I don’t often post reviews or give feedback on games, but as I enjoyed the game and its still in early access, I figured I could give some feedback on my thoughts.
I believe I just finished what content is currently available (all I have left are the infection zones). I’m assuming this isn’t the actual end to the game and is just what is currently available (at least I hope so since the story is obviously not finished). Overall, I quite enjoyed the game and am looking forward to more content. However, there were a decent number of things I didn’t love and am going to spend most of this highlighting things I think could be improved.
Feedback
— Postives —
Good story (so far)
Love the art design
Combat is good, but could use tweaking
Interesting areas that are fun to explore. Good use of shortcuts and platforming.
Solid enemy design, but could use a little more variety in both general appearance and moveset.
— Negatives —
Stat requirements for weapons are way too high, especially later on - 26 point investments in multiple stats (or 40+ points in a single stat) makes it difficult to justify experimenting with different weapons - this could mostly be addressed by making it free to respec.
Make it free to respec your stats - what purpose does it serve to require an item for this? It just makes me not want to try different builds because I could end up running out of fallen embers with a stat distribution I don’t like. While not rare, if I wanted to change from dex to strength, it would require 30+ embers.
Inventory space is too limited - especially for food and resources. Having to leave behind loot isn’t fun. I would change it so investing plague ichor increases all item capacity, not just for a single category. That way you can invest into other things like rune and ring capacity.
Chest access is annoying, especially early on. Before you own a house, having to spend 30 seconds running up and down stairs to go between the two chests in the rookery is frustrating and wastes time. What does limiting the capacity of chests serve other than to force you into buying a house and making additional chests? This isn’t a survival crafting game. I understand crafting is a significant component of the game, but it wasn’t something I wanted to spend a lot of time with. Being able to decorate my house isn’t the same as being able to build it from the ground up. Even when you do own a house, the nearest one still requires 10-15 seconds of running to get to from the whisper point in the opposite direction of the shops.
Loot doesn’t feel good. Most of the loot I received was crafting materials I didn’t use, weapons I didn’t have the stats for, or gear that wasn’t very good. I ended up using the same gear for most of the game, upgrading it when I could.
Stealth attacks are really finicky. It felt like you had to stop moving and be at the perfect angle/distance to get the prompt. Also, something like a parry attack would be appreciated, as right now enemies just get stunned.
The camera sucks. This might be one of my biggest issues with the game. The boss fight against the Caretaker and the Tusk was a perfect example of this. Half the fight I could barely see my character because the camera was centered in the wrong place. Changing who was locked on didn’t seem to help. This was an issue in almost every boss fight against multiple enemies. Maybe there’s a setting somewhere to always keep the camera centered on the character. If not, there really should be.
Enemy poise felt too high. I ran a pure dex build, which I’m sure contributed to things, but it was basically impossible to stagger some enemies. This, combined with tanky enemies that had annoying movesets that didn’t let you attack for long periods of time, could make combat feel drawn out and tedious at times.
Many enemies have spin attacks that go on for 5+ swings before following up with a dodge that leaves time for at best single hit, drawing fights out. Combining this with high poise, it often felt like I was guaranteed to take some damage in encounters. This became less of a big deal once I figured out how to use the healing utility rune, but I was already 15 hours into the game by then. Also, the healing rune seems like a must have since it isn’t limited in fights like food is, heals a huge amount, and doesn’t need to be crafted. I don’t know whether I think this is a good system or not, since it made the game more enjoyable to me, but at the same time made food kind of redundant other than for the bonuses to stamina regen and what not, which overlaps with potions. I don’t think the healing rune should be removed since healing only with food became harder and harder as time went on and your total health increased. The number of foods that heal enough hit points to be worth using becomes smaller, making it a lot easier to run out, especially when fighting a boss, and no one likes grinding healing resources.
Hitboxes feel kind of off, especially behind the enemy. Backswings would hit that didn’t look like they should.
The majority of penalties for plagued weapon enchantments are so bad they render the weapon completely useless. Who wants to lose 30% of their max health for a 20% boost to stamina regen? Given the penalties, the benefits they give should be significantly better. Giving them something like a strong, unique perk would be a nice touch. As is, the best I can say is that they are incredibly niche (heavy roll only, seriously?). When you combine this with how expensive it is to craft and upgrade a weapon and the rng nature of the upgrade system, it really disincentivizes you from bothering to make your own weapons.
I would enjoy additional weapon variety. Maybe it was just the dex build, but it really didn’t feel like I was able to use many weapons throughout the game. I was kind of shocked to see the number of weapons listed on the wiki given I don’t think I even found 10 weapons (including duplicates/higher level versions of the same weapon) that I could use.
I know I’m not the first to raise this, but I’m not a fan of time locking the upgrades to Sanctuary. I know there are ways to decrease/eliminate this, but its still just a question of what purpose this serves and how it benefits the player experience. Its just artificially dragging the process out.
Once in awhile, the game would stutter for a few seconds. Also, in my last few hours of gameplay, I crashed twice while clearing out infected zones (unfortunately I didn’t think to keep the logs and couldn’t say what I was specifically doing at the time).
The UI is kind of meh, especially for the equipment screen. I didn’t even notice the utility runes until half way through my playthrough.
I would appreciate some side quests. The only side content other than grinding away for resources was to fight the daily/weekly challenges, clear infected zones, and the crucible. This stuff is fine for repeatable content, but just having some more story driven content would be appreciated to help flesh out the characters. At least add in some unique mini bosses for these.