Review for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem. PC game, the video game came out on 13/02/2020
Funded through a Crowdfounding, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem spent about four years in Early Access, only to see the light a few days ago, with a launch that was not exactly the brightest, given the complete saturation of the servers that forced the team to block access for the first few days, managing to restore a decent service without many difficulties. Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is an RPG with similar characteristics - very similar - to Diablo III, from which it takes inspiration without innovating much.
When starting the game we immediately have two possibilities: play in offline or online story mode. In fact, if you create a character online, it cannot be used in offline mode and vice versa, we imagine for problems related to possible changes to the client by malicious people. Once we have chosen whether to play online or offline we will be introduced to the creation of the character, which unlike the early access version allows us to modify various traits of our avatar, including of course gender and appearance. After choosing the name of our hero and starting the adventure we begin to discover something more about the plot, which unfortunately turns out to be quite flat and uninspired for the whole course of the approximately 20 hours necessary to complete the three available acts.
As good warriors, we are immediately catapulted into a war scenario in which our army, or rather the army of Heimlock (inquisitor who raised us as children, given the loss of our parents), was ambushed. of archers. Once this first phase is completed, the story is obviously always the same: we must seek and defeat these enemy forces to save our people. As we have already said, the plot is really very simple and also the dialogues between the characters do not give interesting ideas to follow, therefore limiting themselves to exchanges of jokes that in the long run end up boring, without giving the player anything more in terms of lore.
The gameplay is certainly the most interesting aspect of the game, which at the base very much takes up the style of Diablo III, adding some distinctive features that make the experience a little more personal. In fact, we will not have the possibility to choose a single class but during the adventure, based on our style of play, we will be able to decide to develop the branch of a skill rather than another. We will not be limited in the use of weapons: we will be able to use swords, pistols, bows, daggers and so on, often combining them with each other, deciding whether to hold a gun or a sword in one hand and another pistol or always a sword, for example. This allows you to experiment with different styles of play, often interesting and different from the classic warrior, archer or magician.
Obviously, as in every RPG, each class has its own skills and in Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem the classic progression has been changed, you will not have native skills, but you can make enemies drop, or buy at the market Enneract, or objects that will make available a certain skill (which can be for archer, magician or warrior) obviously based on the style you want to develop. Once you have used these items you will have a series of skills to place in our slots, initially limited to 6, including the primary attack. You will be free to change when you want equipped skills, and it will be good to do so since their progression is separate from the character level and will tend to increase only when they are actually equipped.
Another characteristic aspect of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is the "Gates of Fates" a huge tree of passive skills that can be enriched by leveling up. The tree is divided into three macro-zones: Soldier, Sentinel and Scholar and of course you can start from any point and you can expand in any direction based on the elements you want to enhance, be they related to damage, life points, magic or defense. These passive skills will impact what is it character's mother status, characterized by four elements on which to distribute the 10 skill points that you will get at each level. These points can be distributed in Ferocity (which prefers attack and critical damage), Toughness (to increase life and defense points), Agility (to increase attack speed) and Wisdom (to improve magical attributes).
For the rest, the gameplay stands at the levels of titles of the same genre, thanks to an interesting combat system especially for the primary skills, which are fun to use especially in the most complex clashes. We didn't really appreciate the hit-boxes and the delay in the execution of some actions, such as dodge and some skills, but we believe they have problems due to some programming errors that will be solved in the future, since they were limited to some skills and only occurred in some limited cases.
As said at the beginning, the title will guarantee you about 20 hours of main story, where unfortunately you will often find yourself facing long scenarios filled with the same enemies and with mostly useless drops. The drop is in fact another problem of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem: due to the limited inventory and too many diversified objects (given the absence of a main class) and poorly distributed in the rarity, you will find yourself collecting everything and then throwing useless things on the ground or at most sell them to a merchant. A disposal system like in Diablo would have been appreciated, to make it useful to drop unused rare items due to the class or weak ones for our level.
After the main campaign you will have the opportunity to face an "unlimited" adventure fighting enemies and bosses already met in the main story, in an end game activity that honestly isn't too bad, except that once you reach the credits you will hardly still want to kill the same enemies already faced thousands of times. Speaking purely of the technical side of the game we must say that we were pleasantly surprised: It will certainly not be the game with the best artistic and graphic sector in circulation, but it certainly defends itself well thanks to well-kept environments even if not too diversified, all with excellent resource management that allowed us to play quietly at high settings without ever losing frames.
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is a title that has certainly had difficulties in development due to a limited team that has grown over time and has managed to churn out an interesting title, even if not brilliant in terms of originality. Inspired by the king of the genre, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem shows criticality both on the plot and on that of the gameplay, which in addition to the discourse of variable classes and abilities does not bring great innovations, leaving the player more than a few questions at the end of the adventure . However, we were satisfied with the graphics sector of the game and overall we recommend it to lovers of the genre who want to get by in a fantasy RPG adventure without too many pretensions. We do not feel instead to recommend it to those who hoped to find a successor to Diablo or in any case an innovative title for the genre.
► Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is an RPG-Sliding-Adventure-Indie-type game for PC, the video game was released on 13/02/2020
