Recent reviews by yazukiwolf

I was unsure how I felt about it at first. It wasn't ticking the boxes of what I usually expect from an ARPG. Namely Massive loot, fast progress with quick builds, etc.
But I kept playing and found that it was ticking a lot of the boxes of what I enjoy about some other games, namely old school rogue likes, dungeon crawlers, and maybe a bit of souls-like, and it was melding those things with the ARPG genre in a way I hadn't found before.
After 3 days I found the balance. Remapped my approach to the game, and now I'm absolutely loving it.

It's intimidating at first, but once your stuck into it, it's hard to get out.
Actually yeah, this is your warning, This game will suck you in for hours at a time and it will beckon to you during any free moment you have. So get out now if you aren't prepared to be completely consumed.

This is the granddaddy of colony sims and it makes all the other games look like kid pools. The depth of play here is insane and every playthrough will leave you with a dozen new ideas for things to do the next time. Maybe I'll make a Spartan style warrior society, maybe I'll try to build a colony into a frozen glacier, strike that let's jump into an active volcano. Maybe we should be a scholarly nation that produces historical libraries to be shared across the world, Maybe we should send raiding parties instead.

It's a true sandbox that you can make into whatever you want, and with a scope beyond any sandbox you've ever played. When an ancient forgotten beast stumbles into your fortress it's not just a randomized encounter, but that beast actually has a fully generated history with slain foes, pillaged towns, and an assortment of travels that eventually led it to your front gate. Same with the necromancer that you resurrected all your dead dwarfs to fight against you.

And that brings me to the in built difficulty system. In DF you have a world with all sorts of challenges that you can customize to be more or less hostile as you choose on generation, but beyond that, you also can control your challenge by where you decide to settle. You can find a deserted corner of the map, or place yourself right in the middle of a goblin vs undead warzone. Then there's the biomes, and hostility of wildlife etc. that all can be scouted ahead. And since new games in the same world actually share their history, you can come back and retake a fortress that was destroyed in a previous playthrough, or go raid the people that destroyed it in the first place.

Anyways, there's no way I could do an exhaustive review of this immense game, so as stated before. YES I totally recommend it, but only if you you are ready for a game that can very easily become a lifelong obsession.

Simple but addictive.
There are some quirks to get used to such as the workers not always finding their way to food which means you need a bit of micromanaging to carry them over to the right spot, but after the initial annoyance I found that this actually motivated me to build better organized dungeons. Oh and also I occasionally had some screen shake that seemed to linger a bit long, so I wasn't sure if that was an intended thing or if it was lagging or what.

It looks like there are just two minions at first, but you unlock more as you explore and find scrolls which unlock all sorts of things. I kept wanting to hit space to pause which does nothing at the moment, but I would quite like it if that was implemented in the future. As the dungeon grows it starts becoming hard to keep track of everything going on, so a pause time function would be useful.

Would be nice to also have some indication of off screen hungry workers. Maybe something that jumps you to their location like Warcraft did with peons.

I'll recommend, but with a large caveat for those looking for another Survivors-like.

The games in stage progression departs pretty drastically from the Survivors formula, and I'm not sure it completely works.

Instead of choosing from 3 upgrades on level up or after finding a treasure chest as is the case with the vast majority of Horde Survivors, Malignant Survivors, doesn't give you any build defining choices during your run. Leveling up automatically increases your stats without any input from the player, and you don't gain any new skills during your run unless you happen to find a rare item that gives you one (this has only happened once for me in a dozen or so playthroughs).

Also there really is only one stage, and although it has numerous difficulty levels like Easy, Normal, Hard, Torment, Torment 2, etc. the mobs and general aesthetic remains the same.

That's the jist of it, but if you want more detail...
The game progression revolves around RNG and Loot.
You find loot (and Gold) from chests, boxes, etc. as well as from drops for some enemies. The loot has some effects that will automatically apply to your character, but once again there is no choice for the player other than the choice to risk picking up a dropped loot or not.

The point of player choice is moved to the time outside of the stage instead.
After completing a run, you can look at the loot you picked up and decide to pay gold to bring back any loot you want to keep.
One negative to this that I noticed was that you can have the joy of picking up a rare drop be dashed at the end when you realize you didn't save enough gold to bring it back.

Once the loot is back in your item stack, you can equip it into up to 6 slots that can be unlocked from the player selection screen, once again at the cost of more gold.

I don't mind this game loop in principle, but the effects of most of the loot are barely noticable. Mostly relying on parameter buffs rather than the impactful skill upgrades common to Horde Survivors.

On another note, the game also let's you unlock new characters, once again with gold. Not sure if I like this, as it seems like gold is being over used and it leaves you with a conflict between spending 2500 gold to unlock your next item slot, or 2500 to unlock a character, or save the 2500 for the next rare item drop. Not to mention the dissapointment of getting a legendary drop only to have to trash it cause you spent your gold on something earlier and now you don't have enough to actually keep your drop.

That being said, the desire for better loot can be engaging, and for the price the game can give you a bit of enjoyment.

I recommend with a bit of a caveat. The game is well polished and the Bard's Tale style dialogue keeps you engaged.
The grid-like movement is also reminiscent of old school dungeon crawlers, and I initially liked it, but I wish the level layout made better use of it. I felt like I was fighting with the controls to get up winding stairs and there were interactable objects that just didn't line up with the grid properly and I was forced to lean in at awkward angles to reach them.

Finally the magic. Well it works. But it's kind of awkward. Some spells require you to do throw or javelin throw like motions, but the trajectory seems to be determined by the angle of our controller when you let go, and it shoots off at a constant speed without any regard to physics. So it feels a bit more "gamey", and less athletic than I would like.

Other than that the levels are well structured, and it appears to have an engaging story progression, so give it a go if the above issues don't bother you.

I'm going to update this after I get a full playthrough in, but as the game is currently on sale I'll give my initial thoughts.

I postponed playing this for a long time because of the mixed reviews, but so far I'm loving it.
There were complaints that the combat was laggy, especially with melee, but I'm thinking this might be a design decision. Most games skip wind-up animations for attacks to make the attack feel more responsive. Wolcen plays the full animation so when you click the animation starts but your attack doesn't land until a few frames later. Some people might interpret this as a lag, or input delay, but I actually like it.
It makes the combat feel more rhythmic and deliberate. And the attacks themselves have a real weight to them. This in addition to the beautiful graphics make Wolcen stand out from the crowd.

I suspect that the skill system is going to be a bit slim when compared to the complexity that games like POE or Last Epoch offer, but there is a good amount to play around with nonetheless.

As for story, thus far this is probably one of the most compelling stories I've played in an ARPG. And being a person not usually interested in story, I believe this is thanks in part to the way the game engages you with well made cutscenes, and fully voiced dialogues (at least for the main quest so far.)

All and all I think in terms of a casual ARPG experience this is very close to D4 in my opinion, and which you prefer is probably a matter of the style of combat you like. Wolcen feels a bit slower and more deliberate whereas other ARPG's may be a bit more fast past and responsive.

And as for a hard core, long term ARPG with loads of customizable builds. Wolcen isn't bad, but something like POE or Last Epoch will probably serve you better.

I was about to uninstall this 3 or 4 times because of what I thought at the time was a clunky, unintuitive skill system and tedious enemies that needed to be kited around while popping shots backwards till they die.
BUT.. I gave it another go, picked the tank class so I could stop kiting, and eventually the skill system started to click. And after getting the hang of the skills I was able to go back and play the other classes as well without kiting so much either.
The skills definitely aren't as diverse as Last Epoch or POE, etc. but there is enough to experiment with and you can definitely develop a custom build.

Also the skill system has a fairly unique mechanic where you use rage to sort of over charge your skills, which I found interesting, but it's a bit hard to keep track of what effects each of the 3 overcharges has for each skill on your bar, and so I ended up just always using space, which spreads the effects evenly rather than specifying a specific effect. It could be easier if they themed the effects so that say the number 1 effect is always offensive, 2 is defensive, and 3 is aoe related or something like that, but as far as I could tell there was no consistent pattern.

The feedback for skills is also a bit weak compared to other games, but it is serviceable. Also I appreciated that loot seemed to be a bit less frequent than other games, and it didn't feel like my inventory was filling up with too much junk.
A lot of loot comes from chests, rather than enemy kills, which does make that shiny treasure chest feel extra appealing.

The story is very much this games strong point. I'm not super into story in games, but this one draws you in. Admittedly not for any real deep story telling, so much as just as a result of the overall atmosphere and strong personalities to each character with nearly fully voice acted lines that just makes it fun to playthrough.

Another small thing that I think was done well was the puzzles and secrets. Each chapter of the game has a number of secrets that you can easily miss on your first playthrough which can add to replayability.
And the puzzles are well made. I don't see a lot of puzzles like this in ARPG's but it was a great break from mashing monster heads to take a minute to think about why there's a stonehenge type circle in the middle of the forest and how can I interact with these gates to make something cool happen.

All and all I'd say this is a good ARPG, probably not the best, but well worth a couple playthroughs

Looks great with an immersive environment, that is until you shoot a deer with an arrow and the deer is launched into the air with a big BOIIING type sound effect to then explode into fireworks above you.
This is what happens everytime you do this by the way.
I was expecting a minecraft style VR game. Not Goat Simulator.

Quick addictive gameplay loop. Each successive unlock makes it that much harder to resist going for one more run, even after you promised yourself that last death would be the end for today.

The combat is fun, but the UI is a bit cumbersome. It might be more enjoyable to play on a tablet.
When you find loot, for example, you have to mouse over the item at the very top of the screen to see what it is, and then you have to move your mouse back to the very bottom to take the items. There are also a number of dialogues that can be skipped with right mouse click, but others that can only be skipped with space bar, and then other times when you have to move your mouse to click continue. It may seem like a gripe, but this adds up to make progress feel a bit, well, cumbersome.

On top of that there are overly long periods of time in between enemy movements at times. I'm not sure if it's lagging or if it just takes that long to transition. It seems to happen particularly often when enemies move through traps.

The lack of an undo action also hurts it a bit as you can misclick and move to the wrong spot with no way redo your action other than restarting the battle from the start.

The WASD camera movement is a welcome addition, but it also feels awkward at times. Firslty, in exploration mode the camera resenters on the selected character whenever they move, so if you move the camera via WASD to where you want to go and then click, it immediately jumps back to the character. This may not bother modern players, but coming from games like Baldur's gate or Fallout 1 and 2, where you can navigate the camera while your character is moving, this just feels off. If your character moves the camera follows them, so you can do either or, not both.

Secondly, in combat, the degree to which you can move the camera with WASD seems to be limited by your current character's visability. This, coupled with the lack of ability to undo a movement, means that if you want to see where that enemy just off screen is to move you back archer into position, you may need to select a frontline member just to move the camera down far enough to see where you need your archer to go, and then re-select the archer to make the move.

OK, so that being said. I still recommend the game, as the actual combat is fun. It starts slow, and the first few fights consist of nothing more than click on bad guy and beat them down style strategy, but after your first few upgrades you will quickly start to find the deeper strategies of the game.

The game does a really good job of putting you in what seems like a hopeless fight, but giving you just enough tools to get you out of it. Nothing feels better than crushing a huge gang of baddies by strategically linking up your skills with the surrounding terrain, traps, and stage gimmicks to come out victorious. It's not quite as complex as something like Divinity Original Sin, but it will give you a similar vype.