izigame.me

I played and enjoyed this game immensely! Great and varied combat. Sprawling beautiful open world map that you can explore however you want and at your own pace. I love that the map is tabletop-like and real time. There is deep lore if that is your thing (it is not mine) and no neg consequences for skipping through that lore and focusing on questing and exploring. The graphics are beautiful. The music is solid. It is very well made and original in my opinion, and I did not encounter a single bug. I honestly think some (not all) of the neg reviewers kind of missed the point of this game. I do have issues with Alaloth but I feel moved to briefly address some of the things some people have objected to because I think this is a fun game and I want small original teams like this to get a fair shake. Here are some of the common issues I have read and my quick responses. You will obviously make up your own minds:
1) Different Game Modes: I see a lot of objections about arbitrary time limits and pacing issues. I think some of this is due to misunderstandings about the different modes you can play the game in, and to be fair, Alaloth is not very clear on what these modes actually entail. If you just want to play the game the way (I believe) it was intended to be played, then do yourself a HUGE favor and play the SINGLE player campaign (can't remember what it was called exactly) NOT the mode where you are competing against AI champions. From what I understand of the games mechanics I believe this the actual way the game was likely designed to be played, but the developer can feel free to correct me if I am wrong. As I understand it, the competitive mode will put you on a timer where you have to complete the game before the AI or the AI will eventually beat the final boss instead of you and you will subsequently lose. This discourages exploration and questing as those take up valuable time and may cost you the game. I think this understandably frustrated a number of people as they were just off questing and exploring (two of the games biggest selling points) and then suddenly lost. It could also have just been avoided by playing single player mode. I'm not sure why the competitive mode is in there tbh. Maybe just to have a quicker, more intensive mode meant to drum up urgency and tension. The single player campaign does not, to my knowledge, have any timers and you are free to follow or ignore the main plot. This encouraging exploration and experimentation with different builds and is the main reason I enjoyed Alaloth.
2) Difficulty: It is a hard game early on when you don't know the skills and have very few abilities. I think people expect that they can just grind a few random encounters and quickly level up to be powerful enough to go anywhere, as is the case with virtually every other game. This game does this differently and I think rather than give it a chance, some players just got irritated. You can only level up by completing a dungeon. That's any location with a skull on it. The more skulls or the larger the skull the harder the dungeon. Obviously only try single (small) skull dungeons early on. Every dungeon is different. If you die a couple times on a single skull dungeon go try a different one. It may work better with your character build. You only need to complete a dungeon once to level up. Aloloth does not tell you this info and does not hold your hand. I like this but many do not. I would encourage people to explore this as a dangerous world where you have to gain experience handling low lv dungeons before you can survive elsewhere. The thing is, its only a brief initial difficulty spike for the first 5-10 levels or so depending on your skill level. I found the game to be exceptionally easy from lv 5 on. In fact this is my major gripe with Alaloth. My mage character melted enemies before they can even reach me. Many time when they are too far away to even aggro me. After having such an initial difficulty I was expecting that balance to persist. But I digress. Be a little patient with the difficulty. It will get easier.
3) Preconceptions: I think Alaloth does not fit the preconceived expectations of players who wanted it to be a clone of past games they may have enjoyed. This game has an original idea for leveling, for isometric combat, and for its approach to open world. I think it has significant balancing issues once you level up a few times but its a beautiful, large, interesting world. There will be tons of quests. Some may be interesting. Some you may not care about. Don't do them if you don't want to. The rewards are shown beforehand so if you don't care about that item or are not invested in that character there is no penalty for dismissing the quest.
Anyway, there was A LOT of love poured into this game. It is evident in every hand crafted location and game mechanic. If you end up giving Alaloth a chance, I encourage you to take a little time to experiment with it's original approach to open world exploration and isometric top down combat.
Man, I originally sat down to write just a couple of sentences...