Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

I wanted to play this game since release but waited because of the bad state of the game at release. I'd been wondering when would be the right time to buy it because despite this, in context they ran out of money for their kickstarter. Far more important to me though was that someone finally made an ARPG which isn't trying to be a straight Diablo or POE clone. To me, innovation and willingness to be different is huge, especially in what I think is a stale genre which is ready to evolve. First and foremost, if you're deciding whether to play this game, my advice is to set your expectations as if this were a brand new game for where the content and polish currently is. Forget that it came out over a year ago now. It's a very, very fun game IMO, but think of it as a fresh new game that needs time to grow out still. I've also only been playing single player offline so far.
So...where is it now? This is the question and the review I'd wanted to read before I bought but couldn't find. It's hard to read past all the negativity and complaining about the game still.
The great: The action and gameplay in this game feel INCREDIBLE. This is the biggest thing for me. I sadly have not been able to get in to POE despite its popularity and vast amount of content because the game just does not feel good to me. Wolcen feels almost like a hybrid of a brawler and an ARPG. The hits have weight, weapons have different swings that you actually need to take in to account when using them. Simply fighting with your regular weapon swings is fun, where as most APRGs it feels like you click enemies to death and ability spam. I thought the campaign, story, and characters were *very* well written and I'm honestly surprised. I actually cared about the characters and where the story was going.
The stats, itemization, and skill tree feel like a work in progress but are currently in a very playable and fun state still. This is another area where I personally am giving it a ton of bonus points because, again, they have opted to not run your boring standard ARPG stat system. At every level this game is trying to make it so that theoretically every stat can work with any class archetype you choose, and there are not nearly as many arbitrary limits on what gear or skills you can use. The game pretty much lets you wear and equip whatever you want, the only limitation is whether you can make it work, and the game tries very hard to give you the most flexibility possible in how you accomplish that. It is so nice to play a game where necessarily intelligence/wisdom = magic, agile = rogue/ranged, etc........even the skill trees themselves offer something for everyone in the majority of cases. The graphical quality, art style, and animations are superb.
THE BAD, as I see it:
-The worst thing for me is that the tooltips are very poorly worded and there are too many unexplained mechanics. It's kind of bizarre actually, considering how good the writing is for everything else in the game. It makes it harder to know what you're getting when theorycrafting or comparing items and skills
-Everyone writes about bugs with this game. I played through the campaign two full times and have been doing their endgame mode here for a while. It's only crashed to desktop twice for me, and once I had to restart the game because it was acting wonky. Twice I got a weird graphical bug that meant I had to quit to main menu and load again. That's it.
-*I haven't tried it myself yet* but everything I hear is that there are still some game disrupting bugs when playing MP, and at this time there is no matchmaking.
Conclusion: I love this game. I hope Diablo 4 takes some notes from this game. I do not say this lightly. Part of the reason I'd waited on this game, aside from bugs, is that I was afraid that development would freeze or worse the studio would go under. Instead, they've started posting development updates talking about upcoming content. They promised regular patches starting in 2021 and thus far have delivered. They even were able to hire a couple of extra people to work on the game! I'm not ready to pause on the game yet but I see myself coming back to this game every time there is new content.

If you are, like me, late to the show (i.e. you know nothing about how this was envisioned to be a totally different game and how promises weren't kept, you haven't suffered the disastrous launch), what you'll find is an ARPG with an OK story, wonderful visuals, great production value in an almost bugless state (at least I haven't come across any yet). I got it on sale and I don't regret it at all.

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) !

Summery:
The game is absolutely playable and fun. I had 2 crashes within 120 hours of gameplay and a few minor bugs which didn’t bother me at all. It's an absolutely awesome looking and sounding ARPG with almost no limitations regarding character builds. I would totally recommend the game at its current state and price for all ARPG, H&S and RPG lovers.
Hint for Newcomers:
Don’t give too much attention to the bad reviews. Most of them were disappointed bakers from the kickstarter project “Umbra”. Which is justifiable because they didn’t get what they payed for. But Wolcen is NOW a good looking completely fun ARPG.
Don’t get confused by the two campaigns. Just use “Blood Trail”. It’s the same as the “Lords of Mayhem” campaign but without the bugs and including the improvements of the Blood Trail patch and the following patches. The “Lords of Mayhem” campaign is meant for old “legacy” characters only.
Hint for those who want to come back:
Delete all characters which you had before the “Blood Trail” patch was released. Start from scratch with the “Blood Trail” campaign and enjoy. Since I did this: (almost) no issues during 120 hours of gameplay.
Pros:
- Dynamic gameplay
- Awesome graphics
- perfect sounds and sound design regarding positioning and quality
- no class limitations
- lots of skill variation possibilities
- well sized skill tree (wheel)
- almost infinite endgame
- the first real fireball I saw in an ARPG which is actually useful in the endgame ^^
Cons:
- linear level design
- not challenging except the boss fights
- the apocalyptic form is almost useless
- Endgame:
o becomes boring by the time and there is no specific threat or super boss
o Not enough players for a random multiplayer session atm
o Repetitive expeditions/seats

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.