Recent reviews by Rhyn

I'm giving this a positive review, but I'm not sure if I'd actually recommend it or not. Nor am I decided on purchasing it from what I've played.
Before getting into what I believe are the pros and cons from what I've seen of the demo, I want to talk a bit about the combat as I find it hard to necessarily put into either as feels very hit or miss.

The combat has positives and negatives, lets start with the positive.
There are many ways you can go about combat, using magic and the terrain to defeat your foes by throwing different objects like trees, rocks or even explosive plants at mobs, throwing mobs at each other or even just throwing mobs off the edge of a cliff (more of magic in and out of combat below). Or you can go the classic route using weapons, being able to choose between sword and board, bow or two handed weapons.
How you kill the mob can affect what loot they drop, for example killing an animal that drops fur or oil with fire will prevent those from dropping as you'll "burn" them away so depending on what mat you want you may want to avoid using certain types of spells and/or sticking to your weapons. You can also climb on bosses and attack specific parts to break them for mats or to stop different actions.
As for the negatives (which are pretty big negatives for me), it boils down to weapons as a whole feel clunky, especially the bows or block/push for the sword & board and the two handed weapons each and a complete lack in variety weapon types as you are limited to only 3.


Exploration: The world looks pretty good, personally love the art style of the game and you can run through a map pretty quickly if you're just trying to get from point A to point B. Lots of mats to be gathered from breaking down trees, rock, plants and monsters. Depending how you kill a monster you get different mats. There are also hidden blueprints and chests you can find, the latter granting higher tiered mats, although with such a tiny and limited inventory space to begin with, the quantity of resources available to find can get very frustrating as you'll constantly find yourself having to drop mats for newer or higher tiered ones.

Magic: I'm putting this as a pro because, conceptually, I enjoyed it.
It seems to enable a sense of creativity in how you explore the world or combat enemies. Although it does have its gimmicks and from what's available in the demo, it's a bit hit or miss.
There are 4 spells in the demo, 2 telekinesis type spells, 1 cold and 1 fire spell. What I find found interesting is how you can use these spells for combat and exploration, the 2 telekinesis spells are great for combat. 1 for hurling objects at enemies or launching enemies around and the other can be pretty neat if packs group together or are surrounded by objects as it'll group mobs and objects (e.g. rocks) and burst for aoe dmg. In regards the other 2 spells the cold is interesting as you can use it to pave paths through fire, although its frustrating as the ice wall you create leaving a pool of "cold" on the ground that damages you, but not enemies. Doesn't really make much sense when standing on the ice wall itself doesn't negatively affect you. But it can also be used in combat to weigh down flying mobs it seemed. on the second map you unlock there is a drake and not only could I create Ice in it's mouth to prevent it from using it's fire breath (as was implied in the ending cutscene for the scripted tutorial intro) but every time I did so, it'd instantly ground itself.
For the fire spell, it was probably the most lack luster, I only really used it to melt ice on the ground for me to traverse frozen areas as you take cold damage constantly and are slowed if you don't have enough cold resist. There was 1 mob i found in the demo though that had some sort of ice armor plates on its back which i couldn't damage till i melted them off with fire magic.

Crafting: The crafting in the game isn't really anything new or super inventive, but it has some really interesting in how it works as well as some of the features tied to it. For starters every piece of gear has 5 different components where you can freely choose what mats are used to alter its stats. The stats themselves are a little lack luster as it's only attack, defense, cold/heat resistance and weight (the weight seeming to affect how much stamina actions take, the heavier the weapon, the more stamina you consume to attack, the heavier the armor, the more stamina you use while sprinting or climbing). Each of the mats also affect the appearance of the gear, changing the colors and textures of different sections within it. One interesting feature is being able to re-craft gear, where you just replace one of the components with a different mat to alter its effects and appearance without having to fully commit the mats to an entirely new piece of gear.

Voice Acting: Although I really didn't care for the narrative while playing the demo and ended up skipping most of the dialogue and cutscenes, it is a nice surprise to find it fully voice acted, although there are quite a few negative reviews talking about it due to their choices of going more of a VN route for dialogue with the use of 2D images of the characters. Personally doesn't matter to me, but was a nice touch.


Codex: Although having a codex is really nice for you to be able to check and reference thing's you've discovered, the monster codex has no imagery... It's quite annoying and being extremely frank, a pain in the ass to have to cross reference the names of the monsters on the materials to the names of the monster in the codex for me to have any clue of what is what. It's absolutely ridiculous to not have a photo of the enemies beside the descriptions in the enemy/monster codex.

Overall clunkyness: The game simply feels clunky in multiple areas of gameplay. In combat, the lock on feels off and when you aren't locking onto a mob, if they sidestep or move behind you, your character will just continue combo-ing in the same direction even if you redirect your camera. This also happens on occasion when fighting a pack, where your character might randomly decide to turn around on its own and attack absolutely nothing as it decides to target something else within proximity.
Movement overall feels fine, until you start climbing, specifically when it comes to dismounting, but in combat it cab get particularly bad as it affects more than just the dismount as when you climb onto bosses the controls will change up their directions as you move from different body parts and consequentially are latching on at different angles.
Magic, although I placed magic in the Pros, that isn't without some issues. Casting spells can feel a little clunky on use. The ice wall, when using as an actual ice wall build bridges, feels horrendous to use or to walk on and the fire spell, drake breath, has such a long animation, and considering it's a channel spell, lasts only a few seconds instead of being able to continuously channel as long as you have mana to consume.

Dialogue: Again, personally I skipped through most of the dialogue and cutscenes, but from the ones I didn't skip, dialogue just simply feels off, it's just feels way too positive, which in of itself isn't really bad, but it's how it's been done, where it kinda comes off as this kind of like "toxic positivity" where you're just positive about everything, agreeing with everything, supporting absolutely everything that your buddies say. It comes off as unnatural, as I was reading some dialogue options I just kept thinking "who actually talks like this, what the hell?" It ends up feeling forced. Not to mention the options you choose have apparently no affect on the games narrative whatsoever.

Game is fantastic, a great middle ground between the complexities of PoE and the overly simplistic D3/D4. I would hop on every now and then throughout the beta to see the progress and have always enjoyed it.

Game offers a lot of build diversity while making respeccing easy within your characters chosen class mastery.