This is a pixel survival crafting RPG. It has quests, weapons, armour crafting, boss fights and zones with leveling segments.

I’ve played this game for just about two weeks now and I found the game to be endlessly frustrating. This game is quite boring. It has a never ending loop of the same music that plays on and on forever, only ever changing for boss fights and caves.

Most of the people in the game are quite friendly but unless you are max level, nobody will want to group up with you to do any of the mid-tier boss fights and dungeons. I found this to be quite annoying because certain quests cannot be turned in without completing them at least once.

As of right now, the armour and weapon crafting is very bad. It takes hours to farm up enough materials to level up the crafting system and by the time you have enough materials, you are already so much higher than the stuff that you can craft that it makes the system completely pointless and a huge waste of time.

Fiber and Leather can only be looted from creatures in the game and so you are forced to either buy the materials from other players or spend what seems like an eternity farming and grinding the mats yourself with horrid loot drop rates. The game is extremely repetitious and the combat system is terrible as well. The game has cooldowns on literally everything. It takes several minutes to learn a recipe, craft any object or to use any of your weapons as they have a cooldown between swings.

To prevent the enemies from killing you, you have to walk back and forth and around them to kite them to prevent them from landing a hit while you wait for your weapons to be off of cooldown. The health potions and healing staves for your level are a joke as they only heal a tiny fraction of your life so between fights you have to stand around and wait for your health to rise back up. There is lots and lots of waiting in this game, in fact I truly believe that this game is designed to waste as much of your time as possible.

I don’t know if I will continue to play it, the thought of having to craft anything else make my eyes want to bleed. This game is still in alpha and is still being developed so things may one day change.

I strongly recommend though you do not get this game unless you have ALOT of patience. =(

This game on the surface looks like a fun and interactive game which allows you to do whatever it is you like. However that is not the case. This game literally locks your account to a "free" account unless you pay for a monthly subscription which is 7.99 euro (approximately $8.96 USD) for NORMAL EXP rates, a NORMAL friendslist and just an all around NORMAL gaming experience that MANY other games which are more intensive than this game is. This game is very scummy here's just what it says;

Full Account

Get a Full Account and receive access to ALL features:

Free | Full

EXP: 75% | 100%
EXP Professions: 75% | 100%
Gold Drops: 75% | 100%
Dungeons: Keys | Free
Friends: 10 | Unlimited
Respawntime: 30sec | 15sec
Active Quests: 5 | 20
Education Slots: 2 | 3

Don't waste your time with this game, greedy practice and should not be advertised as a Free-to-play game and should instead be advertised as a subscription based MMORPG. This game and this company are most likely only looking for one thing and one thing only: MONEY. Advice from me and I've been around the block, this is a scam, shady practice and should be bashed for all intent and purposes. Just play Runescape, Oldschool Runescape or Runescape 3, $8 USD per month and has WAY more content. That game advertises as a subscription based MMORPG; or better yet, play a strategy tactical MMORPG like Wakfu, no sub needed 100% EXP access to everything in the game right off the bat.

After around 2 hours of playtime, leveling and questing is fairly simple, kill missions, fetch quests etc. so far the 5 quest limit (early game) is non-hassle but later down the line I can see where it'd be disgusting to do. Have not been able to do dungeons yet so I cannot say how easy or hard it is to get keys, if they're just a daily renewable resource or anything of that nature. The profession system works as such; get a book from one of the people on the map (lumber, herbalism, mining etc.) open your inventory and learn them which takes X seconds on a "free" account you can only learn 1 book at a time. But you can do and learn every profession in the game.

Bag space is limited and the only way to get extra bag space is to buy using real money for gems, which since this is a subscription based MMORPG the use of gems should be removed and gaining bag space should be given to those types of accounts.

Edit:The first dungeon and I'm assuming every dungeon is run this way, but the first dungeon "Cylguin Chamber" is fairly boring. The way that it's boring is that it's a wave based dungeon and those are usually yawn fests of the player running around with a single monster that doesn't do damage on its own until you recover enough mana to fight off everything else for 5 rounds and repeat. The only hard thing about it is the purple variant of the same "boss" monster. I would've much preferred an exploration dungeon one with chests and elite monsters and some resources thrown in randomly, something like that over this system. I got to round 39 first try and blind but died because I got so bored I stopped paying attention.

To everyone that is thinking about playing this game for prolong periods of time, it is like a normal MMORPG w/ oldschool graphics of 2D pixel art which I am fond of and it's not bad, however this game is a subscription/pay game, if you don't have the money look away and find something else, Kurtzpel comes out soon may wanna look into that. But more to this review will come since I don't have much else to do and would like to give a full informative description of this game.

Edit:The reason I judge these types of 2D pixel art type games harder than let's say a game made with Unity or Unreal Engine 4 is because of the nostalgia aspect that it has to people that grew up with this style. Most of these companies are monopolizing these nostalgic games, but to give this game some credit the only server is in Europe and I'm in North America and the game runs fine, I have the occasional 5 seconds to stutter in about a play of 30m-1hr and the game is a pretty nice time killer. From what I can tell the players don't seem that bad either, in fact some are really helpful just like you'd see in an older MMORPG.

So this game isn't all bad, but could change how it's subscription works, instead of making it "free vs full" make it "normal vs premium" and make the friends list for normal unlimited or at least 30, more than 10.

Some mods ruined it for me. Manipulating the economy using their titles to scam new players.

Played enough to write an honest unbiased review. The game is p2w and heavily pay for convenience. Let me tell you why. Current max level in this game is 30, you get 3 bag SLOTS upon finishing all 3 quests, 1 per quest. If you take up crafting which is a must for endgame because you have to craft your gear to progress to the hardest dungeons - there goes damn near all your space right there from crafting materials. They force all these "extra" things that take up space down your throat in an attempt to force you to buy space. You may say, "well, what's the harm in that? they have to make money somehow!?"
Which is fine and all but you should support a game because you think it's a good product and want to support the devs, not because you HAVE to or feel forced to, to progress. There is a hefty bank which boasts a whopping 10 slots for you to store all of your extra goodies(end sarcasm) of which you can buy an extra 10 slots with 100k gold and 1million gold, respectively.
You can buy bag space with in game gold as well but the prices are ludicrous and it's extremely hard to make any money at all considering that you can now hold 3 things to sell for 100g a piece. To put things into perspective, a 10 slot bag sells for around 200k gold. Also note, that these prices are fabricated by the people that have all the money with hundreds upon hundreds of accumulated space and everything already. You get about 50k leveling to 30 - a little more if you don't focus on upgrading your crafts which isn't recommended. Once you hit 25 and get to the last area, you're bombarded with even more things to hold which are important to finish your quests, 12 to be exact...4 for each quest. Keep in mind you're still holding onto all the crafting/gathering materials. Another thing to note, once you hit a certain level in gathering the nodes give 3-4 additional items, each of which take up another bag slot. So that's an additional 3-4 items PER gather profession, RiP 12 more slots. Couple this with the fact that you still need a place to store gear, potions, crafting books etc, and you can quite clearly see a problem here.
Now, before the few fanboys the game DOES have, complain. I'll say that it can probably be done (not likely) if you take 1 craft and focus on 1 class with 1 gathering skill which is idiocy at best. You'll have to buy from others more than likely - not to mention the fact that you're severely hindering yourself from enjoying the game. To each his own, I suppose.

However, there is a simple way around all of this. It's called paying to win - I mean paying to progress...I mean paying for convenience. Pay to play. Paying to have fun?! Paying to....play more efficiently? Pay because you can! Heck, idk what they're calling it now.
Simple solution to all of this = buy bags from shop sell for 200k a pop. 10$ is roughly 200k give or take. You can buy an infinite amount (idk why you would want to) and have as much money as you want at your disposal without lifting a finger other than to charge your credit card, of course. Now, since money isn't an issue, nor bag space, you can quite literally farm to your hearts content. Quite frankly, negating the purpose to actually farm in the first place if you can just BUY all the stuff you need from players. All you need to do is level up. Buy all that you need to level crafting which completely nulls the tedious time consuming task of running around gathering materials and killing for cloths and leathers that, mind you, have a very low drop rate. Buy all the end game crystals that nets you best in slot prerequisite gear so that you're able to farm the hardest dungeons for the ultimate best in slot gear.

A player that does this can be doing the hardest dungeons for the best loot in game in about 2 days give or take. You'll need to level up a toon and also level up the crafts/learn the books which take 6 hours each of which can be halved with money, of course. Whereas a normal player or even 1 that spends say....a few bucks on a small amount of space or the monthly sub (which is also BS in itself but I digress) will take several weeks to accomplish the same task, of course that depends on how hardcore they are but you get the drift.

I ask you: How is this NOT pay to win? People that support it are the reason why games have gone to the gutter nowadays.

Thanks -

I play this game on browser more than on steam. It was okay at first but gets dull quick.
I've made it all the way to current(3.6a) max level.
If you've played through Farshore(the beginning area), then you've played the game.
Nothing but lotta reskins from there. Only goodish is community due to small player base.
I, myself, crafted beginner weapons and gave freely for newbies to help them out in the beginning.

Unfortunately, there are too many cons compare to pros to keep playing.
The big con is inventory space. You only get 2 more throughout the game, unless you buy with real money,
I don't have a big pro. It was equipment system until I found out late game I can't do
whatever I want, like it advertises, cuz they lock you to typical tank and spank builds/classes.

Stuff I find false with claims.
FEATURES:

== Embark on hundreds of quest with many different objectives in a diversified fantasy world ==

--- Nope. Only about 5 different quest objectives. Rinse and repeat till max level.
World isn't diversified. It's split up into tiny areas that contains mobs for quests only.
If there's more than 2 ppl in an area you're screwed. Same thing with leveling professions.


== Learn several professions to craft new gear for you or your fellow adventurer ==

--- Lies....okay, some truth. However, ALL professions are REQUIRED in this game cuz they are tied together.
The current(3.6a) near end gears deemed you to make them "YOURSELF" at near max lvl of necessary professions because of bound rules. You won't be able to get into party of current(3.6a) final raid without it.
Even if you ask nicely, everyone will pretend you don't exist till you flash the crafted rare equips.


== Play Solo or band together with friends and strangers ==

--- I guess. No one party outside world; 80% XP comes from quest.
Only party in Raids cuz typical...Tank N Spank.


== Customize your character to your liking with millions of equipment variations ==

--- BIG LIES. Don't bother with dropped gears and store bought gears later. Stat differential is HUGE.
If it ain't rare don't bother. Unless you want to be laughed at.
You are also locked into a class archtype later so no CUSTOMIZATION.
Late game weapons require equipping certain amount(1-4 pieces) of said armor type before you can use it.
Which is never explained to you or require in the beginning giving a fake impression.

== Defeat the powerful enemies of the dungeons & wave dungeons ==
---Indifferent. Raids = obsolete. No one does em outside of friends. Takes long time too.

== Earn fame & fortune by competing within the ranking system ==
---Kinda hard to be famous when everyone has do all the same thing.
Money can be easily earned by farming and selling trash gears to npc as mage.
Cuz you know mage super OP. *pew* *pew*

My views on what could make this game a lot better :)

* Currently bows are useless, sure you can use it to bring one enemy from faraway to you and also deal some dmg, but using a bow as an archer is not possible. reasons? you need to press where the arrow should do dmg, and even if it passes through the monster no damage is dealt. solution is obvious, make piercing an enemy with an arrow deal dmg instead of using a tile as the target.

* Holding in mouse button to continuously is buggy, at first it works fine but after awhile you can't do it and need to repeatedly hit your mouse instead of holding it in to deal dmg. takes a toll on you after awhile clicking so much sometimes when you are hunting a lot.

FYI: I will be updating this "review" with things I consider needs improvements / bugs, hopefully a dev will consider the bugs I find or are aware of them.

The game has a lot of potential, hoping for many more updates and functionalities added to the game to make it even more interesting and adventurous.

Stein.world is an MMORPG that I think has great potential. I feel the need to write this review because I've seen many others writing reviews with misinformation or lack of knowledge, I have been following the development of the game for awhile now, since alpha and have a maxed out account, saying that I am here to give an honest review of all aspects of the game good and bad. Is the game perfect, no, does the game have potential and should you give it the time of day? I feel so yes and here's why.

First Impressions:
Charming art style, I personally love the graphics as it gives off a very Stardew Valley feel, very relaxing and easy on the eye. It's very much a themepark MMO going from one quest to another, but it doesn't hold your hand what so ever. There's a world map but no minimap or waypoints, you actually have to read the quests and go find the objective very comparable to vanilla wow and I love this aspect of the game, the world feels big and you get to explore it.

The Combat:
Very slow paced in the early levels similar to OSRS but gradually picks up in the level 20-30 range with roots, spells and all that lovely stuff. Sadly there in no PvP yet, I am an avid PvPer and this usually makes or breaks a game for me however the devs have confirmed this is on the way so I'm willing to wait it out until then, if this is a big aspect for you like it is for me I recommend keeping up to date with the development of the game and maybe jump in when they implement it as right now the game is pure PvE.

Group Content/Dungeons:
I make the difference between group content and dungeons because the game can get hard, pulling more than 1 mob can be a death sentence while questing and I've found that normally its instinctive that other players will jump in and help you out, the game has a great community. Moving on to Dungeons there are a few 5 man dungeons you unlock as you level up, some at 10, 20 and then the current endgame at level 30, some are fun, however most dungeons follow a wave format where you just get waves of enemies coming at you that get harder than the last which I feel is quite dull but some do have boss mechanics and the ones that do are amazing.

Crafting:
Don't really have too much to say about crafting, its very straight forward and easy to understand, rather simplistic.

The Dreaded "mandatory" Subscription:
This is why I felt the need to write this review because all the negative reviews have all been based purely on this with lack of knowledge. There is a subscription model you can buy in the cash shop, YOU DO NOT NEED THIS TO PLAY THE GAME AT ALL, it's bad wording by the devs, a F2P account does give you 100% exp and gold gains the subscription gives you a 125% exp and gold gain however on the shop it says a F2P account only gives you 75% exp and gold gains and a subscription account 100% exp and gold gain, they have stated this many times on their discord and if you dig around other reviews they will back me up on this. Now with that out of the way do I like the subscription model? I don't really feel any sort of way about it, its things you come to expect like the 125% exp and gold increase, ESO plus does it for everyone complaining and that aspect doesn't effect your game experience at all. However, there are certain perks of the subscription that I just think are down right stupid and unneeded such as the limit of 10 friends on a F2P account and the limit of 5 active quests in your quest log on a F2P account, really not needed and I feel should be removed. There is also another rumour that you can only buy backpacks on the cash shop, this is false, you can also buy backpacks with ingame currency, gold.

PROS:
- Charming art style
- Amazing friendly and helpful community
- Relaxing and also punishing game play, thought required with quests

CONS:
- Can be rather laggy for NA players atm as there is only an EU server
- No PvP (thats a con for me anyway)
- friendslist limit and quest log limit on F2P account, fix this.

Suggestions/ Things I would like to see in game:
- PvP, get this in ASAP Pronto, personally, for me, I will not be sticking around if they don't implement it soon and will most likely leave for classic wow in the summer to be honest.
- As mentioned, remove the friendslist limit and active quests from the F2P account
- Currently there are no nametags, you don't know whos who, npc, player ect, I would like it maybe to be a toggle option that shows your name, level and guild above your head with health bar of course.
- text bubbles, currently I have no idea if the player stood next to me is trying to talk to me or if hes typing I have to constantly look at global chat.
- Less wave style dungeons and more boss fight mechanics, the wave format is extremely boring and grindy in my opinion and I would like to see maybe some raid type features? obviously the game doesn't have the playerbase of wow or ESO however maybe a 10/15 man Raid? I would love this.
- I personally would like to see endgame ground mounts introduced at some point, walking around the world can be slow.


FINAL THOUGHTS:
Yes Stein.world is worth a try and I personally see great potential, the game is still in infancy but it has such a strong, devoted community that I feel if the devs listen to the players this could be one of the greats. There is no pay to win content, as of yet, too many a time have devs promised no pay to win but ended up implementing that but for everyone reading all the negative reviews I can confirm there is no pay to win elements, all I see is people complaining about there being a subscription who don't understand how F2P models work and think bills get paid off fresh air and sunshine, I don't know... anyway honest review make of it what you like.

Summed up this game has an okay foundation with basic gameplay elements and a nice unique artstyle but lacks proper implementation of the first and several quality of live choices which makes it feel like a chore at times.

Imo the game would benefit greatly from working on some main cons:

-
A) The (melee) fighting system as a whole is currently is very dull. You attack by
clicking at the field the creature is in. It is possible to time your attack precisly and
attack at the moment a creature is walking from one field to another and dodge it's
attack right after that. This requires, with more and more creatures, very proper timing
and therefor isn't easy to do which is a GOOD thing because you get rewarded for
the skill it takes. The alternative is just standing next to the enemy and left clicking it
while soaking up its damage with your hp and armor.
This is the approach of the first mmos and makes them die as its not skill based.
HOWEVER is this not an option as there is a mechanic which stuns you if you walk
around in combat (as a status effect not an attack wtf lol)
If this timed based combat isn't the vision for the devs than they need to implement a
SKILL BASED alternative the more fleshed out the better, but the stun status effect
makes it seem that they want the dmg sponge approach.
This removes combat as a major point of the game as it's to basic for anyone to
engage with.

B) Travelling through the world when in search for quest givers and items is very
annoying. The
movement speed is rather slow which isn't bad on its own as i read it can get quicker
but paired with the fact that you often end up in front of a fence and have to walk all
around to get back to the path because you couldn't see it on the map just wastes the
players time. This is a problem because you are forced to walk and search as there
are no mechanics to point to a quest (possible solutions: nps direction instructions are
readable in the quest book, simply adding quest markers, a skill or buyable map or a
pet which guides you etc)

C) The game needs depth in the sence of mechanics and the game world.
Besides the mentioned dull combat and the very simple general gameplay (raise skill
enough to mine a new ore & repeat) which is neither motivating nor interesting the
game offers little more.

A sword and a club are merely different icons in the inventory and feel and act exactly
the same.

The town with its npcs, besides some guards and farmers walking up and down
without purpose doesnt feel alive. This is because the houses of the npcs have no
function besides looking pretty and the only interaction with npcs is the task they give
you.

Adding to that theres no character improvement besides the 6 passive gathering
"skills" like mining and woodworking, which act as artificial barriers to the next
resource tier. You aren't thinking about picking what type of skill, item or ability you
aquire and how they synergize because that all doesn't exist in a meaningful way.

I believe the game has a lot of potential, but as it is, it's just too tiresome and repetitive.

The good:
The game looks nice and I actually liked the interface. It's very minimalist and has a nostalgic feeling.
There are different mobs with different attack patterns, which makes fighting nice - if you have a party to do strategies. Otherwise is hit and run.
The professions/crafting system has potential, there are a lot of recipes and gives a nice feel besides the usual fighting and running errands for NPCs.
The players community is really friendly and probably because of the style of the game, it doesn't seem to have a lot of kids running around and doing stupid things.

The bad:
The reward system for quests is really lame. Some quests require you to be level 10 and the gear you'll get is the same as when you were level 2, for example, so you just do the quests because, otherwise, there isn't much to do.
Coin currency also doesn't seem to have a purpose: I am getting more and more gold and besides recipe books, I don't find anything worth buying.
The crafting system as it is, is a joke, it requires incredible amounts of grinding and by the time you are capable of creating your first gear, it's stats will be far below what your current gear found while farming monsters. The first weapon I managed to craft has 1/3 damage of the weapon I had at the time.
Inventory management is a buzzkill. You can get more inventory slots by doing quests, but crafting materials will start pilling up (and there isn't much to do with them), so you'll have 1~3 inventory spaces for items dropped.
Cooldowns are not very good. High level gear have 3+ seconds of cooldown. In gaming seconds that's like years.
It's really hard to partner up to do quests, and some dungeons require parties, or else you'll only manage to complete it when the rewards are far below your level.

Since it is currently free to play, if you want a little bit of a nostalgic feeling, go for it. Paying 8 Euros for 30% boost on EXP, Gold and Drops is really out of question. Paying the same amount for other 10 backpack slots is also out of question.

This game reminds me of the good old times, killing rats, fetching stuff and killing more rats.

The game is a fun thing to play.

Have I already said that I killed rats?