Forewarning, I only played the first map and didn't even finish that. Why? Because the map ran out of metal... what you need to make ammo and walls and turrent and everything. You could say that it is way more important than the game namesake lumen is. Speaking of lumen, there is a farm for it in the game, which is pretty useless. Barely any yield, but you can already research and buy everything you need lumen for, with barely half of the maps natural reserves. Game is wave-based, but how many waves? No idea. There was a message at around wave 14 saying "Just one more" or something similar, than the game went on for more than 10 more waves. 5 hours, and no end in sight, while you literally cannot fight any more because you run out of material to fight with? I'm sure there is a game-genre for this, but I don't even want to know the name of it. The game sorely misses some ingame contexts. Like what are those brain things? Why are they so scarcely guarded? Why do bugs and crystal golems go together? Why is the medium sized default bug tankier than the extra big one? Why is there no melee weapon option other than your drill, which can barely damage the weakest enemy, even with maximum upgrades? Why is a shotgun weaker on max level than the weakest revolver? Why is the big tree thing that you cannot even touch more like an enemy building that even moves, when the actual enemy brain building is technically a placeholder? Also you can put a storage next to the mine and it will pick up the metal, otherwise the mine will mine out 30 pieces, throws it on the ground and goes on a strike, Having said all of these, this is already a game better than half of the AAA productions I came across this decade (that's not much of a threshold I know but still). You can get at least 20-30 hours of gameplay out of this title, and they also have a map editor (something I sorely miss from a lot of games, thanks guys). Lumencraft is a title that's worth the 10$, and I hope gets finished.
When people say this is better than Elex 1, they must mean its release state. Elex 2 looks like Doom3. You know the horror one 2004. The amount of bugs in is... okayish. You clip through a lot of things, companion ai is like CP77 pedestrian AI on xbox1 release. Game balance is nonexistent. The higher your level the higher the enemy HP, but your damage does not increase with anything. Lvl1 you can 2shot a things with a broken stick. If you use a stormblaster on lvl20 which has about thrice the base damage and has passive skills damage on top of that, you need 20-30 shots to kill things. Meanwhile your companions do about 5 times the damage you can get whatever you use. Hopefully it will be playable in a year or two, like the first game was.
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.
