I wanted this game to be something amazing. My next world to disappear in to. I put in the hours and the time and after 500 hours I am sad to say I can't support this product anymore.

It is a beautiful game and wonderful crafting system, but there are a few things holding it back.

1. The developers could do a better job telling us what is going on and where they are going. Yes they released a road map awhile ago but it hasn't been much since. This ties in to my other concerns

2. A social sandbox game should have better social systems in place than this. it took them six months to get chat to a slightly better place and that was done with discord integration. I am still not sure if it is a good move or not for the game. In this same span of time we got market stalls put in to the game and some gold economy. You can only sell at this time and no buy orders in place. ( I don't even know if they ever will be?) and has to be at each persons stalls. These are items that should have been in place prior to early access.

3. crafting is grindy without feeling satisfying: (I love to grind in games too) I am going to give some examples here. I loved the idea of running a tavern for a town and focused on food, drinks and booze. However spending hours (days with some skills) to make 100-250 of the SAME item to level my skill one point leaves you feeling like crap. To make matters worse cooking recipes lack a unique feeling as the next item you can make just increases health by 5 points or stamina by 5 (or something else marginal). Once a player has these high enough there is no need for any of the lower items. Or imagine making 300 pick axes to level up once. Their idea to mix it up was anything that requires more components gives more experience. But they forget that also means more time grinding. So do we really get anything out of it for the extra steps?

4. Magic: This one really bothers me. It is a beautiful game but all your magic is currently tied to a weapon and there are maybe a dozen spells in the game? Want to cast fireballs? Better have a leather bracer that lets you? Want to heal? Go get the headband? Taunt? Magical sword. This is a horrible system imo.

5. No character development: Aside from having higher skills my character doesn't feel special, unique or remotely important. The value of my character is strictly connected to how much time I spent leveling a crafting skill or hitting a target with a weapon.

6. Combat: I normally am not concerned with combat in a game but after 6 months of "We're working on it" its become nothing still. Each time you hit a target with the weapon you are holding it increases your weapon xp by 100 points. Flat rate,, Want to get your weapon to max skill? Hit a mob...any mob 10,933 times and you will max the skill. Weapons have 1 skill ability and if a magic weapon will have a proc ability or maybe a spell. To make matters worse, there is so little to kill. Deer, bears, fox, badgers, boars are your animals. Zebians, inquisitors and ghosts are the rest. Some of the latter will look different here or there but they all hit hard as hell so make sure you get the best stuff possible to farm them for crappy mats and gold.

All and all, its a beautiful puddle. Great to look at but no depth.

I am so sorry everyone, please go elsewhere until they get their act together.

There is nothing on the store page saying that when they release the full game you have to purchase it again and pay monthly. (you have to go to other website to find out) hell no, i want my money back! Lot of money to drop on a game and DLC for an early access and you don't even get to keep it. Another money grubbing company ruining games.

Definitely a good game, but there are caveats that any buyer should be aware of before getting into it.

1. Building is fantastic
2. Visuals are fantastic
3. Social interactions are great.

Downsides:

1. The game costs $40 but says you will have to pay a sub after early access. Subs for small game studios almost always end in a dead population. Plus they dont even tell you how much it will be, so you are basically gambling on the hope that its not expensive. Note: Devs did say that you will be compensated even when the sub starts. So based on the pack you buy, you will get a decent amount of free sub time for owning a founders pack. It should be buy to play OR a sub, not both.

2. While building and social stuff is great, combat is poor at best. Its not that it doesn't work, it does work. It just has basically no depth. Swing swing, block. Thats it. The combat overhaul claims to make it a far higher skill ceiling later on.

3. **EXTREMELY GRINDY**. When the devs say its designed for large social interactions, they actually mean it. This game works best if you either join or live near a large group, then you can choose a role that is in demand and grind that to make a living and get everything else you need.

Note: Its not impossible to solo. Its just slower. I play in a 2 man group and we do alright just taking our time. There is no open PVP (pvp is only in specific zones that you opt-into entering).

If you're coming into this game to have fun and relax this is a warning!!! After almost 500 hours in the game I am giving it up. Playing solo or even in a small 4 man group makes it nearly impossible to level crafting. I just takes way, way, way too much work. I've played grindy games and this puts them to shame. It really just reaches a point where crafting is so difficult it killed the game for all 4 of us. None of us want to join a big clan. Been there done that. I worked for 40 years, I'm retired and don't answer to anyone nor does anyone answer to me and I'd like to keep it that way. Other issues that seem to be basic fixes for other games seem to linger. Sorry to leave this. We gave it a good shot.

Thought the idea of a player driven world would be cool, but then I realized there was gonna be a monthly subscription for every plot you owned. I hardly can pay for rent IRL don't think I'd be wanting to pay for it in a game.

I would not have written a bad review, but the community is so rude that i will do it anyway now.

(Detailed infos about each aspect of the game is further down)
I have nothing against EA/Alpha games that are unstable or have lots of bugs, and i think it is always unfair to judge a EA/Alpha game based on that. So i will not talk about that in any way.
I also dont like to judge a game if i have not even played for atleast a couple of hours, and i will most likely continue to play to atleast get my money worth out of it.

There is also nothing bad about a game having little content in EA.
The reason for my bad review, is that this game plays and seems like a money grab.
You pay atleast 40€ for nothing. If this had been 10€-15€, i would have probably given a good review.
But you should always charge a fair amount of money for your EA/Alpha title, based on the amount of content you have and work you put in.
And this is just not worth the price and feels/seems like a scam.

They have an extremly low amount of content, that they hide behind unnecessarily long waiting times and crafting times.
You essentially have to play 10 hours to unlock some basic house building stuff (this takes significantly longer if you are alone or in a small group)
And they do this with everything. They strech what most survival games would consider to be 10 hours of gameplay, to 500+ hours of gameplay, by making every little thing super hard to get, cause you have to level each skill (that you need for something) to a ridiculus level for hour and hours, just to build for example a basic looking wall.

So, they basically strech that tiny amount of content as far as they can, to justify the price point.

The scam gets even worse, once you read that after EA, you will have to pay a monthly fee depending on the size of your plot, to keep playing.
And no, 1 plot size is not even close to big enough to do anything other than the basic stuff that you do the first 5 hours. You need atleast 3 or 4 to do anything.

The game is supposed to be a "social mmo", which is what interested me the most.
The community is supposed to fill the world and build a player based economy by trading with other clans and people.

There is just one problem... There is no trading. Litteraly the only thing you can do right now, is throw items on the ground and hope you dont get scammed by people.
There is no system for money, no market stalls, nothing.
So, the game cant even provide the basic content that it is supposed to be build upon by the community.

You join into a okay looking (perfectly good for an EA game) world that is filled with lots of players.
Very quickly, you learn that there is nothing to it though. And no, that in itself is not a bad thing. I really enjoy the idea of a world that is being filled by the community. But the world is really big, and there really is nothing else to do other than to gather, craft and build houses.

You will also see, that you can not play this game alone. You need a big group so everyone can do a different job. Otherwise you will probably spend litteral months to do anything.

Crafting your first gear, gathering items and "hunting" animals for loot, is the most generic it can be.
You press e to collect, press craft to craft. The only difference to a lot of games, is the waiting time. Some things take a really long time to craft and unlock.

This seems to be their strategie for every ascept of the game (like i said before), to get people to play for hundreds of hours without actually providing content.

When you and your group eventually get to the next tier of axes, you can really tell how many "tricks" they try to use, in order to strech the little amount of content they have.
With the tier2 axe, you can now cut down bigger trees. These trees however, dont give you anything new. So, why do you have to craft the tier2 axe to cut down new tress, when you get the same stuff from the other trees?
You have to play for another day (you will not be this fast if you dont have a group of 20+ people), just to get the next axe to then the better wood.

Your Inventory is tiny, stacks are tiny and there is no way of crafting backpacks or carriages to gather more of the items, after you have to walk 30min to get to them.

Building in this game is also extremly generic. And i mean, extremly generic. The friend who told me to get this game, said that its an even better building mechanic than what enshrouded has. Well, its not even close.
Even if you unlock everything, which takes extremly and unnessecarly long, you barely have anything to work with.
You get some basic foundations you can place, there is no voxel based building or anything. Its basically like in ark, but you only get stone, clay and wood, and you need to skill carpentry to an absurd level (this takes litteraly forever. i am not even 1/6 of the way there yet) to even unlock these simple building options.

This is the kind of building system you get from games where the focus lies more on other aspects, like exploring or farming etc., but in this game, that the only real thing you can do, which makes this super sad. And again, of course this is an EA/Alpha, but dont let me pay 40€ and then hide that tiny bit of content behind 500 hours of generic crafting and gathering.

The plot size of 1, that you get when buying the 40€ version, is also not nearly enough to build anything cool. You can build a small house and have a few chests and crafting tables. Thats about it. So, you have to pay 100€ if you want enough space to build...

Just dont. There is nothing to explore. And you have no option other than walking.
Sure, the map is really really big and thats super cool. But if you make a map that for an EA/Alpha release, atleast provide the players with basic horses to travel.
You take SO long to even travel to the next stone deposit. Good luck walking all the way to the next tier of iron deposits, just to get a handfull and having to walk all the way back (This unironically takes atleast 30-50min, depending on where your base is)

Once again, extremly generic. Nothing new or good. You have basic attacks, a few different weapons and shields.
There is really nothing else to add to this.

This community is suprisingly toxic. This is the main reason i even got motivated to write this review. I initially though i will just let them do its thing and see where it takes them, eventhough i really feel scammed rn.

The community makes it super hard to like this game, since you basically can not have your own opinion without 20 people attacking you and putting words in your mouth.
They also all seem to know this game in and out since everyone seemed to played all the closed alpha versions.
So, as a new player you dont really get any help from them.
By the time you finally made an axe, everyone has already rushed to some big project, which makes you feel super left out and you can not catch up at all.
They tell you that "because there are no players levels, and only skill levels" you dont need to rush along. But you do. If you dont keep up, you have to rely on everyone else to make even basic stuff for you.

The community is also putting these "clown" rewards on every negative review. I think that tells a lot about them.

This game is simply put not worth 40€, not even to support the devs. It feels, looks and plays like a money grab and a scam. If the game actually releases, you loose access and have to pay a monthly fee.
If you really wanna play this game, wait and see how things are in a few years.
If its not a scam, good.
If it is a scam you will be happy to have saved your money and time.

I'd like to recommend this game, but I can't in it's current state. even after the building wipe (which was fine, and the devs did a good job making it so you could rebuild easy) I've also heard rumors once the game is released they'll want a monthly subscription.

But after the last "update" the dev's have made it so you NEED to join a large clan to craft anything above tier 2.
The game shows a lot of promise and I love building and crafting games, but even if you're in a small group entering the PVP area to mine or gather is just another death march and slaughter at the hands of the large clans. (more power to ya if you can solo the PVP area, I kept getting killed)
the crafting system is still screwy, they have the weapons and armor crafting decently setup, but cooking and alchemy or brewing could use a lot of refining.

After playing the last update, I wonder if the devs actually play test their game from a fresh start.

The game has potential and I know the goal is to be a "social" MMO, but maybe they should play their own game by themselves (go ahead and interact with the people actually online), but don't play with anyone from the company or your personal group of 'friends', starting from zero. And if they can't enjoy their own game the way they made it, maybe take some time rethink some things.

I wanted to give this game the benefit of the doubt being a "Early Access Game", so i put the college try worth of time 106 hours at the time of this review. I didnt want to be like a lot of reviews these days with the rage machines who play for 20 minutes and quit expecting a participation trophy.

Graphics - 8/10

First off i love the graphics of the game i think they are going in the right direction when it comes to this aspect, however there is not blood or gore or anything indicating a wound or kill. You can loot an animal you've killed or a npc and theres just... nothing.

Building - 8/10

Building in this game is like a love/hate relationship, on one hand you can build pretty much whatever you want and how you want. On the other hand when you try to place some of the props it will show "Green" but then break apart 2 seconds later. I managed to build a Tavern a Workshop and a castle during my played time in the EA version.

Game play loop------

Gathering- 5/10 " It will never be enough"

This is where the cracks start to appear in this game, as per every survival game there is a lot of gathering, mining, and wood chopping involved in setting up your first house or base. This alone will take you countless hours, which by itself is not really a bad thing however there are a lot of materials you'll need for crafting, building, progression that you will have a really hard time finding or its just not in the game. Example here is clay which is a basic material needed for a ton of items in the game, however its hard to farm out in the wild. Another example of this would be the next tier of leather which is just named "Animal Hide", this is dropped by wolves in boars in the wildlands but at a painfull drop rate of like 0.1%.

Crafting- 3/10 "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

This has to be the first game i've played where there is truly nothing to do with items you've crafted, and you'll be crafting A LOT of items. Hundreds and Hundreds of items just thrown on the ground since there's nothing else you can do with it. It takes far to long and way to many materials to level crafting up, it takes about 100 crafts of something Moderate difficulty to get to the next level. The crafting in this game just feels like a slog and a half since your entire game progression relies on it. Also for whatever reason when you fail a craft the items go on the floor, in your bag, or on the roof of whatever structure your in requiring constant cleanup when your done to get your hard earned materials back.

Combat- 4/10 "It works, but its about as deep as a puddle"

Combat works but its the FPS equivalent of shoot it until its dead and move on. Stabbing endlessly until the mob your fighting dies with no real sense of mechanics or skill involved. On higher level mobs your basically bound to bug them out or stand on rocks they cant get on until you can safely stab them until they are dead.

Other considerations:

While i know its a MMO and giant clans and guilds are to be expected you will be at a huge disadvantage playing solo, until some sort of in game player shop or currency is added.

The dev's plans for monetization of this game in the future just seem extremely vauge on purpose. Could you imagine being in a clan with people and building a town only for chunks of it to dissapear if a person doesn't pay thier sub?

Mainframe has been pretty responsive when it comes to game breaking issues such as launch day rubber banding or the DNS issues they hit later on, which is a nice change from other games in recent memory.

Suggestions for changes to the game:

Crafting system needs a full overhaul
- Make it fun, not just a gather and craft hundreds, then pray
- Give us actual XP bars for skills so we can judge how much we need to do to the next level
- Give crafts a chance to proc better version "common, uncommon, rare, etc" a lvl 40 armoursmith should be able to make something easier and better then a low level. Or the proc of making more materials like Nails where as the default is 50. Maybe it will proc and make 75 or 100 depending on level.
- Make Salvaging a skill or a option for crafting or loot, to atleast give people somthing to do with the stacks of items needed to level.

Building system and skills need more clarity
- Im not sure how many people know this but your carpentry level correlates into what you can build in the construction menu. The higher your carpentry is, the more things youll be able to use to build on your plot.
- Give us some kinda tooltip or explanation of what the point of leveling combat skills or gathering skills do. For those who dont know leveling bows make your shots do more dmg, leveling mining lets you mine faster at lvl 30.

Combat changes and upgrades
- Combat feels like your fighting AI set to Very Easy, they all do predictive attacks.
- there needs to be some kinda of dodge or other mechanics introduced


Summary

Personally id wait until the core of the game has more meat to it but the skeleton is there, lets hope the def works on it.

21 feb 2025 : Still no real improvement. Run.



19th dec 2024 : DO NOT BUY THIS GAME ! Add it to your wishlist and come back in 2 or 3 years.

[Edit : I forgot to mention that's once the game is released, you will need to pay a suscription every month to keep playing]



The beginning of the game is cool, graphics are pretty, you have lots of professions (16 right now) and the progression is easy... until level 20 (there is 40 level right now).

But after level 20, oh boy, welcome in hell.

Every single level, in every single professions will cost you weeks of farm. Even if you play in a clan, you will need several farmers for one crafter. There is nothing to do but farm. And the more you approach the level 40 the worst it becomes. We are talking about months of full time farming.

And here is why it will not change before release (the great reset) : that's because there's actually barely 1500 players (on all the servers) right now and most of them leveled their professions before the Proving Ground update. And since this update, everything is worst for the new players. And because the fan base is already max out, they ask for new content and the new players are not listened.

Look at the number players' curve on steam DB. Players who are blocked at mid level don't come back, even if there is regular updates. The game is not manageable anymore.

Ex of a guy who did maths on the discord :

"This is a fun thought.

To get alchemy from 32 to 36, requires at least 7 furnaces running 24/7 just for glass, over 100 days. This is at least every 6 hours, refilling all furnaces. Over 1 million sand (300 chests) and 630k charcoal (180 chests). This equates to at least 1.26 million sapwood (720 chests) to supply for charcoal. "

NB : on discord, most of players are unemployed, retired, or (for real) are playing from their workplace...

This game requires a subscription fee next year!!!

This is not obviously stated in the description, it's hidden quite far in the early-access notice, I would never have spent 40 bucks on this tech demo if I had known I can't play this game anymore in a year! So I hope I can save somebody 40 bucks.

That said, the building is nice, it's really cool to see the buildings from a huge distance away and the graphics are really nice I think. The combat is terrible, gathering is basic and the grind is quite terrible, needs some balancing.

Considering I've paid 40 bucks for this and can't get a refund anymore, I'm going to test it further and update my review with more findings