Recent reviews by d3n.Swiper

I gave this game a chance and I don't think it's worth your money.

There are some good things. Biome variety, player-built world, building system extensive crafting systems that take a while to explore.

However the underlying core mechanics under all of this are just not that good and it very much seems like "1.0 release" was more of an attempt to get some money from people, rather than actual release. It's been more than a week since said release, yet the game still has particular trees (snag) failling up into the sky after being chopped.

While the game promises you player-driven economy and markets, reality is, since every character can eventually level every skill, economy is dead for early game and will eventually die for end game. Leveling any skill is also pretty grindy (not much of an issue in itself, but an issue when playerbase is lacking and economy doesn't work as designed).

Good example of how the intended design just doesn't work - let's say you want to level ArmorSmithing. You get ArmorSmithing XP for every craft, failed crafts give a tiny bit, successful crafts net you a good amount of XP. So naturally you focus on crafting things with high probability of success, that also require not a lot of resources. Meaning you're crafting the same thing over and over for as long as you can, and then move on to crafting a different thing, again, for as long as you can. The problem is - everybody else does this too. So each one of you goes through like 200 crafts of bronze vambrace just to get XP, and since there's not enough players in the game - nobody wants to buy those 200 vambraces from you. So everybody who levels crafting ends up throwing stuff on the ground like trash, because economy doesn't work as intended. Same happens for practically every crafting profession, slowing down quite a bit close to "best" recipes that require you to invest a decent amount of time into efficient crafting, with some people working together as clans to supply crafters with what they need, so their playtime is 90 % crafting. However while this will get them ahead for a week or two, eventually everybody else will catch up, making endgame crafts just as useless as early game crafts are.

Meanwhile combat in the game is extremely meh, very buggy and desync-y, with boars and other NPCs teleporting and PvP being straight up boring. And to wear decent gear you need to invest the hours into fighting in the gear of same type, so you level the according skill. Which again, puts efficient organized clans ahead for a tiny bit, but is not sustainable in long term and has best before date practically stamped on it.

I don't regret the money I spent because I enjoyed getting carpentry to 30, blacksmithing to 23, building out my house and checking out what other people have built. But this isn't a real game, just a template for one. You can still have your fun in it, but it will break sooner or later depending on your tolerance to monotone grind and how social you are. In it's current state with it's current playerbase I see no easy fixes for crafters throwing thousands of items on the ground and economy/market being used by the same crafters to speed up EXP gain. Almost nothing is bought to "use", almost everything is bought just to facilitate faster XP gain in a skill and this won't last long.

Game is good. AGS servers in EU are bad. Every launch amazon manages to mess this up. 0 server stability, 0 communication on the issues.

I have put in around 30ish hours into the game since it's September "Realms Rebuilt" updated and I feel like the game is in a better place than it was originally. I'd not go as far as saying it's good, there still a lot of work to do, but it's not massive turn off anymore.

Aesthetics are still good,setting is still interesting. Optimization seems a lot better than it used to be, I can get decent framerates consistently now (although the game does suffer from textures being bad occasionally if your GPU is low on VRAM).

I've played up until around 4rd "story world" of new campaign and I'd say it's a strong point for the game at this moment.

Building mechanics are still uninspired and clunky in my opinion. You don't get enough freedom in terms of what can attach were, some build pieces (like stave columns) can't get roofs attached to the top of them, there's a bunch of issues with how far your respite zone can stretch (and how high a chance you have to come back to boar ruining half your base).
Minor realm cards (modifiers) often seems like workarounds to some issues, but sometimes can provide some interesting new experiences.

Crafting can also seem unnecessarily complicated meaning you will need a lot of storage to store dozens of different types of hide. On one hand it's somewhat unique, on the other it's not interesting, it's just annoying. Same with having campfire present near all your "activities" for the warmth, not to mention how it looks having campfire dropped on wooden Tudor floor.

Character presets are still ugly. Hopefully this trend will soon die off in western games and we can get some decent presets that don't keep you awake with nightmares at night. I saw a couple examples of non-uglies on reddit, so it seems like character creator allows for that, but it's not easy.

Combat (1st person especially) is improved, feels decent now. Shooting guns feels good enough to not have any complaints at all. Some traversal methods have had their stamina cost decreased, making them much more usable.

I'd say right now Campaign, exploration, some of the content that is available is a strong part of the game that is interesting. Exploration will get repetitive eventually, since there's not a big variation in terms of activities available. Building, grinding out the resources - still pretty weak, but now awful.

Overall - game improved a lot since the previous review. Still need a lot more time. But I lean more towards positive now. It's worth trying out if you're into the genre.

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Original review from February 2024 below.

Optimization is pretty bad. Yet another example of Developer who thinks that DLSS and FSR are not technologies to make older hardware viable, instead they think these are technologies to make it safer to ignore proper code and optimization, people will just unscale and play a blurry mess.

Could be forgiven if gameplay loop was fun, but it's not. Base building is on 10 year old level and doesn't come close in complexity to staples like valheim or even recently released Enshrouded, meanwhile it's very resource intensive and requires a lot of resource grind.

Aesthetic of the game is amazing in terms of environments and some design elements, but when creating characters you have a choice between ugly and uglier.

Combat mechanics are weird, Janky and not enjoyable. Developers honestly say that 3rd person view is experimental and it shows, animations are pretty bad, combat gets even worse in 3rd person than it is in 1st.

Maybe it could be good with more time in the oven? Unfortunately could not refund since you can't grind out the tutorial in 2 hours allowed by steam.

Wish I had more time and patience to play this. Probably the best thing that happened since Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Neat mix between HOMM and CIV, 4x elements are well though out, amount of customization and gameplay options is absolutely mindblowing.
On the negative - some balancing stuff, some tomes can feel overpowered, some can feel underpowered. "Campaign" could be better thought out, right now it's okay, but not engaging and is mostly based on events occuring in what seems like a normal game, would prefer more "scenario" feel to each campaign map. Also kinda wish that "themed" builds were powerful enough on higher difficulties

Extremely mediocre in all aspects. I beat it in 10ish hours, payed 20$ for it and I think I overpayed. Most glaring issue that after god knows how long after release the game is still not free of bugs, especially so far as "newer" DLC Axatana weapon concerned. During certain animations you can get hit out of weapon skills and end up being unable to use ANY attacks at all, input just won't get registered until your death.

On top of that - animations of most of enemies are wonky, hitboxes are not clear, weapon feel is extremely meh, overall combat feel is a lot less polished than FROM games. Boss design and level design are lame and uninteresting, out of the 5 weapons maybe 2 have decent movesets that are flat out superior to everything else. Extremely annoying camera work not just during cutscenes, but during fights as well, as well as a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ decision to add "slow-mo taste" to certain animations completely ruined the combat for me.

Bonus points for lute, being able to pet a cat and being able to live your life as a brigand.

Buy only with a big-ass discount and only if you enjoy the genre. Even then probably not worth your time.

Seemed like a good idea at first, turned out to be a terrible experience. Camera constantly locks to 1 player when playing online (would be understandable co-op, but unforgivable for online). So quite often players end up not being able to see themselves, and sometimes camera goes completely bonkers and focuses on the dead person instead of someone alive. Private game turns into public after resuming, so you have to deal with constantly kicking bots. Ping desyncs usually end up in dead players for 0 reason. You unlock a bunch of characters as you go through the game, but you're locked in with the first character you select for the rest of the campaign, so you can't swap or try out the new one without restarting the game. It seems like in almost every aspect of the game design that you could fail in - this game fails.
Spell design is decent though, and you can still have some laughs with a good company so there's that. But there are better games to play together, so this one is a hard pass.
Devs not fixing known bugs (like private games turning public) for 3 years doesn't help any either. They obivously don't care enough, so why should you? Don't waste the money.

Pretty curious experience. There are some bugs, expected for early access, but having a game that doesn't hold your hand and you actually decide what to do and when feels great. No journal, no quest log. Pure exploration and maybe take some notes if you play this.
Very relaxing experience overall, with a decent soundtrack and amazing ambient sound-design. Hopefully it will evolve into something even better later down the road

Huge wall of text incoming, you've been warned.

Bless is in a very interesting position. To my memory - this is the first MMO that community tries to kill, instead of game being killed by developer or publisher, like it happens with most other MMOs.

• Translation could be better. Especially where skills are concerned. However it's one of those issues that can be fixed easily and fast and really not a big deal if you're playing the game at a normal pace.
  
• Optimization is pretty bad out of the box. It gets a lot better with certain tinkering in .ini files and your GPU driver control panel though. After some tinkering you'll get stable good peformance, I get 100+ fps in dungeons and 40+fps in very populated cities with GTX 970. If you're a PC gamer and don't know how to adjust your settings that's your own fault really, PC is not a console.
  
• Endgame PvP balance is meh. They're actively working on it though.

• Launch experience is/was a lot better than a lot of people paint it out to be. At least in EU. The amount of time I have not been able to play the game due to maintenance in first 4 days sums up to around an hour and a half. (evening play sessions after work). This is the first time in my experience where additional servers got added almost instantly, closing registration/allowing it once again decisions were made promptly and the overall server performance was great except evening of 2nd day before server restart (physis btw). I've lived through a lot of MMO launches (LA2, WOW, Rift, GW, GW2, Wildstar, ESO, Archeage, BDO and many others) and this launch was decent. Don't even make me remember ♥♥♥♥ ESO pulled off with their "hey guys, EU servers will be located in NA until later this year BTW".
  
• "No endgame content" - Is just a pure lie. Yes, loot chances of highest tier gear in endgame dungeons are low. Gear still drops though, contrary to what a lot of people will make you believe. It's june 1st, less than a week since the pre-order start and they've already implemented the first battleground. Not to mention the glorious openworld RvR fights near dungeon entrances. There's plenty content, at least for now.
  
• "Duping exploit" - stuff like this existed in EVERY eastern MMO upon it's launch in our region. We went through it with Tera, went through it with AA, went through it with BDO (well, BDO actually had plenty of game-breaking exploits not just on launch day but even months later, but that's a whole another matter). What's important is that issue has been quickly adressed, official stance on it was released, punishments were explained.
  
• "Dated Graphics" are fine. Game isn't the most beautiful, but it's not ugly either. I can't criticize graphics.

• There is NOTHING. And I mean NOTHING that can be considered "pay to win" in the cash-shop. Even the experience boost that is in the cash shop is so minor that having in-game pet with "xp" roll nets you 4x better bonus.
  
• Vocal developer/publishing team that actually communicates with community. I CAN'T STRESS ENOUGH how important this is and what an impressive job they've done so far. A lot of the most annoying issues (like launch splash screen that they couldn't realistically test in dev environment because it was steam vs bless authentication issue) were solved in the first couple days. All of the major complaints get adressed in official news posts. Even if the game have released unfinished (which Early Access model suggests btw) - they're really doing a good job at fixing it and speaking with community. Battleground release in the first week of EA is something I didn't even expect, yet they're doing it. Server maintenance time were short (at least during "normal" playing hours in EU region) and in-game server performance was top notch. Not to mention that they've still compensated all founders, and straight away claimed in developer letter that they will accept any refunds from people who didn't understand that they're buying into early access. Huge props for this.
  
• Combat in the game is probably one of the best adaptations of the "old classic mmo tab target". Somewhere around GW2. It starts off pretty weak, but at later levels combat system blossoms and even though it's still not "action combat" it's still satisfying, fun, impactful, and situation-dependant in terms of what skills and stances you have to equip.
  
• Voice acting is pretty good. Quality of VO recording is not stellar, but voice acting itself is good. Well done there.
  
• Questing is your typical MMO questing. No grinding though. Not good, not bad.
  
• Crafting and taming systems are "interesting enough". Not overcomplicated, but still rewarding for people who want to do that and not high-level-gated. Meaning that if you want to stay level 15 and make tons of gold with crafting - you can. Taming is very interesting as well.
  
• This one was a big one for me - ALL and I mean ALL of RNG chances are stated in game. You don't have to google/spreadsheet stuff in order to find out what are your chances of success(enchancement/pet upgrading), what is the boost from failstacking and so on. All of the percentages are clearly stated in the game client, so you don't have to do any guess-work.
  
• Music in the game is pretty good.
  
• Party content that exists. Decent but not stellar dungeons. Interesting party-buff system (can be based on races, classes, a lot of different factors, and party leader selects the buff that will benefit party the most. "crafting parties" from random pick up groups have became very popular very fast. So a lot of people are socializing and talking to each other while doing crafting to get some sweet boosts).
  
• World lore/story actually has something behind it.

Bless is a Decent Asian MMO that is just good. It's not Great, it's not the savior of the genre, it's just a decent MMO and what makes it stand out is the effort developer tries to put into communicating with their playerbase and making them happy and the fact that there are no P2W elements (at the current stage). Game is in Early Access, so expect some bumps, and expect to make a few quick edits to game config (in less than 2 minutes) if you want it to run good.
If you're a guy/gal who enjoys MMO and especially enjoys exploring NEW MMOs with the community, figuring stuff out, having that "new world" experience - bless is worth your 30 $. Also expect a lot of toxicity from overly vocal part of MMO community that have decided to crucify this game for no reason.