Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

For months I've wanted to buy Wolcen and have put it off because of the negative reviews and general opinion online that it is a buggy mess. I bit the bullet during the winter sale and so far I have been absolutely blown away. It is everything I was looking for in terms of a new ARPG. The combat feels great and the visuals are pretty. The progression systems strike kind of a balance between Diablo 3 and Path of Exile. The abilities are simplified and accessible but there is an expansive passive skill tree for tailoring your build.
In terms of bugs I've gotten some occasional texture pop-in and glitched audio, but everything has been very minor. So far I haven't experienced any of the game breaking issues that other people have reported, but I'll edit my review if I do later. Either way I've already got my money's worth from this game and I would gladly recommend it to other ARPG fans.

I am torn with rating this game. Its has huge potential but also some severe problems.
Pros:
- huge skill tree (you can develop your character just any way you feel like)
- Interesting feature to build up your "city" to support and aid your hero
- awesome graphics (including battle animations)
Cons:
- laking endgame content (especially loot: no sets and highest tier items are the worst in game)
- not very engaging team of developers (they like to nerf skills and create the most useless unique items possible showing that they dont understand their own game in that respect)
- due to the afore-mentioned there is a severe limit on character development possibilities (yes you can chose any skills you like but in actual fact only very few builds really work well)
I will give this a thumb up simply because I hope that the developers will eventually create meaningful set items and fix many of the useless skills.
Dont buy this game yet. Put it on your wishlist and wait for the problems to be solved (and a sale) !

This is one of the harder reviews I have ever had to do. Wolcen is a complete mixed bag of emotions, fun gameplay, lack of polish, and frustrating bugs. It's an ARPG, which means at it's very core, I am probably going to like it.
I'm a well traveled dungeon crawler as my first game was Champions of Norrath on PS2. Sacrilege to those that started with the Diablo series, but I simply missed D2 in it's heyday. My favorite ARPG of all time is Diablo 3 with Path of Exile following closely behind. I have well over 700 hours into Diablo 3 with over 300 hours into Path of Exile (my most played Steam game). I value exciting, visceral combat above all else. The game being nice to look at doesn't hurt either.
This is why I find myself recommending a game that is honestly, a bit of a mess. Wolcen launched with a shit storm similar to Diablo 3's launch. Nobody could log in and bugs went wild. Full disclosure, I had the game on launch and elected to play offline. At the time of this review I am sitting at 35 or so hours of gameplay. ALL of those hours were offline which saved me a ton of headaches.
Wolcen does a lot of things really well. The game is just flat out gorgeous. I have spent a lot of time in the transmog screen perfecting the look of my character. My character in Wolcen looks 10x better than any character I have ever made. In any game. Particle effects are gorgeous. The environments are destructive and look great. This is the pinnacle of graphics in an ARPG.
The combat is really, really good in Wolcen as well. The game manages to have the weight and fluidity of Diablo 3 without being a complete rip off. Diablo 3 combat is structured around using resource gaining abilities to then use resource spending abilities. Wolcen instead goes for a tug of war resource system where you use willpower abilities to transfer into rage abilities and vice versa. It's fun to play with especially when you start getting gear and passive nodes that speed up those transfer times.
Gear in Wolcen is middle of the pack. It's not the stupidly simply itemization of Diablo 3 where you simply look for green arrows and it isn't the extreme complexity of Path of Exile. I feel like Wolcen strikes a solid balance in the middle ground in itemization...which the game tends to do in general.
Nobody plays an ARPG for it's campaign, but I'm happy to report that Wolcen probably has the best campaign out of modern ARPG offerings. It's fairly well written and the voice acting isn't bad either. It's quick and once it's over, you don't have to deal with it again. You stay in endgame mode much like Diablo 3's "adventure mode." Perfect.
So that's all the good. What's the bad?
The endgame is lacking right now. It exists, but it's incredibly repetitive. You blast through what are essentially nephalem rifts from Diablo 3 and build upgrades for the main city which gives you certain bonuses like an extra skill slot or higher magic find stats. That's about it. The maps get boring fairly fast and the developers made the poor decision of having the end of the run boss spawn in a static location. When you fill up the kill meter the boss should spawn on top of you like it does in D3. Instead you have to back tread in the instance that you already passed the boss area or fight through meaningless hordes to get to the boss area. It's sloppily done.
The game is a fairly buggy mess as well. As I already mentioned, I played exclusively offline. Which means I avoided probably 90% of the problems. Players that played online reported stash wipes and even entire characters vanishing. These are the kinds of bugs that would cause me to uninstall the game immediately. Thankfully, they never happened to me. Instead I came across crashes, graphical glitching, campaign missions not properly triggering cut scenes, passive nodes that either do not work as intended...or just don't work at all, and chests in impossible to reach locations.
The game just doesn't feel like it is a complete game. Everything just kind of feels half baked. In the end, you have to ask yourself what you are looking for in an ARPG. If you want a game with hundreds and hundreds of hours...this likely isn't it. After 30 plus hours I just didn't have the drive anymore to do another three expeditions. I ultimately went back to Path of Exile. This seems like a non recommendation, but it isn't. I thoroughly enjoyed my 35 hours in a $35 game (I bought it when it was on early access). It's a game with a pretty solid foundation that needs a lot of repair work and added content. Hopefully the devs don't give up on this game because I think this game could be something special this time next year.

With the first free content release coming up soon I thought it was time to finally leave a review for this game. Wolcen was a long time coming, hotly anticipated, and sadly a bit of a disappointment for many. This is, however, mostly due to how the game's official launch went. This being the developer's first game they made quite a few rookie mistakes. Some mechanics and passive nodes were broken, there were some game-breaking bugs and amusing glitches, poor balance, but most importantly (something that earned them the ire from a lot people) was the state of the games' servers at launch. All of this is documented elsewhere on the internet so I'll be brief. The short and skinny is that the game received an order of magnitude greater of players on launch day, so the servers were inaccessible for the vast majority of the playerbase for quite some time. I remember rather early on I told several people that I expected the developers would spend the rest of the year balancing and fixing the game and it would truly shine.
With that out of the way this game is an amazing success in my book. As far as aRPGs go Wolcen definitely has earned it's place among some of the greatest. It's visual style and visceral combat fits right into the genre but what truly amazed me is the story, which is something that tends to suffer in aRPGs. Even my brother, someone who quite literally gets lost in any game with quests because he skips any dialogue he can and smashes faces without consideration for consequences, found himself sitting with rapt attention on this story. The game isn't the most difficult, but the Chapter 1 boss quite literally had me respeccing my character to try different approaches with him. The crafting is interesting, the passive tree offers quite a bit of customization, and there is an unexpected surprise waiting at the endgame that I found to be a pleasant addition to the usual bump and grind of aRPG endgames.
In short: This game is easily worth the money to play, if only for the story and a change of flavor for when your aRPG of choice is growing a little monotonous for you. With the new content release coming up I look forward to seeing if this game will be able to compete with upcoming titles, such as Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4, and whether or not it will earn it's place along the likes of Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, and Diablo 2 as some of the greatest of the genre. However, with Last Epoch's release just around the corner I can't help but wonder if they will be able to compete with the two most precious of resources: a player's time and patience.

Two words my friend: (no, not "No refunds!") "Growing Pains".
Yup, that's the essence of what Wolcen was, and actually still is. It was born in pains and even now, after years of development it still crawls in pain. Unbalanced, unfinished, incomplete. Passives working randomly or not working at all, content missing, various bugs still present: from bad positioning (loot drops under surface) to hits not conecting opponents and so on.
Ok, now you are probably thinking "Dude mistakenly pressed 'I recommend' instead of 'I don't recommend'". No, my friend - it's not a mistake. I really do recommend Wolcen. Why? Didn't all those faults spoil my fun? No, they didn't. In fact I am having a hell lot of fun.
I don't know why but I really like this game. Perhaps it's because of its visual side? Wolcen is one of the prettiest action RPGs on the market. It's physics gives you the feeling that your character is really connected to the world and not just hanging hovering in space. Sceneries are beautiful, lots of various characters, mobs and so on. Everything made with a high detail polish. Character customisation for instance - is of the greatest: lots of armor parts in dozens of variations ready to put almost any color combination you want (different paints drop as loot).
Hack and Slash is about two things for me - combat and loot. Wolcen offers a great combat - especially magic. Spells are just awesome. Their power, animations and effects - game gives you the best in it's genre.
Then what about the loot? It's right there. Perhaps not a variety like in other H&S but it's good. Wolcen focuses on rare and legendary item builds (think of it like blues and purples from WOW or Borderlands, the difference lies in number of its abilities). There are also uniques but these are a bit different. They are not a key-things like in Path of Exile where you create a whole build around one item. Here they have their unique abilities but in fact they are just a nice addition to the game, nothing ground breaking. There are no set items at present in Wolcen and I think it's good. Why? Two reasons. 1st - I don't like being limited in selection of abilities offered by set items (after all it's my choice what to use, right?). 2nd - Sets feel very 'final' to me. When you finally complete one, some emptiness comes and you start to think "Well, so it's done".
As I have mentioned before, the content is still incomplete. Right now the main campaign fits in 3 acts and they are quite long. At the time I'm writting these words we're pending the next big content patch (hopefully) that is supposed to add next chapter to the game and various optimisation fixes. Personaly I can't wait to it.
In the meantime there is the end game and it's content is not so shabby (compared to other games). In Wolcen it comes in two forms: Mandates and Expeditions. The first one is just a single mission, a random map with a simple task (usualy to kill a number of opponents) that is rewarded with an item, some experience points and gold. Expeditions are more complex. They offer you a fixable level of difficult resulting in better loot drops and amount of experience and gold reward.
There is one more thing in the end game - a micromanagement of the town. You can raise new buildings and they will open new features and enhance character options. Resource that is used for buidling is called Productivity and comes from doing Mandates and Expeditions. It's a nice addition to the game but nothing extraordinary (rather a gold sink and a grind machine for completionists).
Current Metacritic score for Wolcen is something around 60% but most of the bad reviews focuses on technicals - weak optimisation, various bugs resulting in crashes, freezes, poor performance etc. I know that from my own experience, I've also struggled with crashes, memory leaks and so on but in the end I kept coming back to Wolcen. It has this indefinable fun factor that adds "Just one more map/level/mission!" thing. Game isn't flawless, actually it has few strong downsides but.. I still like it.

Overall a quite decent game with really nice graphics but not near complete with some minor to major bugs, alas I have faith that WOLCEN Studio will not disappoint in the long run.
Do keep in mind that it will take some time for the Developers to finish and polish this game so if you're impatient then put the purchase on ice for now.
*I MAINLY PLAYED OFFLINE*

I wanted to take my time before publishing a review of this game. It is now April 5, we are multiple patches in, and I have a lvl 78 character who is working on their last upgrade for the endgame city. I love ARPGs and play almost all of them to their endgame.
TLDR: Fun combat, great visuals, nice campaign, but a shallow endgame means this title does not have the longevity you might expect from the genre. Lots of potential, but it hasn't achieved its best yet.
Bugs:
I have only encountered a few bugs in the game. Nothing I encountered was game breaking. I see lots of people struggling with issues on the forums and reddit, but by some small miracle I've avoided most (except those that impact talents and skills).
Combat:
This game is slower and more deliberate than POE or D3. I find that combat is heavy. This leads to well designed boss fights that I found exciting and interesting. The addition of a stamina bar for dodging (complete with i-frames) is welcome to the genre. It allows mechanics to be designed with this resource/skill in mind. It is not your typical run and gun ARPG as both POE and Diablo have become. Combat has a weight and rhythm to it that you do not often see in an ARPG. I loved this change of pace, but this is just my preference. Further into endgame you can develop into a faster clearing build, but bosses still take effort.
Graphics:
Beautiful. This game puts all other ARPGs to shame visually. I love the style, the atmosphere, and the levels. I like that skills are apparent without being overbearing (like POE). I always know what is happening on the screen.
Story:
I can't believe I am saying this, but the game has a pretty decent campaign. ARPGs aren't known for their plot, but Wolcen does this very well. I think the game is worth the price for the campaign alone. I really enjoyed my run through the game and I took my time. I felt invested in the story which is antithetical to ARPGs.
Bosses:
This is personal preference, but I love the bosses in this game. It reminds me of early Diablo 3 where the boss fights were mechanics driven and took a long time to complete. Act bosses are standouts. Endgame bosses are fairly repetitive.
Skills and Talents:
This game has more depth than Diablo 3, but is much simpler than POE. Skills level up, get stronger, and unlock talent points to put into skill modifiers. This allows skills to morph like in POE, but in a more streamlined and easy to grasp fashion. Unfortunately, there are not many viable builds out there at the time of this writing. However, the groundwork is there for a deep skill system.
The talent tree is POE lite. There is a skill tree similar to POE, but each tier of skills can rotate to allow more customization. This is an awesome feature, yet not many builds are late game viable and the potential of this character system is not reached.
End Game:
Here is where the game suffers most. End game shows glimmers of brilliance. I love the city building, but it will be too much of a grind for most. The end game functions similar to D3 rifting, but with the ability to use POE style map modifiers. Neat set up, but pushing endgame content to get to the top tier of loot can take a long time. This isn't bad, but it will likely feel like a grind. I can understand how people can get bored with end game in its current state. The lack of terrain, monsters, and bosses adds to the grind. In short, I enjoy the combat so much that it didn't bother me, but this is strictly preference.
Loot:
The game has failed in this department, which will hurt it in the long run. Most great end game items are crafted through a POE lite crafting system. Materials are rare and spamming them is required for good items. Uniques are not interesting, most loot is purely vendor trash, and my best items I created myself. Without great loot to chase, the end game will lose its appeal long term. Trading doesn't exist so the economy just doesn't matter. This needs to be addressed to give the game longevity.
Overall:
Wolcen is a very pretty ARPG. The combat is different from other ARPGs enough to be worth a play through. The campaign is great and the bosses are interesting. End game is lacking at the moment, so you won't sink thousands of hours into this game. There is so much potential here and pre-COVID-19 I thought the team was getting into a rhythm of patching out bugs/tweaking things. It has slowed down since mid-March, but that is to be expected with the current climate. The team did a great job with the game, but it is not a polished AAA title. It has rough spots, struggles with build diversity, and lacks a motivating end game. The systems have great roots and I expect this game to grow into a great game in the future. Right now, play the campaign and anything you get out of end game is gravy.