Age of Reforging: Freelands is a plausible attempt to recreate Kenshi's "craft your own story" magic on a medieval fantasy foundation. The gameplay, especially in combat and world exploration, is a reminiscence to Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. The world map is populated by bandits, monsters, merchants, villagers, and soldiers that are constantly at odds with each others. You can of course take side with one of the belligerent in said conflicts, such as saving a group of poor villagers or helping bandits to rob them instead.

You have all the usual cRPG stuff. Trading, crafting, sneaking, stealing, skill checks, murderhobo-ing.. all included. If you played PoE, pathfinder, divinity, and bg 3, you immediately understand what to do. This game has a lot of content for an early access game, and along with that, comes a lot of bugs and crashes. There is no voice acting. The story is.. serviceable. There is not much to say honestly. Just imagine Kenshi with a storyline.

That said, this game is really hard. I say this in a kinda bad way. Some encounters are straight out both unavoidable and unwinable. I'm no stranger to hard games like Dark Souls and Kenshi, they are hard but fair because you can choose to avoid many problematic fights. In this game, you'll frequently find yourself in a situation where the only way out is to load the game. For example, some orc ambushes happens so fast, yet the mc runs like my grandma (he is neither encumbered nor debuffed). Orcs have 0% avoid rate early on, hence once you get caught in the world map, you are not allowed to flee from the battle area. The orcs outlevel and outnumber you a lot and with only 2 party members, there is nothing you can do aside from loading a save.

You can micromanage, but the feature is pointless when the controls are extemely clunky and unresponsive. I had my character stood frozen mid fight because the game decided to cancel his aggro after killing one enemy. Having a 360 degree camera also introduces a lot of bugs like being unable to select some enemies at certain angle.. and often i selected the ground instead of the enemies, making my crossbowman rushes to the enemies instead of shooting them. UX is a mess right now.

Thankfully these problems are not inherent to the core gameplay and should be easy to iron out by the devs, assuming they continue to support the game.

It's ugly in places, the dialogue is painful, and it's clunky.

But it has heart and vision. Merchant caravans plod their way from town to town. Guards change shifts and relax in their Barracks. Other adventuring parties can be seen in the hills, and you can join their battles if you choose.

Kenshi-like in many ways, but with questlines to follow.

It is enough good to engage me, and for me to suspend disbelief and engage in the world. If you found Kenshi or Rimworld value for money, you will probably find this value for money too.

game looks like ♥♥♥♥ but you need a super computer to run it anyway. can barely load the game on a $1200 PC.