izigame.me

"How many more times do I need to do this?"

NOTE: This will not cover the online component which was shut down on September 17 2024.

So your character might exclaim during the endgame loop*. This echoed my sentiments towards the end of my time with Wolcen and grinding out some of the achievements.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is an action RPG in much the same vein as Diablo or Path of Exile. While it does have some good attributes, it also has more than its fair share of problems - some of which are subjective, some of which are not. You play as a character who suddenly develops unknown powers and is thrust into a pivotal role to save the world - hardly remarkable so far. Aspects of this implementation however serve to differentiate Wolcen from its peers. For starters, the game runs on CryEngine (yes, of Crysis fame) so it looks truly fantastic: well ahead of its time and probably still equal to any other ARPG on the market today. The character customisation is quite extensive (eye colour, facial hair etc.) albeit potentially irrelevant as you will likely be wearing armour the entire time.

The writing is quite good and the campaign is lengthy - with at least 20 hours (probably) to finish all the acts. There is an extensive amount of dialogue (perhaps too much) as well as cutscenes - which are very well done. Even here though, there are some (subjective) issues: a lot of the interchange between characters feels overly long-winded and while the story is quite well written and fairly engaging, the coverage is so broad that nothing is really explored properly. Maybe the team behind Wolcen were setting it up for further expansions or sequels - we will probably never know. The exposition however is not ideal, but is still worth a playthrough. The story is supplemented by good voice acting (never hurts a game), so clearly the production values for graphics and engagement (story/acting) were quite high for Wolcen - more on this below.

The interesting part is that there is no true class system like you have in other games in the genre. You choose a starting "playstyle" rather than a class; this really only seems to determine which attributes are most important for your "class" rather than what abilities/items they can use. Imagine a spell-slinging sword-wielding warrior - quite possible in Wolcen. There are also items which enable this as well, so the flexibility is quite broad. Tied into this is the skill "tree" (called Gates of Fate) which is also quite interesting. It consists of three concentric circles (starting position somewhat determined by the playstyle you chose initially), but the outer two circles can be rotated. This opens up many interesting possibilities, but can also become very confusing as there is no way to distinguish paths/nodes just by looking. If someone sends you an image of their skill selection, you will not have the slightest idea of what they have chosen. I also enjoyed the dodge mechanic used to evade attacks - it was useful for mobility as well. However, it is tied to a stamina meter which is difficult to track during gameplay.

NOTE: In the interests of transparency, I played a pretty standard sword+board build - take that into account but I do not feel it changes the fundamental argument in any way.

There are however numerous problems with this game. Every game has bugs to some degree, but the degree here is noticeable and in some cases prohibitive. This is said ignoring the disastrous launch and the numerous game-breaking issues at the beginning of the lifecycle. I had instances where I got stuck on terrain and was forced to quit and reload the map. Often (I was using Bladestorm) my skill would show as active even when it wasn't - imagine having spinning blades around you while not doing anything. This interfered with my attacks as it made it difficult to tell when I was actually attacking. On top of this, I had numerous crashes to desktop and instances where the game slowed down so much (memory leak? lag?) that I was forced to kill the process and start again. On that note - friendlies (e.g. pets/allies) also share a red health bar, just like enemies. Like me, you are probably conditioned to attack something with a red health bar and it becomes annoying when there are multiple enemies around you. I even found the minimap to be tricky in the sense of your location being slightly off; perhaps this was as a result of your marker being an arrow rather than an icon or dot, but it annoyed me to no end (possibly subjective though).

The single biggest issue however is simply how bland the gameplay is. Every game has a loop and most action RPGs have the same loop (kill stuff, get better gear to kill more stuff to get better gear), but the majority make it entertaining. Wolcen is really just about repeating the same thing over and over and over and over and over until you eventually quit. The reliance on just combat (which is fairly satisfying, but combat should be a tool in the gameplay rather than the entire gameplay) does it no favours. The endgame is especially guilty as the problem is less pronounced during the campaign. Endgame, while having a few small basebuilding characteristics, is really just about preparing for the final boss fight and repeating it over and over again ad infinitum - that's it. The implementation is "map like" but there is no depth to it, such as Path of Exile. This more than anything else is the primary reason for my ranking - I got bored and at least half of my hours played were unenjoyable.

Wolcen is not all bad, but I struggled to extract any meaningful fun from it and feel you will not be missing much if you give this one a skip. You might find it worth it on sale for just the campaign, but if you are looking for a long-term game, this is probably not it.

Played on Windows 11 Pro x64.

*My recollection of the precise wording may be a bit off, but that is the gist of it.