izigame.me

I'll update this after every major patch, I suppose.
Patch 0.1 review
Context: Did >almost< all the content on all the difficulties. Finished the season tower. Leveled 3 classes to 30. Leveled 5 weapons to 30. Got all but 1 achievement currently attainable in game. I come to this game from Warframe (due to DE) with almost 5k hours played and 100% mastery and achievements in that game.
Good:
Excellent combat
Excellent bosses
Good weapon/character crafting progression (didn't feel like I had to buy anything from the cash shop)
Good telegraphs
Good art direction
Bad:
Stability / authentication servers (this has been mostly addressed, but crippled the game for the first month)
Open world events: No timer for world boss, different shards have different times, 'event near you' alert doesn't give direction
Drop rates on non-crafted set pieces are aggressively low (recently buffed)
UI elements cannot be moved. Your health is in the bottom left. Your combo points are in the bottom right. Your eyes are watching the center of the screen to so you don't get hit by boss mechanics. Allowing players to move UI elements would fix this.
Ugly:
Echoes - There are 4 qualities (so far) and 10 ranks. Different qualities have different max ranks. This means that 1 type of echo can have 38 version (iirc). These echoes do not stack. Even if they stacked, they wouldn't be able to stack well due to type and rank differences. The sheer pain of managing them, melting them down for upgrade dust etc, is brutal. It will only get worse as more enemies are added to the game and the level range increases to 40.
If I were AS, I would drop quality from this system immediately- or make it cosmetic, like going from rank 4 to 5 makes it green. Furthermore, I would make it so that echoes ONLY drop at rank 1, so that new drops all stack and could be mass melted in a single click the future.
Dropped items - Item levels are determined by the level of the dungeon you are in, and each dungeon as 4 levels (so far, that will increase). This means that drops have at LEAST 4 versions, but many items drop from multiple dungeons, resulting in more versions. As a result, inventory management is painful- made more so by the item cap, originally set at 100 and now increased to 125. 25 doesn't really help. Items should probably have 1 level but 4 qualities, with higher difficulties having a chance to drop the higher qualities. This would cap the number of versions at 4 AND it would mean that all items could be potentially valuable (white, green, and blues outside of breakpoints, like level 15, are basically vendor trash)
The issues in the ugly category are worse than bad because they represent a design issue, not necessarily a technical issue- like adding a timer or fixing logins or tweaking drop rates slightly. Furthermore, most of the things in the Bad category are either in the process of being addressed or are on the list of soon to be addressed. The ugly is just "well, maybe we make a better UI for selling/dusting?"
No. Fix the ugly through simplification or else they will hurt your game as it's scope grows. Fix it before it becomes a headache to solve.
This game has EXCELLENT bones, the combat, the classes, the weapons, the crafting, the loot. It's all there and it's already good. There are two systems that are crippling my experience; echoes and trinkets. The other issues I suspect will be addressed well before actual launch.
I don't look at this game, right now, as "is this game good", more so "what will this game be in 3 years." I think that the foundation is solid and we just need way more dungeons, bosses, weapon fighting styles (or at least sub styles of the existing 4, think stances in warframe for 2 handed maces vs 2 handed swords vs 2 handed katanas vs 2 handed scythes).
This game has what Warframe can't give us after 10 years, good bosses. It has a niche. If it leans into it, it will find and keep a community.