The Waylanders

I've played plenty of games already this year, from classics, through indie whatevers, to new early access hell hole titles. This is easily the worst of them all. Badly optimized. Horrible combat. The characters are horrible and you will hate every single one of them. Voice acting and sounds overall are just subpar. Writing is lazier than a Michael Bay movies. I bough the game for the premise, I'm keeping it to reming myself of the same that befell me by buying it.

The game may be inspired by Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur’s Gate, but after a short time I decided I'd rather play any of them instead.

I've been playing this game on a different platform and I can say, It had a neat concept but very poor execution. Can't even finish the game because the medieval portion is a buggy broken mess that wasn't finished.

Full disclosure I did kickstart this game. So lets start with what I liked. The artstyle is very unique and I think many of the areas of the game have a cool sense of flair with really unique character designs. The games shows it's uniqueness in both it's graphical style and lore/races. Their cyclops race the Formorians are one of the most interesting races in any fantasy game to come out in the past decade. The addition of formations in combat is also a nice added to the traditional cooldown style skillsets. The NPCs are all mostly interesting and subvert what you picture when you hear something like an very long lived race, or a druid. The way they give you lore is also very well done as every piece being written by someone in the world gives a pause to how accurate that bit of information especially when it clashes with things that other characters will say. To that end I would say that their worldbuilding is by far the games strongest feature. What I didn't like. The dialogue is painfully inconsistent. You'll have have several minutes of well paced and written dialogue only to be disrupted by a paragraph that feels like it was written by the writers 14 year old niece, and it's so jarring it's painful. The romances are the worst written things in the game, not because of the writing itself, but it feels entirely unearned. It's literally you did the one thing for a character and now they love you. The game need way more work to tell you exactly what is hitting and how much damage you're doing. There is an option to toggle damage numbers, and it's an absolute must. After you get past a few of the start missions you'll get skills to both heal and regen your healers magic and it really curbs the difficulty. It's also way more buggy than you'd think with how long it spent in EA. I didn't encounter anything game breaking, but several immersion breaking things. Final thoughts-I have enjoyed this game, but you've got to know you're getting an indie project

It's not the voice acting I have a problem with, but the glibness of the characters as they were written. They're way too casual feeling, and that's probably because they're gods or something. I've never been able to get past that. Eventually I will really give this game a go but it's fallen down hard, as I'd rather play other things first.