Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

I have a little history with Wolcen ,i tried it a few years ago and my computer had some problems,here on steam this is my second experience with this game.
Unfortunately my review comes at a time when developpers announced their plan to end the support for multiplayer and endgame content however there's enough content in the single player campaign and to be honest i was interested only in that. The after grind is not for me and there are better alternatives for that.
If you never heard of this game there are similar games like Path of Exiles or Diablo series,this can be a great choice if you're interested in action rpgs with dungeon crawling and loot-based progression.
I really liked the dark fantasy theme and visually the game is a feast for the eyes and for my surprise the voice acting was great for this kind of game. After some browsing i discovered popular voice actors from games i played before like dragon age or witcher 3.
In terms of gameplay everything was smooth with no major issues or bugs.. the movement was fluid and the dodge/roll responsive. With a huge arsenal of spells and combinations of talent trees you can create a unique character, featuring a classless system Wolcen doesn't lock you into a specific class !
Another mechanic i enjoyed was the Apocalyptic Form, this transforms you into avatars with unique and powerful abilities ,there are multiple avatars you can unlock each with its own theme. Beyond the cool factor and amazing visuals there are strategic advantages during though battles or boss fights.
At this point in time i can only recommend this if you're looking for the single player content, for a great price during a sale of course.
Pros:
- Great story with twists and betrayals
- Voice acting
- Visuals
Cons:
- If you want more than single player campaign,read the negative reviews
My review score
Story - 9
Gameplay- 8
Graphics- 8
Sound - 9
Overall - 8.5

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem isn't the most polished game, but it holds its own in the ARPG genre and offers an enjoyable experience.
It took me 36 hours to complete the main storyline (no interest in endgame content).
Pros:
- The concept of a vast skill tree with three rotating rings adds depth and flexibility to character customization.
- The game offers a straightforward and awesome system for changing gear appearance and a wide range of dyes which you have to collect.
- The visual and auditory effects are stunning, with a decent soundtrack complementing the experience.
- Monsters and dragons are impressively designed, adding to the game's immersive atmosphere.
- Skills are dynamic and enjoyable to use, with a plethora of talent options that encourage variety. Additionally, most spells offer different damage types, enhancing strategic gameplay.
(for example Ice nova may become Fire nova)
- The intricacies of the skill tree and talent system provided me with hours of enjoyment as I honed my character's abilities.
- Despite my disinterest in endgame content, the system seems promising for those who do wish to explore it.
- The story, while not groundbreaking, is engaging enough and easy to follow.
- Chapter IV's structure, mirroring that of the endgame, offers a refreshing change from the standard narrative-driven chapters.
Cons:
- NPCs' impatience with players spending too much time in shops or engaging in conversation is an odd and immersion-breaking feature. It feels unnecessary and detracts from the experience.
- Some skill talents are broken and do literally nothing.
- Many descriptions, particularly for skill talents, are overly vague, lacking specific numbers and leading to confusion among players. (For further discussion, see this Reddit post
- The character design for Valeria feels like it was inspired by a cheap blowup doll
- Jump spells can be cumbersome to use, with certain environmental obstacles proving impassable.
- Exiting a dungeon using the HUD exit button doesn't register as completion, which is especially frustrating during "stay in the ring escort" missions, where players may need to backtrack to gather remaining items.
- While the concept of Apocalyptic Forms is undeniably cool, I found their execution to be somewhat lacking. There's a sense that they lack depth and variety, leaving much to be desired in terms of their potential impact on gameplay.

Wolcen is a fairly divisive Diablo-style ARPG with some interesting ideas with mixed implementation but having a few highlights as well. From my understanding, Wolcen was very heavily changed from original Kickstarter plans which annoyed backers. Then released most of the game after ending Early Access leading to a really rough and buggy launch. I picked it up on discount years after it's release, a number of minor bugs here and there and a few crashes but nothing totally game breaking in offline mode and the campaign has been 'finished'.

Wolcen is currently getting a lot of hate due to announcing on May 30th 2024 that they are ceasing further development and support for the game and closing the multiplayer servers on September 3, 2024. It was already pretty obvious that the devs were finished updating game, losing multiplayer is a bigger issue. I assume they choose to do this because Wolcen player pop is pretty low. Unfortunately, like many other modern games, there is no alternate local multi-player supported so once the servers are closed multiplayer functionality will cease. The Community Manager reported that the devs are planning to release a "Import Online Character" button to download and convert your online character to an offline one, even when the server is already shut down so at least there's that.


Pros:
* Has one of the better campaigns in the genre I'd say. A bit cliche at times but well done with decent cutscenes, voice acting, good character designs and a few interesting characters. The final fourth chapter was released post-release and is weaker than original (no waypoints, it's more of a rougue-lite type experience with a couple of story missions and a lot of grinding to be able to fight the final boss Ahriman) but still overall worth finishing off the campaign.
* Graphics are overall pretty good.
* Has a passive 'wheel' instead of a passive 'tree' like most ARPGs. There are three tiers of the wheel and you can rotate the nodes in each tier allowing you to adjust the 'wheel' for a better path through the layout. Provides a bit more complexity than some other ARPGs while not being as complicated as something like POE's passive system.
* Attributes and skills can be refunded. Refunding attributes gets damn expensive at really high levels but it's available. Also, there's no fixed class and can learn all skills so if you want to try out a different playstyle you don't need to create and level an entirely new characters.
* Skills can be upgraded with a limited number of special traits which lets you make some big changes to how they function and also come with a pool of damage types they can be converted to.
* Hybrid builds are interesting; the game has two resources, willpower and rage, and hybrids have to juggle these resources by using rotating between skills that use either of these.
* There's an active Dark Souls type dodge you can use to roll out of trouble.
* In post-game you can gain ability to duplicate skills up to two times.

Neutral:
* Passive wheel could use maybe a couple of additional nodes maybe. There's only one node for summoners for example. Not a huge issue through.
* Duplicate skills share the same cooldown which is a bit of pain. It let you have two versions of a skill with different traits I guess but it's only really good for summon skills. Would have preferred zero cooldown but only one duplicatation instead of two.

Cons:
* The campaign is too easy overall. Trash is not a threat and boss health bars drop insanely fast. Combined with the multiple ressurects, there's not enough challenge in the base campaign until maybe final two bosses in Act 4. Some nice set pieces, the end of chapter fights have an epic feel to them but you got to push deep into post game content to get to the challenging content. I wish there was a 'Hard' campaign difficulty in addition to the existing 'Normal' and 'Story' difficulties where bosses had a lot more health.
* All bosses are one shot fights. So no farming of the bosses possible. Also you can't go back to past chapters. Not a huge issue in offline mode but I hear it might be able to mess up your game in online if you're in a game which is in another chapter but not sure.
* Post-game gets a little repetive. It's just doing random rogue-lite missions agaisnt increasingly high level enemies. Want more fights against big bosses.
* While you can learn all skills, the ones you can actively use are restricted to what you have equipped in hands. It's a bit too restrictive at times, wish they made some utility/defensive skills have no gear restrictions rather binding every skill to using a weapon/off-hand type. A few additional skills would also have been welcome.
* Skillbar is extremely small. You only get four skill slots (you can unlock a fifth slot for all chars starting from act 4/post-campaign). With the way summon skills work (summoning automatically) + duplicated skills, more skills slots would probably not balance well with summoners but feels a bit limiting for other builds.
* Stash space is a bit meh. Only five tabs available. You start with one, the second you can buy for a small chunk of gold and the final three are only available post campaign. I assume they were originally planned to be sold as MTX or something lol.
* Attack/spell animations cannot be cancelled which makes using the active dodge and potions extremely janky at times.
* Some balance issues. Bows for example, attack animations are slow af which makes it harder to active dodge attacks sometimes. Because they are slow it's harder to generate rage attacking. In addition, bows users have no skills for generating rage while melee have two!
* Apocalyptic mode is a massive letdown. You gain resource while playing which lets you activate it. It convert you into one of four invunerable massive aspects that come with fixed unique skill sets, you can de-activate it early or wait until you run out of resource to sustain it. They're extremely clunky to use and honestly I'd rather have my normal skills. The only real good use they have it become invunerable and avoid deaths and restore Energy Shield. Would have been better if they just provided your character with some buffs.


Personally I think Wolcen is worth at least a couple of playthrough through its campaign with a couple of builds. Going deep into the post-game can be pretty repetitive but the post-game content is unlocked for all characters so you don't need to worry about grinding up expedition levels on all your characters. If you're only interested in multi-player you'd probably want to pass as that will be gone soon. As part of the dev update, they announced that Wolcen will be available later (probably when multi-player officially closes) to purchase at a new, permanently reduced price. So either wait for the price to be reduced or a big discount (last big sale was ~90% off I think).

This game is just ok. It's unoriginal in visual style and narrative. It also has a few flaws that don't really ruin gameplay. Recommended if you like a standard Diablo clone (though Wolcen is more specifically a Path of Exile clone). Try to buy it at a bargain price, because whatever bugs you may encounter are probably never going to be fixed.

I will start out by saying I am new to the Action RPG genre, and having little to no experience in the genre I rather enjoyed my time playing Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem. Before starting I saw the mixed reviews and was not sure what to expect, but right from the early going I was delightfully surprised to like and even be impressed with many aspects of the game. The game play was fun and I was kept mostly engaged throughout the story. Wolcen isn't the most challenging game even on the harder mode, but I didn't find this to be a drawback. The end game does become repetitive but still offers ways to up the challenge. The combat was solid and even in the end game it was still fun mowing down endless hordes of enemies. There are many enemy types and some have a really cool design to them which helps keep the game fresh. There are many types of weapons and spells to choose which all can be tweaked to your own liking to better suit your build. The perk tree is massive but doesn't feel overwhelming, you can even rotate the perk tree to allow even more customization to your character. You can make some really OP builds and there are a lot of possibilities. I enjoyed the story even if it was a little cliche and predictable, but it had some depth to it and was on the longer side. Some parts of the story were hard to follow but still in the end I was satisfied. The graphics were a strong point of the game. From the cinematic like cut scenes, to the detailed environments and enemies, its a pretty game. The music suited the game nicely and added to the medieval feel of the game. There were some parts of the game that reminded me of The Lord of the Rings which I thought was cool.
That being said there were some aspects of the game that were inconsistent and held the game back. The game lacked polish in areas, there were some graphical glitches and audio glitches but nothing too severe. On occasions a piece of loot could not be picked up off the ground. I did experience infrequent crashing though the game did a good job of keeping your progress. Some parts of the game like the hub area and project map felt a tad bleak and lifeless. There is an online component to the game with an related achievement that allows you to play Co-op, but that feature will be removed September 17th, 2024. The price is fair for the quantity and quality of the product, though there are games in the genre that are free and many would argue better games. However these negatives weren't enough to deter me from liking the game and my time playing it. Wolcen might not be winning any awards for best in category but I still thought it was a good game and one I would recommend.
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I bought the game a while ago and didn't start playing until recently. Shortly after I started playing, I was surprised to learn that servers were being shut down. So I didn't get to experience the multiplayer aspect of the game at all. That said, I enjoyed the single-player campaign tremendously. The graphics looked great with everything turned up to max. The story is different enough from the standard fantasy fare, and even offers up some wicked twists. The dialogues are well-written and get better as the story progresses. Like others I also thought the voice acting was outstanding. As far as game play, I liked the ability to play as any class just by switching weapons. The different skill and spells are a lot of fun to experiment with. I enjoyed this game much more than Diablo 3 single player.
This game showed a lot of promise. It's too bad the way the way the studio ended left a bad taste for many people. I hope they learned from this and if they would make other games in the future, I would be interested.

Definitely more deserving than the mixed reviews sentiment it's getting. Got it on sale, and it's worth every cent. While there are many rough corners (and the loss of multiplayer), the story so far is relatively engaging (more so than D4) and there are interesting enough mechanics to not be a carbon copy of POE/Diablo/et al.

Some of my gripes:
- You can't combine potions or gems?? Leading to a ton of inventory waste? Even then, gem levels don't seem to differentiate that much from one to another
- Targeting enemies/things can sometimes be painful and not seamless (e.g. as a spellcaster, trying to hit breakable items works 60% of the time)
- Equipment/gold/etc seems very unbalanced. Loot never seems amazing (even legendaries) and you get a pittance of gold from selling items

What I enjoyed:
- For a 'indie' game, it's beyond beautiful in a way that AAA games wished they could. There are many many moments worth taking a breather from the spam-rolling and spell-casting, to just enjoy the aesthetic and design of the maps
- The skill tree is pretty decent (although i did wish the opportunity cost of using a set of skills over another was less severe). Unlike the POE skilltree which requires a master's degree and then some, this was very straightforward + extensive enough.
- The soundtrack is just... 10/10. I also most enjoyed the voice acting

Wolcen could have been something great with better studio support and/or investment, but whatever has come of it is still pretty darn enjoyable!