This game had HUGE amounts of promise and was extremely fun in the beggining. So much fun that I actualy made 3 level 60 characters and keeps for all three of them. Its EA and there are bugs. The blue isle team was diligently working on them for a while and then things turned sour.

There are roughly 3 reasons people want to play this game.

1- The building of bases and fortresses.
2- The flying
3- The pets and dragons you can tame and ride.

Reasons 1 and 2 were completely amazing untill one of their Dev team whom I will call Eggbert, decided to completely change the dynamics of gameplay to totaly ruin the fun that they had once generated for every one. Apparently Eggbert thought that flying slower than walking speed would be fun for every one, but before that the speed was exileratingly fast. Good job Eggbert, you have singlehandedly ruined Flying.

The building system was realy cool & people were creating beautiful castles and keeps that were mind blowing. But the problem is all this building generated lag and server crashes on every server. They tried to find and eradicate the inferiour coding causing this but apparently that was too hard, Eggbert decided to just make all the high end building require an insane amount of regular matterials and now require vast amounts of time to gather copious quantities of special matterials and fight for these same special materials to harvest them before others on your server do, and apparently you have to wait for the server to crash before they respawn. Thats not such a problem as the servers crash mutliple times each day and they still have no idea how to fix it. All this is done just to slow down the building to a snails crawl speed. It literaly takes forever to build 1 wall section now. And you are building the same wall section you had built before with no additional upgrades for the HUGE jump in resources and time now required. Good job Eggbert, you ruined the fun in building.

Riding a dragon is super cool. And it still is super cool as i write this. The process of making a dragon or pet is called taming. Having tames has always and still has tons of negative bugs. From having them just disapear to crashing your game and loosing hours of harvested matterials they were carying, the guantlet is huge on the bugs they have been riddled with. From day one the dev team has been trying to fix these bugs, and they have come a long ways. But it would appear the bugs are now morphing into more powerful bugs causing more fatal errors. But still, even after all the frustrating bugs with mounts, flying a Black dragon is an experience that I loved.

(Edited on 10-11-2017: Riding dragons has been ninja nerfred. They no longer travel at wonderous speeds. They removed the sprint ability and have been effictively slowed wayyyyy down. Its is painfully slow to ride the Black dragons and Infernals now. Way to ruin the marvel of what once had been known only as dragon flight Eggbert !!!)

The crafting system in the game was pretty cool. They have been chipping away to improve it since release. But there is a downside. When crafting is completed for each item, it is placed in a disposable bag. This bag WILL always disapear after a server is reset or crashes and reboots. Server instability is horrible. I repeat HORRIBLE. If people are playing on the same server, IT WILL CRASH and CitadelUSEast41 crashes mutliple times a day. If you are crafting and server crashes. You will lose EVERYTHING. I have lost countless high end materials in the 600 plus hours i have played. It is so dang exasperating to have to try and hunt down days of resources to just lose them all in an instant AGAIN, and AGAIN.

((Edited on 10-26-2017) they have solved the disposable crafting problem. You no longer lose all your matterials & crafted item you had spent hours to find when the server reboots/crashes. Eggbert, you did something wonderful. Attaboy !!!)

Then when you try and bring up these issues on the forums the moderators give you some pat propaganda answers. Thats ok, i know they are only lowly moderators and have no power to actualy fix things. I am ok with that. But when more and more people voice concerns and offer helpful ideas, the moderators get confused. They start to ban people who are saying things they dont want to hear. And remove all posts these people have made. WOW. Talk about censureship. How about you just fix the bugs, stop ruining what could have been an amazing game and heavy handing your customers Blue Isle?

I can not recomend this game or ANYTHING made by Blue Isle. There flim flam tactics are not something i can put up with or stomach. And to be honest, i realy hate the game play Eggbert is driving this game to. Eggbert realy should be kept away from touching anything Blue Isle is trying to code. Who knows, he may be an amazing window cleaner......

I am done with it. I hope you find this information helpful so you can spend your time doing something more productive and experiencing something more pleasant than to waste your time on Citadel:Forged with fire.

If some one were to ask me what to name Citadel: Forged with fire. My response would be:

It feels like this game should be called "Pedestrian Mage: Flying Air slugs" as a dead on discriptive name for this game.

It’s really sad to see how many negative reviews this game has… I don’t think it’s a fair assessment of the current situation. I've got already 100+ hours in the game and still a lot to do!

I would say, don't be afraid of the mixed reviews - it seems that an early access launch was really rough, and therefore it influenced the current rating, but the dev team has done a great job of squashing the bugs that earned this game so many negative reviews early on.

Anyway, I would like to lay out some pros and cons of this game, so at least you can have a better picture what to expect from this title.


** PROS **

1. The world is truly beautiful, shall I say - almost magical in feeling. It gives you a sense of immersion and the atmosphere is very chilling... Varied biomes - starting from swamps, moving over the forests, plains and ending in the high mountains. I love a very clear map/navigation system - it shows all the tags of visited places (quite similar to Skyrim approach).

2. This is obviously totally open world survival game, so you can go anywhere and do whatever you want.

3. You can tame most of the creatures in the game! You can make an ad-hoc army from wolves while adventuring if you fancy. For a long term companion use scrolls which are extending the loyalty of the creature. You can tame horses, tree-men, dragons, demons, and what not :) Taming is much easier and not as time consuming like in other similar games.

4. Flying! Yes, you can fly in this game not just on a mount but also on a broomstick or just simply with a flying potion. Obviously you can still go back to more “traditional” way of flying - on a back of your very own dragon!

5. Build your house wherever you want. You can build a majestic wizard tower in hard to reach places, or maybe you fancy a more impressive castle - your imagination is your limit. The building system is really good! I would even risk and say, that it is one of the best in comparison to other similar games. The pieces you are building with, they fit together very well, and let you build really complicated shapes as well (e.g. curved walls, etc.). Variety of materials and different furniture packs additionally spicing things up.

6. I really like crafting system, which has a bit of RNG in it, but it gives you a sense of polishing your perfect armor or weapon. RNG is not bad, because if let's say armor pieces have the statistics you don't want, you can put them into deconstructor and regain most of the valuable resources and re-craft!

7. Magic! This is after all a WIZARD GAME! There are 4 different types of weapons which dictate what kind of spell you can slot: Wands, Staves, Gauntlets and Melee. I really like this approach, with some reservations though, about which I will mention in CONS section. You can swap two weapons in-battle so that gives you 4 different spells you can use during the fight. In terms of abilities themselves, some of them are projectiles, some semi aoe, instant dots, channeled beams - the variety is really outstanding. You can easily choose the specific skill to match your preferred type of strategy.

8. Knowledge system - I also like how you improve your abilities. There are 60 levels in the game (so far). Every level you get knowledge points, which in turn they can be invested in different "trees". You can’t max everything out so you need to work with others, or reset your skills from time to time with a potion.

9. Developers are active in the Steam community - they inform what is in the pipeline, reply on any reported bugs - they just listen to the community. Thumbs up.


** MIXED **

1. No proper end game yet, however there’s a lot of caves and mini dungeons scattered around the world, so the sense of the adventure is there, nevertheless what is missing, is a reward that would excite you. I know though that very recently devs announced a content drop that will give us new dungeons with a proper challenge vs reward - looking forward to it!

2. AI of the creatures… It’s rather bad, you can see that they are trying to avoid your projectiles, they are strafing, but at the same time sometimes they can just stuck and becoming sitting ducks.

3. Sound - while music is really great in the game (however we need more tracks), the sound is not great. For instance, I hate very abrupt and non-climatic explosion of fireball (kind of a shot gun sound). Also some of the sounds are too loud or are being triggered at the wrong time. There’s a lot of improvement needed in this area.

4. Optimisation - while not bad anymore, it still needs more work. Especially for bigger buildings / constructions the game can be really sluggish, even on a good PC spec.


** CONS **

1. Learning new spells - I like how currently spells are divided between different types of weapons (with a couple branches independent of the weapon). However, how you acquire them is very… shallow for a "wizard sim" type of game. For me this is the biggest complain.

I would love to see the system where you need to study spells (mini games maybe?), during the study let's say you discovered that there is a way to increase effectiveness of fireball but you need to get a really rare ingredient, or control a specific place of power in the word, etc. As a magic user, a player should feel a sense of progression in his or her arcane study. There are no magic experiments - they could add a bit of flavour to the game - e.g. the more dangerous the experiment is, when failed, would give a player some debuffs for a while, but if done right, would give nice bonuses to study new spells, etc. Obviously spell crafting from Oblivion would be my dream come true :) (but no overpowered combinations, please).

2. PvP needs some kind of ''in-world struggle system'' - maybe capturing the resources or places of power? At the moment the only incentive of PvP is raiding the bases and stealing resources - not very innovative.

3. Still long loading times when you first log into the game.

4. No support for economy between players. Maybe addition of marketplace mechanic, where players could visit a town market to buy missing resources from other players’.

5. Animation system - recently much improved, there’s still a lot of room for improvement - e.g. swimming animation which looks a bit silly at the moment.

6. No story driven content. I personally don’t want traditional quests in the game though… What would be great to have, is some kind of procedural generated events that are happening in the world. What would be even better, if these events would influence the world somehow...

7. Game definitely needs more players, hopefully content-drops at some point will lure some population back.

8. Minor bugs


** CONCLUSION **

Really great game! I have easily already got my money's worth for the price tag. Very immersive game, very believable world, amazing building system, sense of progression (but not fully there yet) and when fully fledged dungeons will be added with an upcoming content drop - it will be a really nicely done game.

On the other hand, if you expect more story driven content - this is not a game for you. You need to organise yourself and decide what to do in this vast and diverse world.

Lets be clear, I HATE that I bought another Early Access Survival game.

-BUT-

After a decent bit of time with the game, I can go over a few things for potential buyers.

Some of the other reviewers have gone over this but I think I should emphasize a few things.

We all know how hesitant people are with Survival early access games. I have been at the forefront of successful survival games like minecraft alpha & Rust Alpha. But I too have been burned by games like Conan Exiles, Dark and Light, and Starforge.

In my experience thus far, I have already felt some of the feelings I had in those successful survival games. The framework we have here is beyond amazing. There are a lot of things to add and finish, but this game is leagues above what I experienced with Dark and Light. (Specifically server structure and management)

I can safetly say while playing in the last few days, its been patched about 3 times and devs are on top of the community. There are nerfs where needed, buffs where needed, and gameplay improvements all in a few days instantly. The same thing Notch did with his game and same as Garry from Rust. I have amazingly high hopes for them.

As for the genre of the game? I'd accurately describe it as a Micro-MMO Base Building Survival. The building system is fantastic, the mmo aspect needs to be fleshed out, and the servers need stabilization. Other than that, $20 was already justified for me.

Thanks for reading.

Definitely not worth it for solo/single player.

The spell variety is pretty limited, there's ~25 direct damage spells in total and about half of them are very minor variations on a theme.

For example, you have:
Arcane Beam - a continuous damage beam
Fire Beam - a continuous damage beam with a minor burn DoT effect.
Ice Beam - a continuous damage beam with a minor slowing effect
Light Beam - a continuous healing beam
Nature Beam - a stronger continuous healing beam with a very short range
Dark Beam - a continuous damage beam that costs HP instead of mana
Storm Beam - a continuous damage beam with minor chaining damage.

That's 1/4 of your combat spells.

There's little in the way of debuffing or synergising between spells, so most combat against the AI boils down to picking your most mana efficient spell/weapon combo and running backwards/in-circles whilst hitting them with the same spell over and over, hoping their HP runs out before your mana does. Even on basic mobs you'll want to focus on mana efficiency because basic mana regeneration is achingly slow and crafting mana potions is just more grind, so if you want to engage in back-to-back fights without waiting you'll want to ration it out carefully.

Enemies are... Average. There's a decent number of -technically- different varieties, although they're mostly pretty one-note, you have the flying ones, the melee ones, the ranged ones, the big slow melee ones and when you really push into the end-game you have the teleporting melee ones, the flying ranged ones, and the melee ones that also sometimes fire a ranged spell. Hit boxes and AI pathing are both clunky as hell too, and almost none of them can deal with a player flying directly above them, the only downside of which is the heavy mana-cost of doing both at once.

The grind as a single player is ungodly, so much so that even after cranking the rate of everything to 500% in server options, I still ended up using console commands to largely skip the mid-game when it became obvious that the progression through the tech tree was simply "More of the same, but bigger numbers"

The building looks pretty enough, but is largely useless to a solo player short of having somewhere to place crafting stations and store your junk. It's also pretty expensive, so of course the default is an ugly cramped box rammed full of crafting stations and a respawn circle.

The 3 end-game dungeons were also not well balanced for solo play either. You will need an immense stock of mana/health potions if you want any hope of depleting the massive health pools in the allotted time before the dungeon kicks you out, and even then expect a boring too-long fight running in circles slugging it out with the final boss at the end.

Exploring was underwhelming, there are a good few "biome" styles around the map, but everything felt a bit lifeless. And the NPCs constantly scattered in random little empty stone huts, asking you to "kill/tame/harvest X of Y for an XP/item reward" being pretty much the only interactive NPCs on the map outside of the tutorial is pretty lackluster.

Ok, so at the 4k mark I guess I can make a constructive thing again, two parts, first what we have and second, what we could have.

So here's the short and sweet on why I don't recommend the game: how they advertise vs actual product that's the issue. With that out of the way here goes what we have:

A grind fest, with infinite resources. Sounds a bit contradictory doesn't it? Well if you're the most powerful clan on a server you will have infinite resources as long as you bother picking it up, that's upsetting the balance quite a bit in general since unless you have the 24h-no life attitude you will not in anyway manage to compete or even just survive. They will have the gear, the resources and all the tasty goodies to smack you at any time and you can suck it up, or quit. Which mean people quit. The best way to fix this would obviously be to make the world bigger so people could migrate away and come back, instead of migrating to new games.
This might sound like I'm salty that it happened to me, but no, I'm in the other end doing it to people so I see what it's doing to the game.

Any base you build can be melted into nothing within 20 min if you're not there to defend. Spent a week honey combing the ♥♥♥♥ out of it? Pointless. Hundreds of reformation stones? Wasted, they won't keep up. Shields and turrets? The shields will block your turrets firing, you turrets will stop shooting for minutes on end for no reason giving raiders ample time to breach.
Having sieged hundreds of bases there are no up and coming players that can in any way keep up. And you can't hide, we know every single bump, hole and canyon on the map. We know where you are, or we will find you within tops 45 min.

Taming is pointless, if you're on a PvP server your pet will be dead before you can even open the menu to attempt to save it. No joke, with 10-13k crits and 1.3 sec cooldown with a good cycle you can kill a lv 100 Infernal Dragon with the best buffs and gear in 3.7 sec. To make matters worse, their combat AI is so bad it's a pain to watch. The black/northern dragons can't fight at all in the air.

So what about the PvP? Boring as ass. Might be fun for some people but when it all come down to "I crit first and can pump the most potions" then it's 100% boring. If you want to win a PvP fight you have to go for dmg spec or your damage will be outhealed by the other chugging potions, and then we come back to "who crit first". I do my best to always avoid PvP because of how predicable it is, there's at no point you run into someone who has a different take on how to PvP, there are dmg specers with the identical high end armour and then there are dead people. Tic-tac-toe have more tactical depth.

So let's do quests then, let's have an adventure in this world... Hahaha... Good one. To be honest, despite having done the questline several times (yes, I hate myself and all my freetime) I have no clue what it's about. Strange too since I've read every single book in Skyrim, and even know a lot of them by heart, so why not here? Is it a boring story?

Eh... Honestly I have no clue. Really. I don't know a single thing about the story here. Because while the quest giver prepares to roll out his parchment, clear his throat, correct his sleeves, find a good spot on his chair, smooth the table cloth, light the candle, brush the hair out of his eyes, pat all over the robe to find his glasses, polish them, and delicately place them next to his feather pen, I've already picked up his to-do list and left the senile idiot to his fate. Or to be frank, the text crawl is so slow I get bored of reading every single word five times before the next one has appeared. There's NO way to speed this up!

So that's what we have. Of course since I'm still here I'm somewhat breaking expectations with how everything is run, but it's because I have more patience than the PvPers have destruction potions.

So for the second part, what could we have with very little work?
Hunts: Rare monster spawn randomly attempting to leave the map, giving special loot for special trophies, or as cool mounts.

Customizable pets: Feed X before it levels up to boost a specific stat.
Combat pets: Give ->USEFUL<- armour, 600 is utterly pointless when your enemy has a DPS of 20k.
Swarm pets: Return a controlled duplication of low tier creatures.

Deep history: Add hidden/flavour texts out in the world around ruins and in caves. Bonus point if you make some of it in an ingame language that can be translated.

Customizable gear: Just make the top tier armours and effects costumizable already. Take armour 1 and armour X and get access to the effects and looks of other things and make the gear look the way you want it to look. Or just transfer the stats from one to the other.

Debuff spells: (Curses)
Beam: Flight removal. (Umbrus debuff).
AoE Focus: (Large Sanctuary spellike dome) Poison Potion, The effect of a potion is draining what it's supposed to replenish.
Blast: Crush armour, Damage Durability by 10-20% per hit.
Projectile: Enfeeble, Damage debuff.
Self: Mana plague, if killed you inflict damage equal to 1/4 of your total mana to the attacker.
Utility: Forced dominion, place a beacon that temporarily prevents enemies from building, similar to a house control area.

If they add these things, I will consider changing the review to positive.

Was a fantastic game I would have recommended to everyone. But it turns out they don't like people to raid or have fun in the game so they made that mechanic expensive to persuade from raiding everything. Otherwise known as large tribes will wipe the map and small tribes will have no hope of ever raiding. What a great mechanic that nobody thought about at all.


*EDIT*11:57am 8/16/2017

After posting this review on the patch page I was provided with this message

Ban notification from a Citadel: Forged With Fire developer — Just now
You have been banned from Citadel: Forged With Fire Discussions
You have been banned from Citadel: Forged With Fire Discussions by a Citadel: Forged With Fire developer for your post in "Citadel: Forged With Fire General Discussions":
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Ban Reason:
Spamming

Please review the Discussions Rules and Guidelines.

This ban will expire on Sep 15 @ 11:56am. Until then, you will not be able to post in Citadel: Forged With Fire Discussions.

You are not allowed to post a message under patch notes or they will consider it spam worthy since it tells people the truth. Just gave me the final checkbox I needed to uninstall.

*Edit* 11/3/2017 as expected the game is dead from all the steam reviews. Shame it never got to see the glory it could have become.

Immerse yourself in a world of magic and adventure with multiple sets of spells and equipment at your disposal. You can build massive beautiful structures, tame great beasts, and craft amazing quality equipment.

Sounds great, right?

Only it's not. I spent days crafting, taming, and building my way through this game. All to realize that this has the laziest programming I have ever encountered in a sandbox MMO. Unlike most games, building doesn't prevent things from spawning. In my case, they often spawned under my floors or on top of my building and did massive structure damage despite having no aggro. The crafting system is 100% RNG based and there's no way to guarantee good outcomes. The NPCs do not aggro on anything except for players. To the extent that they will literally fly from out of render distance to you to attack you rather than attacking your pet.

I give this game a solid 3 out of 10. Save your money if you're thinking about wasting it on this. I'm sure it'll end up on humble bundle eventually since nobody else in their right mind would pay for it.

-edit-
In regards to the "misinformation" that the developer accuses me of spreading, perhaps you should fix your game rather than trying to slander people who review it. Several times creatures spawned on top of my tower and then began blowing it up to try to attack me in a complete different part of my castle.

Creatures will NEVER attack your pet over you. I tested this time and time again. I could tell my pet to attack things and literally just stand there watching and the majority of enemies would go after me rather than my pets.

The magic find stat does not guarantee good outcomes from crafting. In fact, as far as I've been able to see it has literally no impact on crafting at all.

Perhaps rather than trying to slander people that review your product, you should put more time and effort into making it function as you intend rather than saying that I'm spreading "misinformation" because of the experiences I had with your poorly put together game.

tldr; The game has it very obvious optimization issues but it's overall content in terms of gameplay, world building/discovery, character progression and etc. make it somewhat justifiable for the low price of 20$. This game is fun playing with your friends. Avoid playing in your own private servers for now as it turns out that hosting and running the client by using the "Custom Game" option is proven to DOUBLE the amount of resources the game uses on your pc SIGNIFICANTLY reducing FPS.

If you play on any official/rented servers, or simply anything that isn't your own personally hosted server, you should be fine.

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EDIT #2: So turns out if you look in the discussions for this game you'll find a guide on how to set up a dedicated server. In my opinion so far this is the best method in terms of hosting if you can't afford/choose not to use a rented server. It's still pretty resource heavy but atleast the hosting isn't killing my fps anymore. Results may vary so take it as you will.


EDIT: Some people seem to be under the impression that I'm misinforming people? I have clearly stated numerous times that optimization is a big issue and if you're concerned you should definately wait. But my review isn't a copy and paste of the countless boring ones complaining about the same optimization complaints over and over again.


WITH THAT BEING SAID, C L E A R L Y (notice the capslock so you can make sure to not overlook the millions of times I have to repeat this) the optimization is P O O R. I personally recommend WAITING if you're concerned about optimization.

To not expect there to be some form of unstability on the LAUNCH of an EARLY ACCESS SURVIVAL GAME is a bit ignorant don't you think?

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This is an EARLY ACCESS game, if it wasn't blatantly obvious it's going to have bugs then you clearly need to do some research on what that term even means. I'm not trying to justify the bugs or poor optimization in anyway. I don't condone that crap but for a game STILL IN DEVELOPMENT, I'll let this one pass considering it has actual content for once.

So far in terms of content, I could say this game has more than the hundreds of dead survival open world EA games that have been in development and never left beta for 3+ years.

Is this the best game in the world? Hell no. Is it a good game? Sure. In the numerous hours I've played I've had tons of fun. Obviously my only complaints would be the optimization but that's an issue currently being worked on and will probably be fixed over time.

So what is it that I actually like about this game? The world is beautiful and vast. There are a variety of things you can do and different playstyles to suit your needs. It's clearly got that ARK: survival evolved formula in terms of the progression grinding but it had it's own spin on it with magic. The spells, weapons and armor you can craft feel more powerful the more you level up/craft better gear. The enemies always feel like they'll give you a challenge once you hit higher tier enemies (30+, 40+ 50+)

It feels awesome to take down a massine mountain giant with a group of friends even though you're overwhelmingly under leveled and one or two hits would prob destroy you. It feels awesome to build up a nice fortress and even go on clan/guild/faction wars with other players.

Hunting down that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ player who killed you and stole your ♥♥♥♥ after grinding your ass off and getting yourself better skills/weapons/armor? Feels good man.

It feels good when you can tame ANY ENEMY in the game and even strap a saddle onto a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DRAGON and fly his ass where ever you want. The absolute adrenaline you feel trying to escape as you accidentally find yourself in the middle of a lvl 55+ dungeon when you're only lvl 25. Coming back to challange towering demons in an attempt to find awesome loot.

The sense of discovery is strong in this game. I spend plenty of time just wandering around, getting lost and discovering new enemy camps, caves and so on. Time and time again I found myself saying "What the ♥♥♥♥ is that?" when an enemy i have never seen or fought before lunges an over powered attack at me. My fight or flight instincts battling each other while i hesitate only to get one shot and respawn several kilometers away.

I've raged, I've screamed, I've laughed, and fist pumped in glorious accomplishment as I took down my first Pyrant. This is the kind of game that is amazing with friends but isn't that bad alone either. The content is there people. You just have to actually play the damn game to get there. Stop quitting on a game after 30 minutes and crying that it didn't hold your hand.

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In terms of reviews I don't do rating systems since I think they're stupid. However, I do think this game is worth 20$. It's a decent price for the kind of content it currently has. If you're so worried about the optimization then wait a while.

For once I'm confident this game won't turn out as bad as the numerous other trash survival EA games that plague steam.

I don't usually write reviews for games, But it's sad to see people get deterred from something that's actually pretty decent for once.


I hope this review has somehow helped you in some form and if you decide to actually get the game, I wish you a good experience.

I was waiting to try out the new updated version of the game before posting my review. I've played the old and the new now. Soooo... here's my thoughts:

I can't in the current state really recommend the game. It was a little grindy before with some interesting if a little bit meh combat. The one major boon to the game was being able to make fantastic structures.

Now it's become a lot more grindy, the combat feels the same but with some minor added complications (which I'll get to), and the one major boon? The prices on construction have been multiplied which only adds to the grind.

I do like the idea of going out and getting materials to get new spells on weapons. But there are only so many charges before you're needing you put that spell back onto you weapon. Which means you will need to remember the spell recipy. It isn't that big of a deal, but it's just one more extra pain to what is an already painful process.

And this is ultimately why it is I can't recommend this game at this time. Games should not be a pain. They should be an enjoyable experience. Or in someways, as this was to many, an experience in virtual artestery expressionism.

I do want to see this game take off and do well. It has a great deal of promise. It really does. This update though feels like a step backwards and sideways.

They did add a lot of new shiney spells an effect. However, those new shiney spells and effects take extra steps to attain. They added new building charicteristics. Buuuut they also, for reasons that escape me, made it more expensive to make things?

For every step forward they took a step backwards.

To the devs this is what I recommend doing:

1. Make a quick patch to decrease the building costs in construction so it's at least set back to where it once was. I'm not that into building myself right at the moment (I knew the patch was coming and didn't want to jump into that knowing what I'd be making would be undone) but for those that are this is a MUST to keep them on in the player base. They have to remake their art, and at the moment with extra costs? That is like saying to you to remake your game not in Unreal but instead in Unity.

2. Make it so after the charges on the spells are lost, the spells stay on minus the bonuses. This should make the happy medium for those looking to get that added boost and those who just want the spell. Although if you really want to go that extra mile this is what I would REALLY do instead. Make it so you can add the ingredients with a special pedistal, maybe multiply the cost, so you can add a perminate spell effect to a weapon. Making the spell fixed and unchangeable for that weapon as well. Some people might complain about balancing later on, but at this stage of the game I don't think balancing should even be in the top ten of concerns (pvp wise that is. Pve.... there's some concernes there. Major ones).

3. Really think about at least adding one more spell slot per weapon. 2 per weapon is limiting. And when I think about a game that should have wizards flying around throwing castles with waves of their hands (which was what drew me to this game by the way) limiting should NOT be part of the vocabulary when describing the game or it's mechanics. Don't limit your players. Expand instead on what they can do.

Personally I think the idea of connecting spells to weapons at all limits the potential of the game. Why put yourselves and your players into that box when you don't need to? Having to apply spells to weapons instead of having a hotkey to bring up the spell just adds unnescary painful steps. When I was playing this part of me was thinking I might as well be playing Skyrim with flying mods.

4. Expand on your world. Make a story. Right now when a person enters in they are molded out from fire which is an epic enterance. And then.... they aren't given anything else other then that. Would be nice to see non-wizardy folk at work in magic guarded towns. That right there could give some reason right there alone. The reason why we were created? To fight the fight that the mortal nonwizardy folk can't. To collect food. To build defences. To help them expand against the forces of.... Bob the Destroyer or something. Even if it's just in dialog and there's a 'portal' or gate that the players can't go through that the 'people you are protecting and fighting for' are waiting in, that least is something.

5. Remove item durability, make it so players are able to deconstruct things from thier inventory, and/or make it so players can delete items that they have in thier inventory. All the broken and items and clutter from gathering materials before getting the draw essence spell is just ugly.

I apologize if this has been long winded. If you've made it this far then props to you. And to the devs and other players or would be players I want to make this clear here before I go:

I WANT to like this game. I see the potential here. Wizards with flying castles carving the land as they see fit. Some good, some bad, and other in the middle. Armies of undead made by some wizards fighting it out with sword wielding mage nights leading dragons or bears or whatever. I'd love to see wizards inthralling others to work for them via mind control or getting npcs to join their cause against that rascal Bob the Destroyer and his armies of zombie rabbits.

This... is not that game.

Not yet.

Keep an eye on it.

A very interesting open-world RPG. The start of the game is VERY crafting-heavy. Not much story yet. Your job is to get to level 25 (about five hours) to unlock all the good weapons to begin. But of course, you get to LVL25 by picking things off the ground (rocks, wood, gems, more wood) and killing boars (which fall to the ground at which point you'll need to pick them up too). You then use all that crap to forge interesting items that keep you from dying.

At 25, you can start taking on legit enemies and enjoying the larger world outside of the three immediate spawn zones. I highly recommend building your base somewhere near one of the fast travel portals as your direct-to-base portal comes much later. Also, hold onto everything you can and max your carry items skill until you get to 140 lbs. Then rush the box-o-stuff so you can store TONS of rocks and wood.

[Must Have Magic Spells]
- wand + base essence + beam = walk backwards while bear chases you constantly doing damage until it dies.
- wand + light essence + utility = tame injured animals (mounts)
- axe + nature essence + beam = allows you to farm resource nodes magically preventing axe damage (a HUGE benefit)

[Fast Leveling Tips]
- First, run to the red portal in your starting location and unlock it.
- Next, run to the nearest tower avoiding every single creature and unlock the red portal there.
- Remember this tower, as this is where you should build your first base (no building allowed at starting points).
- Visit all three starting locations and collect the gems, rocks, and wood at each to RAPIDLY shoot up to 12; also, you can do the same tutorial quests three times at each location.
- Head to acid and mana pools and axe the crap out of the glowing orbs you see there for the essence they hold.
- Attach nature essence (from acid pools) to axe so you don't need to build/repair so often.

[Build Tips]
- Skip jewelry and armor
- Rush wand to 3 and axe to 2 to unlock the first two craftable uniques
- Unlock workbench and other base construction stuff
- Avoid the pretty stuff like flags and furniture until you are established

The key to understand here is that a) this review occurred during early access, and b) the game gets MUCH better after you are no longer glorified bear food (LVL 25).

[Things I'm Hoping to See in the Future]
- more creativity in crafting; let me add resources during forge/workbench to make truly unique weapons
- an explanation that lets me know if adding resources to a magic recipe will actually do something
- a change to the "level" reading on enemies, as a "lvl 8" enemy will own your ass when you are level 17
- a really, really, really obvious glowing beam of light indicating where your loot fell when you died (especially if you died while swimming away from a bear)
- when I tame one of the flying falcons/hawks, don't leave him hanging up in the air where I can't interact with him
- let me outrun a bear if I use magic speed (wand + standard essence + self)
- less resource requirements for a farm, no sprinkler, and instead a 24hrX4 grow cycle
- building a bridge or base should require wood support posts (pylons) on all floor panels, not just the first couple.
- snap the support posts to a grid (right now, they are free-floating which is a pain)