Enshrouded

Enshrouded, as an Early Access title, does some things well and some not so well, but it is all subject to change. We'll see how things go over the next few years. Overall, it's fun enough, and the developers have been very forthcoming with game additions and are also very open and responsive to player feedback. This game does Early Access right.

Pros:
-Gorgeous visuals
-Gorgeous world, procedurally-generated and then lovingly populated with hand-crafted locations
-Incredible, detailed and interesting dungeons to delve through, filled with puzzles and environment hazards
-Beautiful, if inconsistent, armor and weapon designs, which are fun to collect.
-A fairly robust building system, with benefits to decorating and constructing a base that you then populate with craftspeople and villagers
-Simple, but satisfying combat
-A leveling system that revolves around perks instead of stat increases (though you can still boost your stats from the perk tree)
-Dedicated cosmetic slots for your armor, with options to hide both your headgear and your gloves
-Fully cosmetic clothing sets to find behind exploration and bosses
-A food-based buff system, wherein the food you eat increases your stats and stat regeneration
-Lots of lore to discover through characters, locales, obelisks and books throughout the world
-Highly customizable game settings, including the ability to turn off weapon and tool durability or turn on starvation mechanics

Cons:
-The bonuses from armor and weapons are largely pointless, or too small to make much of a difference. Some are even entirely pointless, such as one set that offers a small 10-20% bonus to unarmed damage, with unarmed attacks dealing only 8 damage to enemies (when your mace is doing over 400 per swing, and swings faster than your fists)
-There are tons of weapons, but there are very little differences between weapons of the same class: All one-handed weapons use the same three-swing combo, regardless of what the weapon actually is, and even legendary items don't have anything to differentiate them outside of their raw damage and visuals
-The few weapons with "unique" effects are things like 5% lifesteal, 1 point of health regen, or some bonus critical chance and damage. None of the weapons are build-defining or unique in any meaningful way. For example, the "Dragon Sword", found only one hidden place and tied to a piece of esoteric lore found in your travels, just adds a flat +7 fire damage... Five times in a row. The Dragon Sword is a weapon with nothing going for it except minuscule damage bonuses that don't even interact with your perks.
-Extremely linear item and location progression: New areas are blocked off by "Deadly Shroud," a gas that simply kills you if you haven't leveled up your base enough yet (using the heads of bosses and regional materials). Essentially, your ability to explore the "open world" aspect of the game is heavily restricted by boss progression.
-Heavily reused enemies with very limited attack variety
-The magic system is bland, being exclusively ranged elemental attacks and two healing spells. There is no utility magic to speak of, outside of a single knockback spell
-The perks you gain from leveling are very restrictive in what they affect, very strictly confining their offerings to their respective stat tree (Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity) with very little overlap
-Every quest is a fetch or kill quest with some lore sprinkled around it. "Skyrim quest" is how I would describe them: Talk to a person, go to a place, get a thing, repeat until you run out of quests

Enshrouded, in short, is almost everything you could want from an RPG/Builder hybrid. It has some of the best building systems I've ever seen. This is where the game really shines. You even have people and animals to make your towns feel alive.

The combat is pretty decent. Nothing really new here but that isn't a bad thing in this case.
The talent tree is not too deep nor too simple, meaning you probably won't have to research your choices to be effective at what you want to be while also not being able to fill the entire tree making you have to make choices but also forgiving with the ability to reallocate your points.
The area where the game still needs the most work is the RPG/Story aspect. The story isn't bad, there just isn't much of it, or lore/history to uncover but the game is still in EA so still time to improve.
Character creator is abysmal for 2024. Please devs work on this if possible.
Though not perfect, Enshrouded is already a great game that gets better every update, a great value even at full price, and an absolute steal when on sale. 9/10 at the time of this review(updated)
Update: New game update "Pact of the Flame" and 2025 roadmap shows the devs are listening to the players and giving us what we want with many requested features now and on the way.

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

This is my first review on steam. And I am so excited to write it.
I am a cozy gamer- I'm talking animal crossing, stardew valley, overcooked, stray, etc. I love the zelda games, especially breath of the wild but I spent HOURS climbing mountains just to avoid enemies and bosses. So a survival game was the last thing I thought I might like but Enshrouded has won me over. It feels like the natural progression for me from Stardew and Zelda.
I absolutely loved that I could really customize the gameplay (even before the most recent update that allowed for difficulty settings) to what I enjoyed the most. So many quests are essentially optional or can be delayed, so I could wait to do a really hard one until I felt comfortable because I got plenty of XP from mining or exploring. I love the base building, and the fact that we can reused already existing buildings! Blue Goblet tavern, anyone? Honestly this has so many elements in a game that I didn't know I wanted but now I don't wanna play a game without them.
There's so much I love. But I'm going to share some things I hope they address in the future:
- The other survivors. They feel very flat. I'd love it if they had some preferences or maybe things they'd like for me to do for them aside from finding their things. Maybe they want their room to have a better bed, or a side table, etc. We all live in this space together, they can have an opinion too.
- Wtf is up with how this game was developed that I have to run this game on Performance graphics even tho I run BG3 on High/Ultra???? The lower quality visuals didn't bother me, but like seriously wtf this game is not more taxing than BG3?? I'm so confused on this.
- The hallow halls messaging says you should have friends to do it with you, which I don't have friends who play this game so I got scared that since I'm bad at combat, I wouldn't do well. So I put it off until I was way overpowered. So I feel like the messaging could be adjusted to give a level recommendation. Or maybe I'm just the only big baby who is scared of combat who would play this lol.
Last request: please keep the storyline going! I've learned so much about the world, but what about my place in it? What am I doing? Why am I clearing the shroud roots if they just re-appear? I know it's early access but I love the game so much I am dying to see what else happens in the world. I'm sold on the story, I want the next chapter :)
I just 'finished' this week and saw the new update and I am so excited to start from the beginning and experience this new update. I just wish I had friends who also played this game and wanted to do it with me.

I have played for about 800 hrs. The story is interesting, and the game is definitely playable solo. I completed the game, through level 35 as a solo player with out much problem. Some things take longer (i.e. Hollow Halls), but nothing is impossible to complete. The group play is pretty good too, though there are currently performance issue, though not surprising since this in in EA. There is also no in-game chat (text or voice), but I found a group of people, and we were able to overcome it using Discord. Used basic building blocks in-game to write out Discord info.
I absolutely love the building system. Though it could use work with camera control and additional options (round shapes), the building potential is endless. Of my almost 800 hrs of play, at least 600 has been spent building.
I highly recommend this game for anyone who likes survival/building games!

Started playing this on steam deck non oled version and it plays and runs great straight out of the box. This should be verified and not unsupported

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.