Was very hyped for this game and right now, after early access launch, i’m equally disappointed.
The visuals are amazing. Too bad you cant see them properly because of all the frame dips and horrible general performance. Regardless of the system i tried it on there were constant frame dips and stutters. Not even a 7800x3d and a rtx 4070 ti were able to handle this game flawlessly at 2k constant 60fps. Ironically it performed better with the rx7800xt which is a weaker card, probably because of more vram. And it was close to unplayable on a i5 9600kf and a gtx 1650 super (as a funny side note the vanilla 1650 is the 3rd most used card according to steam surveys).
The vertical world design is amazing and encourages exploration. Too bad the controls feel clunky. I mean keyboard and mouse as a control scheme is horribly implemented in terms of precision and the controller has drift and massive input delay.
Combat is a mess for the same reasons. It just doesn’t flow. The movements feel artificial, and the input lag makes it a mess. There is no way to do key binds and the combat only seems difficult because of how unintuitive the control schemes are.
The AI is god mode sometimes and bad most of the times. Sometimes it dodges everything, making it feel like the system is cheating, sees you and hits you through walls and different elevation levels and other times it runs through the textures, gets stuck in pillars and obstacles and kills itself.
This game wants to be everything, it wants to be souls like but doesn’t have the precision or the grandeur of souls games (although it was marketed as such), top down arpg (but with a strange camera that prevents you from seeing points of interest at times or blocks view entirely instead of making objects transparent), town builder (but with time gated predatory mobile like mechanics), survival game, farming/crafting simulator with botched mechanics.
All these systems put together and interacting with each other, for me at least, resulted in a very tiring experience. Its like something was taken from every genre, put in a blender and out came this beautifully drawn amalgam of…something that doesn’t excel at anything and is complicated for the sake of it.
Exploration and combat flow is broken by the excessive need to gather ingredients and materials because there is no way to heal yourself in this game other than through cooking. Basically you want me to explore the game and then you punish me for doing so.
For example, I don’t understand why when farming resources like trees the lumber falls to the ground instead of going directly into my inventory if said inventory is not full. Why is this unnecessary step in the game? Why the need to overcomplicate things?
And it becomes a chore really fast especially since you can just mindlessly create new realms and farm for materials over and over again like a grinding bot and transfer them to the main realm with no penalty overwriting any material node respawn.
Also in terms of exploration… The first time you discover the world its fun and you don’t mind it but then you realize there is no proper fast travel and you have to do a lot of backtracking and it becomes tedious. Also apart from the first part of the game the rest of the world post Sacrament is pretty linear. The fact that the rewards at the end of most of the jumping puzzles are a let down doesn’t help much with incentive.
Town building is gated behind a time system. Feels like a mobile game full of predatory player retention tactics that add 0 value to the gaming experience and serve no purpose other than to keep you waiting. I already invested time gathering the necessary resources, why do i have to waste time waiting for the building to be completed? What’s the next step? Pay real money for boosts? Pay for completion? Pay to skip? This made me not want to interact with the building system and only done so out of sheer necessity.
The challenges in the game are also time gated. There’s daily and weekly. Because you have to feel the sense of urgency and know that if you don’t play every day like its your second job you will miss out on stuff. And if you abandon a challenge it disappears entirely. I don’t understand why this is designed the way it is, not to mention it completely breaks immersion.
For me the time gating and mobile like predatory mechanics are the nail in the coffin. Not gonna play something that goes down this route.
The interface is bad and unintuitive and as a result so is the user experience. There’s a ton of elements that aren’t explained. There barely are any tool tips and i still don’t understand what some buttons or icons do.
Lastly, it would have been a great idea if you wouldn’t have blown your own horn ,during interviews, over the engine being created especially for this game, from the ground up, when in reality its done in a heavily modified Unity and Photon Quantum. For me at least this created a lot of false expectations and hype because i interpreted the effort as a sign of how well optimized the game would be, not necessarily in terms of graphics but in terms of input lag and general feel of the game especially since the main selling point was the, and i quote, “pin point pixel precision combat”. I know…marketing…
The game has a lot of potential and i genuinely hope these issues get fixed,. As it is now i cant recommend this game to any of my friends who were on the verge of buying it, because it would result in a frustratingly unpleasant chore like experience for them, that aims to unnecessarily complicate things.
