It's great, but time-gates have no place in a game like this. Waiting is not a game mechanic.

This is gonna be one of those "I like it, but.." reviews, because at its core, No Rest for the Wicked is actually a great game, and has a lot of potential to become a fantastic experience. This is an early access title, but for the most part, the gameplay and quality reflect quite a polished product. It feels good to play, and the combat is challenging and fun, the story is engaging and the cinematics are absolutely fantastic. The art and animation style (at least in the cinematics) is very reminiscent of Arcane, the League of Legends animated show on Netflix, which I quite enjoy.

Here comes the 'but'.

There is one crucial flaw: No Rest for the Wicked has a fundamental disrespect for the player's time. You may have seen other reviews mention this, and rightfully so. The game has mobile game-esque waiting mechanics that have absolutely no place in a single-player ARPG. There is an NPC in the main hub that you get to right after the first boss that can expand the city for you and upgrade your crafting stations, but these projects take in-game resources and REAL WORLD TIME to complete. The first upgrade takes something like 15 minutes, and all the other upgrades that are initially available take 1 hour each. I have not progressed beyond these, and so I can't say if 1 hour is the standard time sink for all projects, or if it grows longer as you progress further. Either way, this is obviously not acceptable. Waiting is not a game mechanic.

But the time-gated city expansion is not the only reason I say the game disrespects the player's time. At the time of this review, I've spent 7 hours playing the game, and a large chunk of that time was spent just searching for enemies to kill. It's not made immediately clear when enemies respawn, but unlike traditional soulslikes, the player dying has no impact on this. You have to stay away from an area for long enough, and eventually enemies will come back. At the beginning of the game, this poses the issue that there simply aren't enough zones to explore that are available to you yet, and so you end up running in circles, maybe going back and forth doing bounties, while you just wait for the game to be playable again.

That brings me to exploration: It's fun, the game is vibrant and has some pretty great visuals, but I found that figuring out where I was meant to go was a challenge at times. There are certain areas where it's not clear at all which way you're meant to go, or where it's even possible to go, and the zones loop around on themselves in a way that can be extremely frustrating if you're looking for "the way forward".

Overall, No Rest for the Wicked is an unpolished gem with TONS of potential, but the rough edges and quite frankly disrespectful waiting mechanics prevent me from recommending it. However, in the event that they:

- Remove the waiting mechanics completely.
- Tighten up enemy respawn rates to make aimless wandering less of a thing.
- Make it just a little bit easier to figure out where you're meant to go.

Then, not only will I change my review to reflect that, I will absolutely be playing co-op with my friends, and recommending it to everyone. Until that day, I wish the developers good luck.

remove the timers. all of them.

Remove timers. We're playing a game not cooking brown rice.

When I played this game in June I would've left a positive review. As of now, watching for updates, I'm gonna leave a thumbs down.

They have updated the crucible (a rogue-like infinite activity at the end of available content) several times yet have not updated the actual core game since EA release. This game is gorgeous, the systems are fun to play around with and the combat is pretty fun. The bosses in particular are a stand out.

Since I played this is in June there have been zero indications/communication on main game dev progress and coming from a successful studio like Moon, it's not okay.

Do not pick this up until at least a proper road map has been released.

"No Respect for the Player"

First, the good—this game has beautiful art, and really solid basic combat systems and exploration. There are certainly balancing issues with the combat and visibility issues with exploration, but those are things that can certainly be polished with more time in the oven.

Now, the bad—this game does not respect the player's time at all. If you've read reviews, then you probably are already aware of the limited inventory issue and the fact that after farming areas that you've already been to for hours (I timed it: the first tier of upgrades took about 7 hours for me), you then are asked to wait real world time to upgrade facilities. And then after the facilities are upgraded, it's more farming for mats and then waiting more real world time for them to be processed into something you can use. I think it was around 30 minutes for silver ore to turn into a bar for me? And you need 10 of them to upgrade one piece of armor... one time. You should get the point by now.

Essentially, this game makes itself miserable to play in order to reward the player with basic quality of life features as meta-progression, and that's awful. It uses systems from games that intentionally waste your time to keep you "engaged," but not necessarily having fun. And, of course, you can "just go do something else" while things progress, but.... why? There's genuinely no point other than to make the player feel better when the town is upgraded more and wastes slightly less of their time.

Some people won't mind this. When I was a kid, I had all the time in the world and I needed games to last as long as possible. These days, I value pacing and value for my time as much as my money, and this doesn't succeed on that point.

Some folks might counter that this is Early Access, and that's subject to change. True, but they accepted my money, so the honest review comes along with it. Furthermore, my big complaints are really basic design philosophy stuff (withhold basic quality of life to use as "rewards"). I don't really foresee it changing, and the updates so far haven't really taken the issues seriously. There have been minor updates to how storage works and animation speeds for harvesting resources—small steps that help slightly but really show that the devs don't think the issue is as serious as I do. And that's ok! They should make the game they want to make, and I think they are.

As a bit of meta-commentary about "community feedback" from Early Access, let's face it—there are so many different people saying so many different things, the devs can literally just do whatever they want with the game and say "we listened to the community," because SOMEONE will be saying just about anything.

I played the game for about 63 hours total, and enjoyed about 15 of them. I kept playing because I wanted to really give the game a chance and see if there was something that I wasn't getting at first, and because I really want the game to succeed. Beautiful art, nice combat, fun exploration... it should be a no-brainer, but sadly it managed to fall short at a basic conceptual level.

As subsequent patches made the game run worse and worse on my PC and then broke things like transparency on particle effects (not to mention progress stopping bugs from mis-rotated puzzle objects), I eventually realized that no matter how much I want to like this, I should just shelve it.

I'd be willing to try it again once the multiplayer is added (I already own it, after all) or once 1.0 releases, but I just really can't recommend it as a "game" unless you really want to be a part of "the community" for Early Access. And as I said before, that feels kind of pointless because there will always be feedback exactly contrary to your own, and Moon Studios can pretty much do whatever they want and justify it via player feedback.

One major counterpoint I'd like to raise to my own review, here: this is based on the single player experience. It's possible that just playing with friends makes the time-wasting stuff not as annoying... but that isn't what I played, because it isn't released. And frankly, "not as annoying" isn't what they should be aiming for in the first place.

I really hope the game improves, because the core combat and exploration were really nice!

Cambiaré la review a positiva cuando echen al CEO de ♥♥♥♥♥♥

De momento falta bastante contenido y el rendimiento podría ser mejor. Las misiones diarias sobran y lo de tener que esperar horas para construir... Esto no es un free to play para smartphones.

Cuando salga actualizaré la review pero de momento no lo recomiendo.

The timers are god awful

The gameplay in general and the combat is great and the art style is also amazing...

..BUT:
-Resource gathering is mandatory but boring af and takes too much time overall.
-The town building/upgrading system is absolutely annoying, it takes real time to complete like in a mobile game.
-Same thing for processing your resources.
-You cant teleport to locations you already have been to.. always have to run around the complete map.
-Main City is way to big and everything is spread out so you have to run around even more all day long.
-You have to buy and decorate your "home/house" to get more storage space is just terrible.
-Your equipment breaks and needs to be repaired in a game with souls-like combat...
-Weapon balance is bad, some are completely broken and others feel useless and unplayable.
-Game seems to be poorly optimized; this is the only game where my PC struggles to keep 30 fps even at low settings.

Conclusion:
This game would be amazing without those ♥♥♥♥♥♥ "mmo-like" and "mobile-game" "features" that are just extremely annoying, boring, time wasting and unrewarding but necessary to progress forward in the game.
PLEASE remove/change those "features" or at least make those things optional...