Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

I was (and still am hesitant) to write a review for such a controversial game, but, probably 3 people will ever read this, so here goes...
Caveats: Never played an ARPG before. Saw the hype, took a chance on a genre I have no prior experience with.
PLAY OFFLINE: I hit up offline first without much thought. I had a great gaming experience all the way up and into end game content. Really enjoyed it.
ONLINE: About 9 days after I bought this thing, I decided to try the online mode. Once there, I started to see why all the negative reviews are popping up. This dev team isn't ready for online, is my guess. I got in after a game update or two, so I missed the worst of it. Had some bugs that blocked progress coming into ACT 3, managed to work around them. That said, they shouldn't have been there in the first place.
So IF... this game looks appealing to you, and you like to play alone, buy it, and run offline mode. You will have a blast. Online is better than at release, but I can't see the future, You are on your own if online play is a requirement for you.

DISCLAIMER : I backed this game back in 2015, played here and there during it's changes, I liked some of the changes and didn't like others. This game is much different in 2019 than it was then, and most of the negative reviews are based on that. As you can see I'm approaching 200hrs played in early access, and I might just hit that mark before release because of how enjoyable I have found the game, especially the recent patches. I'll layout my pros and cons for what is currently available and then my optimism for what is coming.
Pros
- Visceral action: This is an ARPG, and you want to feel the impact of your skills when killing enemies, and I feel Wolcen does a very good job here. I've mostly been playing melee and ranged builds, haven't really dabbled in magic yet, but the attacking skills are hefty and satisfying. I'll also add that the audio for the skills is great, and I particularly love the "plug plug plug" sound of the auto-turrets.
- Itemization: Loot, loot and more loot! What more can you want from a hack and slash looter? Starting out lvl 1 in the campaign each found item is a treasure, wondering if it's an item that fits into what you are planning to play or you find something that completely alters your plan because it's better or build defining in this classless system. Once you start finding rares and uniques the game really kicks up! But once you start finding legendaries, oh boy do the min-maxing demons come out, and I love em'!!! So far in this iteration of the game these red items, basically rares on steroids, are often best in slot, and the grind to get them is a ton of fun. Anything red that drops on the screen is a potential small to huge upgrade for your character or another build, and then sometimes; but as with any game looter, there's the chance that item just rolled all the wrong affixes and is useless.
- Skills: I mentioned above how I felt the skills are visceral, and you feel their impact. Here I would just like to mention that I feel the current group of skills we have access to (24 in total) are pretty darn good. The animations and artwork of the skills is great, and I do love the rune system that is in place. For those who are reading this review having not yet played the game, so far each skill lvls up to 20 (same as current level cap) and you have 20 points to allocate between the associated runes for the skill. Some runes cost 4 points (minor) and some cost 8 (major), and this will determine how you use the skill compared to another player using the same skill. It's fun and allows for a lot of build variation.
-Passive Tree: The Tree has 3 rings (2 at the moment) in the first ring there are your basic "class archetypes"; soldier, sentinel (rogue) and a mage one (forgot the name). The next ring has 6 "sub classes" and these are where you start to get builds being defined. The 6 branches of the second ring are the: Assassin (dodging, single target dmg), Ranger (projectiles and ranged attacks), Elementalist? (elemental damage duh), Cabalist (damage over time oriented), Warmonger (physical damage), alongside the Praetorian (tanky boi). Now the really cool thing about these rings is that they are not stationary, so you aren't stuck going in one path or needing to spend 10 points just to get to your desired 2nd ring, you can rotate the rings to set them up the most efficient way for your build!
- Attributes: You gain attribute points per lvl that can be put into Ferocity, Toughness, Agility and Wisdom. You will find yourself sometimes doing a little mixing and matching to perhaps hit break points, or your build might only require you to dump all points into one. It's dealer’s choice sometimes and is often very dependent on gear you find and certain passives you may have chosen. Wolcen is finding a nice happy, and functional medium blending attributes, passives and itemization together.
- Campaign : I found the first act to be rat
her enjoyable, and the story to be easy to follow and so far, well thought out. The art and environments are great. Not the open world that the game used to have, but I do not find it detracts from the gameplay that much. Looking forward to Acts 2 and 3 on launch (hope they have a bit more content than Act 1), and the following Acts that are to be FREE DLC.
- Soldier of Fortune and Wrath of Sarisel: So these are the current endgame content for the game. Soldier of fortune you get to push higher and higher monster levels with the incentive of increased loot drop quality and quantity. You can add modifiers to these runs to make it more difficult but increase the reward. in SoF loot drops from everything, but you don't get the "reward" until you've completed 5 runs.
For Wrath of Sarisel , when making an SoF run, once you add all the modifiers you can lure "tainted" monsters that will chase you down and do what they can to kill you. These guys are basically assassins that can really mess you up. These runs are a mix of speed and kill runs, as you want to clear mobs as quickly as possible to kill the bosses so you can get a high rank at the end of the run, I believe that the higher the rank the better the loot (doesn't always seem to be the case). However, these runs offer loot that doesn't drop elsewhere. Loot from these runs can roll affixes like a Bow allowing you to use the melee oriented Bladestorm (Whirlwind). This affix might be cool and interesting, but maybe not useful. But finding a shield or a sword that allows you to use spell casting skills as a melee character can be build RE-defining.
- Social/Trading: The big thing though is you can trade anything and everything with your friends. Even if you found something while playing solo, you can give that to your buddy who is just starting out. I don't mind a system like this, I prefer it over nothing, or something so limited its frustrating (D3 trading...blech).
Cons
- Skills: some skills I found we very slow to cast, like Arrows Wail, which is hail of arrows type skill, and the casting time for the skill seems a bit long as enemies tend to be able to close the gap during the cast time. This may just be due to my lack of play time with the skill and build style as I've mostly been playing melee builds. So, take that with a grain of salt.
- Lag and Loading: Right now Wolcen seems to be pretty CPU intensive, generally once in-game it isn't too bad, but sometimes when starting a run or going to the next level it takes too long and some monsters show up and slowly start beating on me to the point I end dying at the start.
- Bugs: It is early access, there are bug. My review is very long now so go look in the forums for the bugs.
Future Content:
For this I would really suggest going to their website (
If you like Hack and Slash ARPGs the likes of Diablo, you can find enjoyment here. I'd recommend picking it up if it goes on sale before release (January 2020 if they are still on track!), if it doesn't then maybe just wait until it is released if you don't feel like being limited to lvl 20 (lvl 90 is the cap on release).
Current state, I give this early access version a 7/10. Again, I'm giving this a 7/10 as an early access game. I'm not giving a fully developed and launched game a 7/10 because that is not what that is...sometimes people seriously forget that when reviewing or reading reviews of early access games. I hope to update this on release, and I hope I can give the fully released version of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem a 7/10 or better!
Thank you for your time,
Flyhumpy

I'm a dad, in my 30's now and don't have much time dedicated to gaming. So when I pick a game, I feel I have to choose it wisely. I'm very very glad I purchased this one. First steam review I've ever done. One of my favorites is Grim Dawn. This is now equal to that and I've only played the first couple of hours.
The graphics, diversity of spells, spell graphics (important to me) and the way the combat feels/looks is just perfect. Really great job, devs. I'm gonna spend a ton of my free time on this one!
EDIT: You absolutely should not purchase this game as of 2.19.2020. It's important to know that this game is not in a playable/enjoyable state at the moment. My initial review was based on open beta game play after 3 hours. Once launched, the game was quickly taken offline for 3 days due to unexpected database issues due to a massive influx of new players. There are so many bugs that many consider game breaking and it's flat not worth $40.
Bugs that you will encounter as of this review: Loot/Stash disappearing, Item/gold duplication, unable to basic attack certain mobs, end game monsters not dropping any loot, damage modifiers not actually modifying any damage, potential for complete character wipe and completely bricking your game open completing final act boss.
*Before you purchase, please go to the /r/Wolcen subreddit on Reddit and look up the current state of the game. You've been warned. Come back a year from now and I'm sure the game will be great.

Played for more than 12 hours, unlike some others. I have only purchased the game in the last 3 days so I haven't gone through the massive wait also like some others who would be salty about that now. Just like Diablo there is a very toxic community who seem to 'dog' the game and spoil things for others. Maybe that's just the hack n slash community.
Whats awesome, ie what I wish other games had including Diablo that I spent 1000's of hours playing:
-Hypnotic wheat animation, I've already spent moments running around in it just for relaxation purposes.
-Music that reminds me of Baulders Gate, that I also spent 1000's of hours playing
-Leveling like I've never seen before. Some aspects are familiar but then something different.
-Skills are just found and can be learnt by any class.
-Tumble for everyone.
-Voice for all. No more reading. AND did I hear Minsc (Jim Cummings)? I hope I did.
-Random Treasure chest spawn locations. Can;t guess where they will be at the moment. So gotta look around.
-No limitation on who can wear the armour you find.
-STEAM PUNK theme. Love that, time to move forward in time. Why don't sequels do that? start why back when and move forward after a few releases.
-Some old familiar mechanics but also some new. about 50/50. Now I am interested but not completely lost.
-Loving the varied weapon sound effects. I can it the same thing a few times and get different sounds from my sword.
Now those complaining about the time for release. Kinda reminds me of waiting for Diablo 4 or Linage. This team is a lot smaller. Remember when Diablo 3 came out. People said it was coonie/goonar rubbish but it got patched and patched and worked on. Just like assetto corsa when it came out as well. Patience is key these days. No games come out like Baulders Gate these days that are awesome on release. Makes me thing that waiting 2 years after the release is better when I think about it. Release is more like early access these days.
I hope this review is ok with mentions of other games.

Even if they fix this issue, the game is a hot mess, and people are going to realize it very quickly when they actually get the chance to play.
Issues I've currently run into:
Characters in offline mode are randomly deleted, especially in Act 2. This is not fixed by the fix in their discord that claims it's a path problem with specific characters, as many people (myself included) on English Windows builds have experienced it. When this happens your character's .json file is filed with binary data (normally it's plaintext), which makes me suspect there's a serialization bug here.
You can trivially exploit endgame expeditions. Every time you go down a set of stairs, you get +100% magic find. If you just go up and down the same stairs, you can get as much magic find as you want, to the point where opening a chest spews out loots for minutes. If you expect online to have any form of trade economy, or ladder, don't.
Expeditions do not properly set item levels. If you enter a level 40 zone, then a 60, your items will be locked at 40. You need to reset your game to fix this.
Your progression through the game in online can be randomly reset at ANY time, including when playing the endgame (even after the "hotfix")
he game does not allow you to perform actions while performing another one. This is not necessarily a bad design decision, but because there's zero input buffer when you're animation locked, it makes the game feel massively clunky.
Many passive tree nodes are completely broken. I accidentally literally one-shot the A1 final boss because a node was giving me +1000% damage. There's a few that do this. There's also a few keystones that do nothing. They say they do something, but they don't actually have any effect.
There's ~.5 seconds of input lag on all actions, even offline. You can especially see this when trying to rapidly sell items to a vendor.
Many skill "runes" simply do not function.
Acts 2 and 3 essentially have no real content outside of the main story quests. Act 3 is full of placeholder text in the main story too. It's clear Act 1 was finished while these others were not.
Aspects of the Apocalypse do not scale with pretty much anything and are useless past Act 2.
If you play with someone online, only the host progresses. For example, if you run through Act 1 with a friend, and your friend is the host, once you leave the game you will be back at the prologue.
Flying monsters often simply cannot be targeted
If you mash potion while attacking, you triple your attack speed for each potion attempt, allowing you to delete the game with no skills equipped.
Honestly, this feels like an alpha. I won't speculate as to what happened internally with this team, but I'd strongly question this release and the motivations behind it. I'm also very concerned with the fact that a few "influencers" were singing the praises of this game and outright lying about it. It definitely smells like they were paid without disclosing that they were advertising/sponsored, which is illegal in the US. Very difficult to prove, but this should serve as a continued reminder not to trust video "playthroughs" prior to releases.
The underlying game is good, and if this was released as an alpha, or maybe even early beta, I'd be impressed. The core of this game is to D3 what PoE was to D2. However, releasing this and calling it 1.0 is deception bordering on a scam. Fortunately it seems Valve has opened up the ability to refund regardless of hours played, so people can get their money back now.

Currently at the time of writing, this game is in beta, and it is feeling quite good. Pretty smooth playing and the controls feel good. I've had a few hiccups and bugs, but this is expected and therefore I'm not concerned with it as I can simply just go and post on the Wolcen forums.
I do not know the history of the game or what was sold to people, but as an ARPG, I'm happy.
It is less complex than PoE, and more complex than Diablo 3, which for me is perfect as I cannot deal with the sheer complexity of PoE builds at this time in my life, but wanted something a little bit more than Diablo 3 in terms of build variety.
tldr: the game looks good, it feels good, it has bugs, the devs are working on it, it is overall enjoyable and pretty affordable.

Updated for release: Despite some initial (now seemingly resolved) issues with server uptime, stash disappearances, and player progression rollbacks, Wolcen is still an amazingly fun ARPG. There is still some work that needs to be done to bolster the multiplayer aspects and perhaps polish up the character trees a bit, but overall the foundation they are building upon is rock solid. Character customization is rare in ARPGs so I welcome it, I love the ability to mix abilities and playstyles, and I even enjoy the story so far which is rare in games of this ilk.
Some players are upset with the challenges the game and team has faced and while their frustration is understandable and I too have been disappointed at times, we have to remember that this is not an enormous team and that it is no small thing to build a game of this quality and studio around it; things will take time. That's my opinion anyway.
I discovered Wolcen originally in 2018 and loved the concept of it, but unfortunately soon after my initial introduction to the game the team scrapped the build and rebuilt the entire game from the ground up. There was a significant delay of about a year as the game was developed, which precipitated much of the vitriol you see in some reviews from the community. Some players felt they were short changed on the original concept of the game, which I can understand, but I personally was willing to give them a second chance. I'm glad I did.
The game has truly be entirely re-designed and conceptually reworked; it now boasts a steampunk aesthetic, cutscenes, and a more coherent story than before. Thus far, I've been having an utter blast and praise the developers for taking such a big chance and sticking to their vision even with all the pushback from the community. Well done; going to play this one extensively!