After sinking 80 hours SOLO into playing Runescape Dragonwilds, I have discovered some Pros and Cons of this early access title, and would love to share my thoughts!

Starting with the GOOD and FUN things about the game.
- This game is beautiful. Bright colours with great environmental effects of the world.
- Combat feels awesome and a little souls like, love the parry mechanic.
- Building in this game is very addictive the way everything snaps is a builders dream, you can build basically anywhere!
- The armour designs and Masterwork weapons are a great touch, very Nostalgic!
- Spells feel natural to the game i really enjoyed using different spells to overcome certain fights or even travelling, finding secret caves, and hidden areas.
- Quests and side quests are limited but short and sweet!
- Vaults are unique, some of them can be quite challenging but overall engaging and super fun!
- Having 3 different attack styles (Melee, Ranged, Magic) makes the game fun in way where u can chose what style you want to traverse the map or how you want to approach certain enemy's.
- Loved the soundtrack and music!

Now we can discuss the BROKEN, BAD and UGLY!
- The Dragon attacks feel unnecessary and pointless, also the fact that he still fly's around after you KILL HIM is very strange! The dragon attacks forced tons of people to build in the starter zone (Tier 1) with limited areas to build, because of the constant barrages from Velgars poison attacks if you build in Bramble wood or any (Tier 2) or higher zones. I understand seeing him fly over from time to time, it can add ambience to the game, but it is a very annoying mechanic to deal with and you cant do much about it.
- The amount of times you have to SLEEP and EAT in this game is a bit overwhelming , being a survival crafting game i understand the challenges and intensity of these games but my god i felt like i needed to sleep, eat, drink almost every 10 minutes ! It was quite exhausting at times.
- Although this game had great visuals it was verrry blurry felt like i had motion blur on in tons of areas.
- Spells take way to long to cast, especially if you are trying to put up a tempest shield or even as small as a building spell it takes forever in scenarios where u need it fast!
- Lacks content and needs wayy more things to do. After i did the main story quest and killed the dragon there is not much left to do except going out and searching for masterwork weapons, armour and decoration items if you are a collector .
- Some resources are quite hard to come by especially Harralander, very limited herb to come by and is essential if you want to make weak anti poisons to travel through the Bloodblight Swamps.
- Lacks two skills such as Hunting and Farming. Two of the most important skills in any crafting survival game which too me IMO should have already been released early access, i think it will help with the resource inefficiency.
- Travelling in this game on foot can be a daunting task especially if you have to go back to your loot in a areas that are guarded by high tier enemies can get frustrating if you don't have Waystones set up in your favour!
Would be nice to see some sort of movement speed spell so i don't have to rely on placing a Waystone in every corner of the map.
- Last thing "Bad" about this game is the lack of enemy variety, tons of the areas had similar enemies and to be honest the only thing that made me feel like i was in a different area was the Environmental effects. For example, in the Stormtouched zone it felt dark and dangerous with lightning smacking the ground but no new enemy's around so it did killed the feels of exploring something new ! Not a fan of seeing the same enemies in a different biome.

VERDICT

Runescape Dragonwilds was super fun! Great combat system, not to mention the soundtrack and music was beautiful along with the visuals very colourful and bright ! Engaging vaults/ dungeons, killing bosses finding new masterworks with Friends or even Solo will be worth your money and time ! THIS IS A CRAFTING SURVIVAL GAME IT IS NOT RUNESCAPE ! If they added more skills, more spells, and a ton of new content this game will thrive but right now it does lack a few elements and could use some optimization!
I personally loved this game but to continue following up and playing I think speaking on behalf of the community it needs to push out content fast and make the xp drops smaller so we can get excited about new skills and spells. Tons of potential, keep COOKIN JAGEX!

FINAL SCORE - 7.5/10

As a person who's played the actual runescape since 2006 I had no idea this was coming out until I saw it on Steam and decided to try it. I also happen to really like survival crafting games and have tried most if not all of the major ones on the market.

This is one of the hundreds of "early access but it has PoTeNtIaL!!!" games on the market. There is nothing special or unique about this game other than it's "runescape" branding. Worse still, it's combat is clunky, the developers have absolutely no understanding of balance work, and this is simply an all around mediocre game. If it didn't have the "Runescape" name on it, this game wouldn't be over 70% positive.

Personal rant on why I don't like Jagex and why I don't trust them to follow through on this game: I would like to emphasize as well for people who don't know the company, this is a company that in this game claims that community is at the forefront of their decision making process, but at the same turn has a history of intentionally backtracking on promises they made for their other game titles. Want an example? They had a community voting system in their main base game (which this is based off of) which when they released "OSRS" they said they would only ever introduce updates to the game if the community voted for it in polls. They have made many political statements over the years in the form of game updates that have run contrary to that so there is no reason to believe that they would not break promises with this game as well, regardless of whether you agree with their statements in the past.

But what of the gameplay? Here are some examples of things you will have to suffer through to play this game which in my opinion are inane choices that I can't believe anyone with two brain cells spent more than 5 minutes thinking about (there are spoilers here):
- From the very start there is a dragon that will occasionally circle above your head and spit poison all over the ground aimed at you. This will leave puddles of poison that when you come in contact give you a debuff that slowly takes nearly half of your HP
- You will randomly be "hunted" by a band of horribly balanced NPC hordes (they scale to whatever biome you are in as far as I can tell, or the highest biome level you'd reached) that will spawn almost directly next to you at any time
- Your base will have random attacks that are incapable of being disabled (yes, they can destroy your house)
- There is no way to pause this game even in solo, as you can imagine this is a very annoying combination with the previous things mentioned
- The developers thought it would be a good idea to place an end game enemy in the tier 2 area right after you start. Yes this was intentional. I normally would think this is clever, but the horrible balancing and enemy AI behaviour creates a very obnoxious death loop of you spending 20 minutes running to your equipment only to get slain by an NPC twice your level that will follow you across the entire biome.
- Oh did I mention? Enemies will continue to chase you (and run nearly at your same speed) to a ridiculous degree. You will run out of stamina before you escape.
- Basic first tier mobs like goblins and rats are capable of killing you in around 4-5 hits
- Mobs don't seem to have a clear despawn or movement pattern when they kill you. Remember that abyssal demon that is two tiers higher wandering around the swamps? It will still be there at your grave waiting to kill you in 2-3 hts.
- Oh did I mention that mob attacks are almost unbridgeable by running away? That rat that's guarding your corpse will miraculously be able to 5x it's reach when you reach for your grave marker.
- Magic casting can be interrupted by enemy attacks
- You cannot cancel magic casting animations for any reason unless you get hit enough to stagger, have fun watching that goblin axe slo mo into your face no matter how many times you mash that dodge button
- Parrying is animation based and not instant like the vast majority of games.
- Pretty much everything in this game is animation based rather than how fast you are at reacting.

At the moment, I advise against buying it. The game is only a small fraction complete and suffers from the usual bugs and design flaws:

- Frequent crashes, as is typical of the Unreal Engine, especially when teleporting.
- Forced motion blur and excessive bloom, overall a totally blurry view.
- Performance is abysmal, not acceptable for the graphics offered.
- No pause function in single player.
- Tiny stacks and even tinier inventory to artificially stretch the playtime. Add to that the various types of meat and fur that clutter up the inventory but all produce the same end result when crafting.
- No options to customize anything to your own play style.
- Target-following arrows and spells from enemy ranged fighters.
- Very few enemy variations.
- Useless loot from all enemies. Most only drop a few scraps of standard resources.
- The skill trees don't offer much; some aren't even active.
- Very small game world, and even the suggested expansions on the map don't add much space.
- Generic dungeons with the same enemies over and over again.
- Exploring doesn't make sense, since there's nothing to discover. So you just complete the main quest once—that's it.

At least the building system is pretty solid, with building elements of varying sizes. But here, too, you'll encounter the typical weaknesses, e.g., with the snap points.

In 2-3 years it might look better, but currently not recommended. The price for what is offered is absolutely not appropriate.