Graphically, it is quite beautiful. Mechanically, it doesn't work, and as ARPGs are all about the mechanics, this game fails to deliver. Playstyle is heavily restricted by gear choice, and passive effects unlocked via gifts (acquired at level up) are locked to specific gear. I choose Thor, and he gives bonuses for twohanded weapons, but if you use anything other than a twohander, you lose access to all of the passive effects as well as the active abilities. Gear drops are basically non-existent. I played until about LV 4, and I rage quitted because I got a Legendary Bow piece (requires lvl 28... why is it dropping at lvl 4?) and a Legendary Twohanded hammer... with worse stats than my starter twohanded weapon... what the heck?!?!? You rarely get anything that is worth equipping, even though items do drop. Supposedly you can get better stuff from crafting, but that requires obscene amounts of resources to upgrade a smithy. Level up bonuses are pretty weak. You get to choose to give a single point into damage, health, etc... but each only gives +1%. Yep, 1 percent increase per level. And with the gifts locked to weapon choice, there is very little character customization or even worthwhile rewards given at level up. Shame... Controls are not ideal for an ARPG, and you will often get stuck on wierd things and rolling is less effective than I thought as enemies often track you and hit you regardless. I really wanted to give this a fair chance, but it just isn't do a good job. It had a good first impression for the first 15 minutes, but after that, everything just fell apart, and I would highly recommend avoiding this title.
I bought the game expecting an interesting mix of quake and procedurally generated games, and got a steaming, broken mess of a game, that is nothing like quake and has terrible procedural generation. All weapons have clips, and when you reload any remaining bullets are lost, and thus if you are like me and constantly reload when there is a dull in action, you will quickly run out of clips. All weapons have gameplay enforced bullet spread the longer you fire your weapon, but accuracy perks can reduce the spread. Your secondary attack for your gun uses a percentage of your maximum clip, rather than a flat number to be used; so the Assault Rifle's grenade costs 16 ammo with a 25 ammo clip, but 18 at 30 ammo clip, and if you lack sufficient ammo in your clip, it forces you to reload losing the remaining ammo; instead of say producing a noise indicating that you lack the ammo and thus allow you to decide to reload or not. Found weapons have limited ammo and if you find a gun of the same kind that you are carrying, it replaces the guns ammo, rather than give you an extra clip; thus if you have a shotgun with 3 ammo, and find another shotgun, it replaces it with a full shotgun, rather than give you a clip of ammo + your 3 ammo. You get perks that improve fire rate, accuracy, damage, and clip size by blowing up little containers. Overall, with these mechanics it plays nothing like Quake or other old-school shooters; yes you can play it quickly like those old school shooters, but as the gameplay is more tactical and trying to play fast will likely result in missing targets and consuming ammo clips too quickly, you shouldn't play it fast. The other issues is that the procedural generation is flawed. I got to in one run to a place with two locked doors and no keycard anywhere. I had another run that created a deadend and thus couldn't complete the level. Finally, there is no save/load feature, so you have to play the game all in one play session. AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!!
This is a game I was looking forward to for a long time and was ultimately disappointed when I finally played it. I really enjoyed Titan Quest, and figured this would be like it; it was and it wasn't. I initially liked the title for the first 10 hours or so, but after that, things went downhill and kept going downhill. Initially, the story was immersing and you felt like your choices mattered. Initially, you were finding loot upgrades every 2-3 levels. Initially, exploration was well rewarded, and combat felt great. The first boss fight was great. So... what went wrong? After the first boss fight, the story started to fall apart and you stopped feeling like the choices you were making were meaningful at all. I stopped finding loot upgrades, and went for 5-10 levels to upgrade some items and other items I couldn't upgrade at all and had been using for 20+ levels (I quit at lvl 46). Loot did drop, but the itemization in this game is far worse than something like Diablo 3, where the game favored loot drops for other classes (got tons of green/blue guns, wands, caster gear and ranged gear) but not for my class (Warder). As a result, there wasn't much point to exploration or backtracking as the loot dropped never was useful to me. Combat got worse and worse, as enemies not only got very "bullet spongy" and many enemies were spawning at 3, 4 or 5 levels above my character and thus a fight with 5 enemies took me about 30 seconds to kill, and as you run into packs of 5 enemies constantly, I progressed very very slowly. The place in the story I quit at was at Fort Ikron, so about 50% into the last chapter of the game. I should note that this was all on the easiest difficulty setting, and as I was getting constantly destroyed on easiest setting I couldn't progress anymore. I would recommend playing the game for the first chapter of the game, as it got a lot of love and great development, but the rest of the game is absolutely terrible, so I'd wait for a major discount.
