To start, I wanted to thank you for creating No Rest for the Wicked. I thoroughly enjoyed the Early Access experience and spent about 50 hours with the game. Technical performance issues aside, I thought the game delivered on many levels. I am hopeful performance keeps getting improved.
What I Liked
The visual style of the game is gorgeous. It was a joy to move around the environment. The verticality and how each environment flowed were really well done. Each zone drew me in to take my time and explore. I really loved that.
The combat felt solid and deliberate. I tried out the starter weapons from Fillmore before sticking with sword and board. Attacks, blocking, and parrying felt good after some practice and I appreciated the variety of attack animations along with rune attacks available.
Character movement felt crisp for the most part. I did notice some input lag when doing attack combos or dodge rolls on occasion. I kept my character at Normal weight, but on my next character I’m going to try a heavy weight build.
The contextual interactions/animation felt good the majority of the time but occasionally I’d find myself sidling a door when I swear I pressed to open. I saw this as well when attempting to talk to Mira and Meri.
I really enjoyed the designs of armor sets in the game. I also appreciated that they were more for a look than the traditional armor with set bonuses. Some of the capes and draping portions of the armors looked incomplete though. I ended up sticking with the Vagabond set for my playthrough. It just looked cool. I ended up collecting all the sets I could find.
I didn’t expect the housing system but it was a welcome feature after only having the community chest to store stuff in. I think it could have been made available sooner.
The story is a good iteration of the call to adventure. I liked the characters quite a bit as well as the voice acting. The facial animations during the cutscenes really pushed the performances and I recognized Keith Silverstein’s voice right away for Winnick. My only comment about the voice acting would be to tone down the NPC dialogue as the Cerim moves through Sacrament. When you’re trucking around the town square it’s just a jumble of audio at times. Audio occasionally cut out sporadically for me as well when moving from zone to zone.
The Crucible and its boss is a slog at level 30. I won’t drone on it too long save that getting to the boss shouldn’t be so many floors. I feel three would suffice and then boss. I liked the boss fight a lot. It was epic and intense, but felt like too high of a health pool. I felt very accomplished after finally defeating it. I hope if this is the intended end game that there would be other bosses to square off against as just one would get old quickly.
The character creator was good for what it was. The character’s proportions kind of reminded me of a humanoid Ori sans tail.
I liked the cooking the crafting overall, but getting the ingredients and materials felt a slow for crafting.
What I Didn’t Love
Being unable to skip Logo train at beginning of the game after 50 hours became irksome. Please make it skippable after first viewing.
Stats for weapon equipment requirements were basic. On the character panel it was hard to tell what kind of damage I should be expecting as I progressed. I could understand where my health, stamina, and focus were at even my armor rating but not for attack damage.
Loot was okay. There was always plenty of it along the way but never anything super exciting like I would expect from an ARPG. I was pretty lucky in my playthrough and got the Corpse Smeared Blade off the first boss and gold Laquered Bow in Nameless Path. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use the bow since I invested in strength.
The two handed options didn’t feel great to me. With how tight spaces are and their wind up, they didn’t appeal in comparison to weapons with faster attack animations.
Bows being off-hand and needed focus to use was disappointing. I would prefer to just have ranged weapon option. Staves didn’t feel good either. Swinging your staff to gain focus to case magic just doesn’t do it for me. I saw in the tutorial after equipping a staff a mention of wands so hopefully this gets reworked into a ranged option.
Items like Bear Paws or Boar Tusks took forever to farm for crafting. I tried Grinnich over the course of a couple days and farmed the various zones but still no Boar Tusks for crafting. I think for these craft items just make them purchasable from Grinnich like his stock inventory and make them easier to find when farming.
Upgrading felt all right, I’m glad Weapon and Armor Shards are easy to find. What I did find odd was how some armor needed 10 resources for the first level then dropped to 4 while other armors just having 10 resources per level. Managing all these materials for upgrading felt tedious. Run back to my home(s) to get the materials and come back.
Enchanting needs work. There was only one cursed item I used in my playthrough because it allowed me to heal with each attack. The cursed items were just not exciting and never seemed worth it. At the end of the day standard gear with gem infusion was the way I went and I customized my rune attack for my standard sword. I think it would nice to be able to unsocket the gems and runes. Sometimes the rolls were atrocious and sometimes the rune wasn’t what I was looking for.
Stackable items going only to 20 didn’t feel good. I feel like 100 would be more appropriate. I’m a bit of a hoarder with ARPGs so I had to constantly go back to town to sell stuff or stash it. I think materials in general could streamlined maybe just have it on the character like another currency.
Storage didn’t feel good. Having only 20 slots for chests to store things in felt limiting, I always attribute pile and piles of loot to sift through for ARPGs so it would be appreciated if we could get a bottomless chest with tabs we can name to organize our stuff.
Not being able to arrange my inventory the way I wanted was disappointing. The sort options didn’t feel good between Time and Type either, and things shuffling around randomly didn’t feel good either during storage transfers.
After fully upgrading all the facilities in Sacrament, some of their storefronts were sparser than their counterparts. For example, Whittacker’s Crafting Shack has a plethora of items at each upgrade tier versus Mira and Meri.
Plague Ichor being used for character and equipment expansion is weird. As the tooltip says, “A gruesome, sickly substance. Some believe it can be used by Cerim to enhance their abilities.” Yet is it enhancing anything but the Cerim’s ability to carry more stuff? Seems like this needs a rework.
Other Feedback
I noticed the “training” area on the upper level of Sacrament. I think it would cool if that area allowed you try out rune attacks, move sets, and any weapon in general without the required stats.
The current Whisper system is limiting but hopefully that will expand in the complete version of the game.
Controller button remapping down the road would be nice and better mouse controls. I started on mouse but it did not feel good at all.
In conclusion, thank you again for making a wonderful ARPG. I know a lot of people were expecting something more akin to Diablo or Path of Exile, but honestly No Rest for the Wicked is a welcome change to the genre and I am very much looking forward to how things develop on the road to 1.0!