Recent reviews by castavernas

Absolutely fantastic

I've been playing avidly for about a month and have really enjoyed it. Basically it has directional melee combat somewhat like mordhau. The game is heavily skill based, a good player naked with a training sword will beat a fully geared player who fights poorly, but between two players with fairly similar skill levels/gear/potions/etc will make a significant difference, I think they found a good balance here.

There are no classes but there is a skill tree so people end up build into general archetypes of tank (usually someone with heavy armor and a shield), archer (usually light armor and a bow + dagger or sword), bruiser with medium armor and a two handed weapon, medic (can revive people and heal them) usually an off tank, or calvary. There is no magic.

The community is really supportive of new players. Some of this is just the game culture and some of it is due to a great mechanic called "mentor points" where you get permanent increases to loot like and critical crafting success chance by helping out new players.

The game uses faction based PvP with 3 nations, and right now there is a pretty good balance between the player base in each nation on the NA server at least.There a various non-loot PvP events throughout the day, each siege events where you can take territory from another nation by attacking a castle or the "valley of death" that is basically just a team death match. Siege events use things like catapults, battering rams, lighting walls on fire, NPC guards, dropping burning on the attackers, wall mounted ballista's etc.

At the same time you can do open world PvP any time, the map has various regions that are completely safe zones, non-loot zones, and PvP loot zones. Looting people is a bit complicated but generally speaking you lose about 1-2 items if you get killed and looted, however your team mates can protect you by interrupting the person looting you so in practice on average you lose less than that. Compared to a full loot PvP game like Mortal, dying is a lot less punishing, partly because of the looting, but more so because there you can respawn easily and there is fast travel so even when you die you can often rejoin the same battle within a few minutes.

The crafting is also very deep and is one of the better systems I've played, you can do the usual things like mine and refine ore, fish, plant crops, buy farm animals, etc and it is about the right amount of grind to get your skills up (in my opinion).

Now that the server queue is fixed via instancing, I think this game has a lot of potential. Right now the world feels a bit empty and for a solo player its not great, but the general feel of exploration, vastness, and danger around every corner is something that no modern MMO has captured in years, so I'm really hopeful that this will become a fantastic game as they continue to flesh out the world. Its already definitely decent and despite the terrible launch, the devs did work very hard to get the servers working and finally released a good solution today.

This game has a very creative and novel spell system that is a lot of fun, but the surrounding game play and combat just doesn't really cut it.

There's a lot to like here and the core gameplay loop is very fun. Overall though the amount of content and replayability is lacking for the given price. I beat the game on my second run and had a great time doing so, but also don't feel a lot of motivation to play again.

I'd recommend keeping an eye on this game as more updates come out potentially grabbing it on sale. As it is it's quite a bit of quick fun, but probably overpriced in its current state.

hands down the best rogue light I've ever played.

Solid short and fun puzzle game in the spirit of portal, talos principle and antichamber. Not as good as any of those but still definitely a good game. Game play is ~4 hours, so probably best to get it on sale. Some of the puzzles definitely make you think.

Fun, fairly easy puzzle game. Some of the interface elements didn't work very well for me with a mouse and keyboard (some drawers / latches were very hard to swing all the way open) and it seems like maybe it was designed with a touch screen in mind. Overall a good solid puzzle game for the price, but not on part with meatier games like the Witness, Obduction, or Outer Wilds.

This game is excellent. As an Asheron's Call 1 player this scratches an MMORPG itch that no other game has scratched in years.

A great game