is fairly good, with various different quests from each of the "survivors" to keep you engaged with the game as well as make you explore around to keep progressing to craft better weapons/armor and other miscellaneous.
- The class system, there's different armors/weapons to choose for each class as well as different skills to level which gives variety to the game and they don't restrict the armors or weapons to any specific class, so anyone can pick whatever they feel like picking, e.g: you can be a wizard with armor for tank for survivability.
- Respeccing your skill points is very cheap and doable throughout the whole game giving window for errors and not making you feel like you screwed up on your build. One thing i would change about it though would be adding a mechanic that allows you to respec any specific skill point and not the whole tree every time, as some times when you are experimenting or just want to switch one or two skill points for others it can be very annoying to have to restart your whole skill tree and place all your skill points all over again just for that one skill point change.
- The skill points. Apart from getting skill points from leveling up, they made a very unique way to obtain them through clearing dungeons called "Elixir wells" you have to kill the mobs inside the dungeon including most of the time a Boss at the end then destroying what's causing the "Shroud" to appear.
- The devs are bringing updates every few months since the game came out and the vast majority of them have been good updates, i would say this point matters the most as they are showing they care about their game.
THE CONS:
- The skill tree... It has a fairly high amount of utterly terrible skill points not to say useless... the pathing is also very bad, having to go through a lot of terrible skill points just to get that one that's decent. The points are poorly mixed between the skill trees, like having assassin related nodes on the beastmaster's tree or having ranger nodes on the assassin's tree. Other than that, it's pretty nice to be able to place skill points wherever you want without restrictions, sort of like Path of Exile.
- The combat is not terrible but it's not good either, It's very basic and simple you usually find yourself spamming your mousebutton without second thought unless you're fighting higher level than you monsters or higher % difficulties, the animations are kind of clunky and delayed ever since they fixed the infinite flying trick with the glider... You tend to get animation locked with wands and bows even with daggers and swords but for a shorter amount of time.
- Melee... For a class that has to mechanically engage with the enemy way more than the rest of the classes, it gets outclassed by both mage and archer since they can just infinitely kite or shoot from a distance with higher damage outputs... The damage just isn't great and if you go tank your still not tanky enough to do your job well, especially in harder difficulties... (you take max defense armor + the whole tank tree + more hp nodes and you still get one shot by Lv11 mobs). The jump attack is decent to use but SO frustrating at the same time, since it just gets rid of your ability to attack while mid air completely rendering you almost useless against flying enemies. THERE NEEDS TO BE A SEPARATE BIND FOR THIS ATTACK.
- The ability called "Multishot" for the archer while being good to have since you can do more damage, consumes the extra arrows that are being shot... so you burn through your arrows like it's nothing. Mage on the other hand gets their Spells to be "Eternal" keeping the same amount of damage. While they added an "eternal arrow" it does insanely bad damage... even less than the worst craftable arrow in the game WHILE ALSO USING MANA essentially making it not worth to use.
- The Assassin. I like the addition of daggers even with their very basic attacks. It feels nice to use, they're fast and they give the ranger an alternative since they scale off of dexterity, making the game more fun BUT a lot of the buffs you get for them whether its on armor, weapons or skill points is for merciless attack and sneak attack... which both are COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY TERRIBLE, sneaking in this game is basically useless since it's VERY difficult to pull the sneak attack and even if you do, the damage it does is so mediocre that you would've been better off just hitting the mobs to begin with. And merciless attack is partially the same, the damage is completely mediocre you can be hit while doing it (it has a long animation) and it can also MISS mobs sometimes.... I just think they need to revamp the skill tree for this weapons or make those 2 attacks better and more polished because right now they feel insanely bad.
-Private hosting has been pretty rough, even with perfectly working and fast fiber connection and a decent PC, people LAG when you're hosting the server, sometimes their game freezes for up to 15 seconds when both parties internet is working perfectly fine.
- The enemies AI is kinda wonky, there are certain times that enemies will hit you when you are behind them and they are attacking someone else even when it's not a 180 or 360 degree attack... the hitboxes seem to be working kind of strangely. Also the ranged enemies especially bowman keep following you through walls and attacking you making it impossible to lose aggro unless you run out of their detection radius. This was a massive problem when playing in 500% difficulty.
- Some of the stats for armors and weapons can be very ambiguous and poorly worded, you basically have to do your own research and testing to be able to know exactly what does what, when it should be the games job to explain it more explicitly.
TLDR:
It's a decent game but polishing a few things here and there and fixing others could make it an amazing game. For now i'd give it a 7/10.