Ever had a hankering for swords, sorcery, and castles? The world of Ignus in Citadel: Forged with Fire is like the awkward love child of Dungeons and Dragons mixed with Ark: Survival Evolved. A massive online sandbox RPG, Citadel is one of the newest games released on Steam’s Early Access platform. Developed by Virtual Basement (ARK: Survival Evolved) and Blue Isle Entertainment (Valley), Citadel: Forged with Fire has the potential to be one of the best build-em-up sandbox RPG’s on the market.

One of the largest and best features of this game is its world. My brother and I have been exploring since the beginning of early access and both of us agree that these two independent studios have taken the Unreal Engine 4 to some pretty impressive heights. The environments are lush and beautiful with resources aplenty. The forests feel alive with animals, fairies, orcs and dragons, while the deserts and frosty regions are tempered with enormous fire giants, undead, and… well… more orcs.

The second best feature is the incredibly simple, yet robust crafting system. Mostly involving drag and drop, you pick what type of construction you want to do, then place it where you need. Want to create a small village like in Kokiri Forest from the Zelda series? Go for it. Feel a bit more ambitious? Then maybe rebuilding Winterfell from A Song of Ice and Fire is more your thing, like my brother and I did. Perhaps you’re more into the impregnable fortress type castle-builder. Well, there’s no shortage to what you can come up with and create. At the end of the day, the sky’s the limit and while I can’t speak for everyone, I certainly found this aspect of the game to be almost therapeutic.

Overall gameplay, like the crafting system, is fairly simple in its execution. You have a limited health and mana pool as well as carrying capacity, though you can improve these as you level up. There’s no stamina bar so no worries about tripping over yourself trying to escape that dragon who’s trying to turn you into lunch. You’ll wield a few different weapon types from axes to staves and gauntlets, with more powerful versions unlocked as you level and invest Knowledge points into their respective skill trees. The same goes for your armor.

This brings us to one of the most important aspects of the game; your Knowledge pool. As you level, you will receive a limited amount of “points” to invest in crafting, whether its arms, armor, potions, structures, spells, etc. As you get further down the tiers of each knowledge set, the amount of points required increase exponentially, so it’s wise to plan out what you intend to use and build so you don’t end up wasting Knowledge. Fortunately, if you do screw up, you can learn to craft a potion that wipes your Knowledge and allows you to reallocate your points at level 40.

Leveling up, like most RPG’s, takes longer the higher you are and allows you to also invest “upgrades” to your health, mana, attack, and carrying capacity in addition to gaining Knowledge points. Also, certain tiers of crafting only unlock after reaching certain levels. Depending on whether you choose to play on a PvP or PvE server, you’ll find spending your points to be a very tactical experience.

Other prominent features include animal taming, guilds/houses, PvP, character creation and mass exploration. If you can see it, you can most likely reach it either by walking or flying. Animal taming can be useful if you want an ally in combat or a pack horse to carry all that stone you’re lugging around to build your castle. All in all the system is a bit too simplistic for my tastes. Guilds/Houses are a bit of a limited functionality in the current build of the game, but do allow you to pair up with your friends and build/own structures together. Since it’s so early in the game, I don’t expect much from this mechanic yet, but it has great potential and is great for building community towns/cities and such.

My experience with the PvP has been limited so far as I’ve mostly been exploring the PvE servers, but the system has a lot to work on before it becomes viable. Much of the time you’ll end up either dying a lot to other players or watching your time invested into building a base go to waste as players mercilessly destroy them. I’d feel a lot better about it if they included a PvP flag system like other MMO’s, but again these are features that may be included in future updates or in the final build of the game.

The developers are very active, which is a huge plus point. From communicating often with the player-base through Reddit, their site, or the consistent updates, they are committed to not only improving the game, but adding content that the players are interested in.

Being only in Steam Early Access, there are plenty of issues with the game. The worst that I’ve encountered so far is the terrible optimization of the game and engine. My brother and I have tested the game on two good rigs (one running on a GTX 1070 and the other on a GTX 780) with only a 5-10 FPS improvement between them. Depending on where you are in the game or what’s going on, you can experience some awful stuttering and frame drops. The developers are aware of these issues and are steadily improving them through patches, but as of the latest build, they are still present for even really good PC’s.

Other issues include a notable lack of craftable furniture, a very limited character creation system, too simple enemy AI, and a limited set of armor and weapons. As with the optimization issues, the developers are working on improvements and additions as the game continues in development. As a side note, once purchased, all of these updates are free and no paid DLC or content has been announced so far.

All in all, for an Early Access game, Citadel: Forged with Fire is an incredibly enjoyable experience for anyone who enjoys survival RPG’s and world building. While some of the issues concerning optimization, customization and enemy AI can bring down the experience, I strongly feel that the potential of the game as well as its current features outweigh these temporary issues. So get out there and create your perfect world in the land of Ignus!