Just finished my playthrough of Alaloth. Took me about 24 hours since my total playtime includes 10 hours of starting/restarting a few times previously due to frustration with the beginning of the game.

I finally decided to power through and see if I could get past the initial humps and start to understand and enjoy the game's systems. I play a lot of difficult games, so it wasn't the difficulty that had me stuck in the beginning. Rather it was some of the design decisions that make the game unique that frustrated me initially (such as only being able to level in fighting areas among other things). Once I figured these things out and how it all worked together, I started to make good progress.

This is one of those reviews where I wish there was a "neutral" or "mixed" option, but since there isn't I won't be using this review to trash the devs, their design decisions, or the game itself. These devs have been through enough already, and I can't see myself leaving a negative review for a game I got 24 hours of playtime out of for a decent price and one that has such a passionate dev team behind it that truly cares about their game. We need more dev teams like this in the world.

I know there is a lot more content than the 24 hours worth I experienced, but I didn't really have a desire to explore more of it. This was due to the lore/writing, quest structure, and core gameplay loop just not grabbing me and pulling me in like I thought they would. The combat was very cool and unique for an isometric RPG, but I also felt limited once I reached level 20 and couldn't keep expanding on the build I had created. Instead I would have had to just respec to try out out a new build instead of continuing to build on top of the foundation I already established in those twenty levels.

I don't think I'll personally be buying any of the future DLCs or coming back for the 1.0 release (even though it is imminent), unless there are significant changes to the current systems and gameplay loop which I don't expect there to be since it would deviate from the dev's vision of the game. I totally respect them going with their vision and not deviating from it completely while still listening to player feedback and trying to be accommodating where they can be without compromising their core vision.

I do believe there is a market for this game and many players out there who will fall in love with it if they give it a shot. I also think it is fairly priced for the amount of content that is there. I just didn't enjoy it enough to experience it all, but I am glad I was able to "complete" the main objective of the game, and I wish these devs all the best as they continue with this passion project.

This a fun and possibly misunderstood game. Here's the thing.

THIS IS NOT A DIABLO-LIKE GAME.
NOR IS IT A SOULS-LIKE GAME.

You'll be tempted to immediately run to the first "dungeon" known as a Fighting Arena like Ravens Hideout, which is where I think most people are dropping off the game. DON'T.

You need to pick up the bounties from the board in the main city, go to the world map, and fight the various mobs floating around the map. That gets you some money. Replace your starting weapon, offhand and armor. Either with the drops from the world mobs or buying/crafting it from the Blacksmith.

You need to gear up before you go in the Fighting Arenas, as clearing one is how you gain a Skill Point. If you die in one, you resurrect at a shrine with some durability loss and you lose everything you gained in the FA. There's no picking up your soul to get it back. You just have to attempt it again.

The combat system rewards controlled aggression. You can regain lost health by immediately attacking who hurt you. And since there's no natural regen and a limited number of health potions you can use, getting back lost health is important to making it through a Fighting Arena.

So it's important to pick when you attack but go full combo wombo on them when you connect. A bit like an isometric Sekiro. Once you figure out the rhythm, you can beat any enemy in the game, You just have to make it through the first hour where it's tempting to think you must do the first main quest immediately.

I played and enjoyed this game immensely! Great and varied combat. Sprawling beautiful open world map that you can explore however you want and at your own pace. I love that the map is tabletop-like and real time. There is deep lore if that is your thing (it is not mine) and no neg consequences for skipping through that lore and focusing on questing and exploring. The graphics are beautiful. The music is solid. It is very well made and original in my opinion, and I did not encounter a single bug. I honestly think some (not all) of the neg reviewers kind of missed the point of this game. I do have issues with Alaloth but I feel moved to briefly address some of the things some people have objected to because I think this is a fun game and I want small original teams like this to get a fair shake. Here are some of the common issues I have read and my quick responses. You will obviously make up your own minds:

1) Different Game Modes: I see a lot of objections about arbitrary time limits and pacing issues. I think some of this is due to misunderstandings about the different modes you can play the game in, and to be fair, Alaloth is not very clear on what these modes actually entail. If you just want to play the game the way (I believe) it was intended to be played, then do yourself a HUGE favor and play the SINGLE player campaign (can't remember what it was called exactly) NOT the mode where you are competing against AI champions. From what I understand of the games mechanics I believe this the actual way the game was likely designed to be played, but the developer can feel free to correct me if I am wrong. As I understand it, the competitive mode will put you on a timer where you have to complete the game before the AI or the AI will eventually beat the final boss instead of you and you will subsequently lose. This discourages exploration and questing as those take up valuable time and may cost you the game. I think this understandably frustrated a number of people as they were just off questing and exploring (two of the games biggest selling points) and then suddenly lost. It could also have just been avoided by playing single player mode. I'm not sure why the competitive mode is in there tbh. Maybe just to have a quicker, more intensive mode meant to drum up urgency and tension. The single player campaign does not, to my knowledge, have any timers and you are free to follow or ignore the main plot. This encouraging exploration and experimentation with different builds and is the main reason I enjoyed Alaloth.

2) Difficulty: It is a hard game early on when you don't know the skills and have very few abilities. I think people expect that they can just grind a few random encounters and quickly level up to be powerful enough to go anywhere, as is the case with virtually every other game. This game does this differently and I think rather than give it a chance, some players just got irritated. You can only level up by completing a dungeon. That's any location with a skull on it. The more skulls or the larger the skull the harder the dungeon. Obviously only try single (small) skull dungeons early on. Every dungeon is different. If you die a couple times on a single skull dungeon go try a different one. It may work better with your character build. You only need to complete a dungeon once to level up. Aloloth does not tell you this info and does not hold your hand. I like this but many do not. I would encourage people to explore this as a dangerous world where you have to gain experience handling low lv dungeons before you can survive elsewhere. The thing is, its only a brief initial difficulty spike for the first 5-10 levels or so depending on your skill level. I found the game to be exceptionally easy from lv 5 on. In fact this is my major gripe with Alaloth. My mage character melted enemies before they can even reach me. Many time when they are too far away to even aggro me. After having such an initial difficulty I was expecting that balance to persist. But I digress. Be a little patient with the difficulty. It will get easier.

3) Preconceptions: I think Alaloth does not fit the preconceived expectations of players who wanted it to be a clone of past games they may have enjoyed. This game has an original idea for leveling, for isometric combat, and for its approach to open world. I think it has significant balancing issues once you level up a few times but its a beautiful, large, interesting world. There will be tons of quests. Some may be interesting. Some you may not care about. Don't do them if you don't want to. The rewards are shown beforehand so if you don't care about that item or are not invested in that character there is no penalty for dismissing the quest.

Anyway, there was A LOT of love poured into this game. It is evident in every hand crafted location and game mechanic. If you end up giving Alaloth a chance, I encourage you to take a little time to experiment with it's original approach to open world exploration and isometric top down combat.

Man, I originally sat down to write just a couple of sentences...

This game has potential, but some design choices are just beyond me. For all the positive aspects of the game please read other reviews. I couldnt find a suggestion box on their advertised discord channel but I feel the strong desire to vent and blow of some steam as I had such high hopes of this game.

First of, this was my typical gameplay loop for the first few hours:
- You accept dozens of random quests with no real substance or follow-ups (mainly fetch x, kill y).
- There is the bare minimum of description on what you are supposed to do or where you are supposed to go.
(e.g. there is a quest that has you collect tools, but you are given zero information on where to find them)
- You enter the world map zone
- The map is filled so monotonously with evenly spaced hubs and dungeons that you get lost within seconds
- Completing quests without tracking them is hopeless as you have no idea on where to go
- You can only track one quest at a time
- You track a quest and pray a quest marker appears somewhere on the map.
- You complete your quest, and scan the map for the zone on where to turn it in
- You enter the zone at the wrong time of day and have to reload the area
- Rinse and repeat

Combat itself is fine.
As others have said if you approach it from a souls-like perspective you wont have much problems.
Balancing however is all over the place. Weapon swing animations are merely a suggestion on when and where to dodge/parry, as hitboxes far extend character models in most cases. Also bosses dont care about stamina managment and play by different rules and some can and will stunlock you into oblivion. Your only hope was to be randomly teleported somewhere on the map (as would happen to me multiple times per dungeon) but apparently that has been fixed.

Also some spells and abilities are clearly stronger than others. For example, most healing spells are limited to x amount of uses within a single dungeon. The lifesteal buff however is not. And with that and a bloodstone crafted weapon (5% inherent lifesteal) you can facetank pretty much any enemy in the game.

The thing that really depleted my sanity however (apart from the 10s loop of music what will be etched into your brain for all eternity) was the durability system..
Durability as a mechanic serves no purpose except to punish players. Lots of weapons and armor pieces have as little as 3 or 4 durability, meaning after that many fights your gear will be broken and you have to repair it at a blacksmith.
It is dirt cheap to repair your gear, however waddling over to your nearest hub every couple minutes becomes stale very quickly.

Character progression is also pretty limited. Most perks are somewhat boring with minor percentage boni to resistances, health or damage. From my experience gear slots all share basically the same stats. All armor pieces will have the same different types of resistances, item rarities are mostly determined by their respective values.

All in all it might seem like a pretty one sided review however to be fair, I did have some fun with it. I'm personally just not a fan of cookie cutter games that operate within very rigid gameplay loops with almost zero variation.
If the souls-like combat would be changed to a dice based system this could 100% be a board game.

The good and great things about this game:

- Design: Great looking maps inducing Old School RPG Nostalgia. The Map designers did a fantastic job overall with day and night versions of every town and city. Kingdoms and towns have distinct architecture. It gives a lot of LotR vibes in all the good ways.
- Map: A really big map with 4 distinct kingdoms (elves, humans, dwarves, orcs). There are a lot (a lot!) of locations (towns, cities, caves, dungeons, forest clearings, historical sites,...) to see and all the locations look great. There's enough content for more than one playthrough.
- Music: Major towns have different sound tracks and they're AAA-Level quality. Orchestra-heavy music that sounds just like Baldurs Gate 2 and the like: Drumps and trumpets in the orcish territory, lighter flute and string music in elven territory - the music really captures the distinct kingdoms well. Any game can learn from the musical quality in Alaloth.
- Character Creation: Race and alignment have some consequences for your playthrough.
- Item variety: There is a lot of item variety that promotos more than one playthrough: 5 types of armor (robes, light, medium, heavy, tank), a lot of different weapon types, magic, unique items for quest rewards, mounts, unique mounts etc.: This game has some chunky depth when it comes to item variety and map size, so it rewards exploring and questing in that regard.
- Fighting system: If you prefer action fighting systems instead of turn-based ones, Alaloth went and tried to implement a real-time fighting system with some success. The variety in equipment and skills allow for room for experimentation as well.

Now for the neutral thing you should know about:
- Level maximum: You can gain a maximum of 20 levels which you will get once you've visited maybe a third of the world's locations (or less). There is no purpose in visiting everything in one playthrough. This promotes going for more than one playthrough but people who want to do everything with one character will find out that it just doesn't make sense at some point. It's a design decision. It's very different from other games in this way.

Now for the bad things:
- The big TradeOff: The big map and many locations come at a price: There are lot of npc's but they're not voiced. It's a lot of text and the staging of the story is not very elaborate. Mostly, NPCs just stand around and do nothing. The npcs feel sterile, just standing around. Animated cutscenes are rather rare.
- Story: The story if very straight-forward: Collect four thingies, defeat the big bad. There are sub-stories for quests regarding factions and kingdoms, but they're only told in NPC dialogues. This game is a big example why "show-don't tell" is important. In Alaloth, it's all "tell,tell,tell". It's not an engaging way or exploring the world and story even at the best of times.
- Quests: Everything is just fetch quests. Deliver letters, defeat 50 goblins, defeat x skeletons, find a lantern etc. And since they're all told in unvoiced npc text dialogues, the quests feel absolutely mind-numbing to get into and go through. They're mostly just uninteresting save for some rare exceptions.
- Writing: You get hammered and clubbered with fantasy-lingo. Names of gods, npcs you never met (who all have similar names) etc. - the writing is easily losing you because the dialogue explains no context but throws fantasy words at you constantly while expecting that you are fully versed in all names and terms of this fantasy setting. Combine that with the lackluster presentation and it's just very hard to get into the story of the game.
- Leveling: You only level by doing the big dungeons ("Fighting arenas") and only for doing them the first time. You can repeat dungeons for item drops though. When you level up, you either get to put a point into stats, proficiencies (for armor and weapons mostly), and/or skills. The issue: Most of the skills and proficiencies are useless or uninteresting. E.g. you can't directly level up fire magic damage, only fire resistance. There are almost no proficiencies that make sense for mages or archers. Leveling if there is nothing useful for you to look forward to level up in is a bad experience.
- Many Skills are badly designed. There is a hard limit on summons and healings you are allowed to cast. you only get six abilities to cast/use in the entire game at max level - and then you have a lot of skills with limited uses only (heals 4x use, summons 3x use,..). That seems like a poor design choice.
- Enemy design: If you go ranged (mage/archer), all enemy encounters become trivial. Zero difficulty. Melee characters may experience a whole different difficulty with spongy enemies and bosses. Many players also noted that the final boss is ramped up in difficulty 10x to previous bosses and encounters - the final boss follows the idea of "just slap on 10k HP and make the boss instant teleport everywhere with stun-attacks and we're good to go!". That's a let down.
- Quest rewards: you can get unique weapons and armos as quest rewards: Chances are though, that it's not the equipment you skilled for. I reached max level without finding or getting a unique weapon/armor for the type my two different characters were skilling in. No reward choices
- Crafting: Crafting is meh. You can't craft some equipment at all and i found only one weapon in 20 hours where you can put a gem in (despite you finding gems a lot). Crafting doesn't make sense in that way.
- Pathing: You can do 1-2 dungeons and then you're inventory is full (due to item weight). Finding the relevant vendors and stashing the crafting loot you want to keep takes more than than doing the actual dungeon. The pathways to vendors and your stash are too long. And if you have to go to vendors and your stash so frequently, this will absolutely kill your fun. Imagine having to go to three different vendors + your stash every other dungeon which takes up as much time as the dungeon itself. It's so tedious.

There are some really good things about this game, but overall, the gameplay loop is so dissatisfying: The limited leveling, the choice between so many bad skills and proficiency options that you don't wanna put your level points into anything at all, tedious pathing to sell items that you have to slog through constantly, the disengaged story-telling and boring quests, the weird to badly balanced fighting system.. man, a beautiful visual and acustic presentation are hiding a gameplay that quickly ceases to be fun. I wonder if the developers will be able to finetune the gameplay to a point where it's fun, but after a long time in Early access, i don't expect any more great changes.

In short, the game is fantastic. It looks and sounds great, the world map is huge, the combat is amazing. But first, here are a few things I think every PC user should know before buying:

-This is not Diablo, nor Path of Exile, nor Pillars of Eternity. It is isometric Dark Souls in which player’s own skill is way more important than having good gear or being high enough level. The leveling system is very similar to Sekiro, meaning that instead of grinding for EXP, you have to clear a single dungeon in order to get a single ‘level up’ point.

-The game has full keyboard & mouse support, so you can rebind keys to your liking. And you can also play it with a controller.

-There are no headache inducing visual effects such as motion blur, depth-of-field and chromatic aberration. A subtle chromatic aberration gets applied only when your stamina goes below 15% or so, but the effect acts only as a warning and it goes away as soon as your stamina bar starts regenerating.

-There is a slow motion effect that happens on successful dodges (AC Odyssey style), which can be enabled/disabled in the options menu.

-The game is super stable. In over 40 hours, I haven’t experienced a single crash, nor a game breaking bug.


GAMEPLAY
Alaloth is inspired by the 90s classic called Moonstone, a very challenging and brutal game. You could say that Moonstone was the Dark Souls of those days. And Alaloth is no different. By design, Alaloth has two main modes to choose from. In the first mode, you play against other 3 champions (AI-controlled) who all compete against you and against each other, and it is a race against time. In the other mode, you play all by yourself, and then the game becomes less of a race and is more like a traditional RPG where you have enough time for questing and exploration.

But keep in mind that passage of time, as well as day/night cycle, is still a factor in this game. Some quests can still expire, certain things will happen only during day or during night, and there are dynamic events and other things that can make each run a bit different.


COMBAT
Mechanically, it is an isometric game with combat system inspired by games such as Dark Souls, Sekiro and the more recent Assassin’s Creed titles such as AC Odyssey. So think dodging, parrying, poise breaking, kicking; it is all there, and it works really well. You can freely lock-on and lock-off, just like in Dark Souls. Or you could keep the mouse pointer hovering over the enemy that you plan on attacking or parrying, similar to something like Project Zomboid. The hit boxes are well made, the combat has a rhythm to it and it is very satisfying. Once you master it, you will be able to do hitless runs in this game, which is a testament to a good combat system.

The only slight issue with the combat is that most enemies have a lot of poise (stagger resistance). Meaning, that once you have attacked them, they would not stagger back, but will instead attack you immediately. And you would have to either block/parry/dodge your way out of it, and then attack back. So currently, it feels less like Dark Souls and more like Code Vein or Thymesia. However, devs are constantly rebalancing the game, and it is quite possible that they will rebalance the poise values as well, and make the combat feel even more intuitive.


Which brings me to the final point of this review and that is that the dev team behind this game is quite awesome. They listen to their community, and the game is getting constant and meaningful updates. So I would encourage everyone to leave their feedback here, and then join their Discord, in case you want to help them improve the game even further.

Replayed and updated review 08/09/2024

Description is still incorrect.
(Updated)
I do not think I've come across more tedious, annoying, and frustrating bosses in a game before. Let me elaborate: There is a necromancer boss for the end(?) of the human dungeons. Her "combat" is throw magic bolts at you until you get close and hit her, she then teleports away and you have to repeat this, over and over until phase 2... where she puts a shield on herself and summons undead which you have to clear out. She then goes back to bolts and teleports... I despise this boss and the others arent much better.
Enemies seem to have faster attacks, more range and dont stagger till you break their bar, seems hardly fair compared to your character and makes it feel extra tedious fighting them.

Now to the stats on level up. Attributes mean nothing, I beat the game without putting in a single point into any. The bonuses are so insignificant. Constitution gives 60hp even though you start with around 1500. Strength gives 3% damage per point. All attributes only have a max of 5 points, the rest are worse than this.
Traits are okay in stats but are really boring. x cooldown -15%, x stat +25, etc.
Abilities range from absolutely worthless to "why would you not pick this". I don't understand how your balance is so out of whack.
(Updated) The healing moves have 2-3 uses per dungeon and lifesteal has 4 (was infinite) 'The Way of Arms' trees 12 abilities were pretty useless. 'Way of Nature' had very few that I considered okay and 'Way of Gods' had necromancy, which was the only tree I kept using after testing the others. All the abilities are pretty boring. There isn't any synergy with abilities or combos, no freeze and shatter, or blast, they are just base abilities.

Now onto armour and weapons(crafting): (Updated)
Why is crafting in the game... it seems like it was added for the sake of it, not as an actual feature to explore.
To make anything you need ingots, 2 of the lowest rank ingots you can buy anywhere and some towns will have a higher rank ingot. there is no use getting these ingots since they change the stats by around 1% but in some cases the recipes have been updated to require gems, you can only buy the lesser variant of these so you have to find them buy they dont add anything to the armour... why?
The stats for crafted gear seems to be the lowest you can find, i struggled to make anything that was half decent to random gear or quest rewards, and still costs the same amount of gold as buying would.
There is also crafting ranks for gear that update with your fame, with no way to upgrade if you get a low tier and it is completely chance based whether you get a common or epic (I don't think you can craft legendary, I never got it), which again doesn't mean anything since higher tiers don't give any stats and only add these gem sockets which I never saw the need of using. Add 20% chance of burning/poison/frost/whatever else onto your weapon that doesn't really do much. Poison does 3 damage per tick... 3 out of the thousands of points of health they have. Fire does 10, frost slows them except it doesn't slow all actions.
The ones on armour are add 10% resistance to one of the six elements which I didn't see enemies use much. Basically only physical defence is worth anything so these gems are worthless.
In short crafting is more useless than before

Its narrative is in the from of codex entries all over the map that aren't interesting to find since you either run into it in the world (fight sand troll to get sand troll codex, same with locations) and/or talk to the person with the codex symbol above their heads, which makes it seem they did a lot of world building but had no idea how to add it to the game. An example is in a dungeon in the orc kingdom you run across a bridge with a greenish water below. Your character states "That's the maw. I wouldn't want to fall in there since it's not made for swimming," ...what is this, why would I say this, did you get an AI to write this.....?

Since this is long and I don't want to spend any more time near this game that I spent around $40 aud on (and I'm still salty about that), when you say "Inspired by great classics and modern masterpieces" ...maybe learn why they are masterpieces and why they are well liked, not have a wide as the ocean, as deep as the splash of water on my kitchen sink game.

Edit
Since the Devs boiled my review down to "numbers" I decided to add a little to my review.

I asked about the first statement in the description for your own game: "Baldur's Gate and Dark Souls had a baby!"
You make this sound as if these 2 games make up most of the DNA that makes this game... So I ask what of these games go into this to make this statement of yours accurate?
Maybe use "Inspired by Dark Souls and Baldur's Gate" instead.

Since you believe my review is about the numbers let me talk about things that aren't.

The dungeon designs look quite good and have an interesting style. However the actual gameplay around them is just linear corridors with slight paths off that will never change, be altered, or have different enemies no matter how many times you go through them.
When I found an Artifact I was excited because that meant I could leave that area and be done with the game as soon as possible.

What about the boss mechanics? That isn't something that can be changed by just altering numbers. The previously mentioned Necromancer Boss, Alaloth and his brothers, they need reworks along with all the other bosses.

Now to do more "Numbers" things
Why is the break bar there? To recover your stamina? Broken enemies recoil so far back that they fall outside my attack range and they recover in less than a second so that I cannot even run in and followup attack.
Then I ask why do I not have this break bar? Do enemies have different mechanics to me? Why do I get staggered every hit but they don't? I think Alaloth is the most egregious example of this, as his first attack will stagger you to the ground, which he will then proceed to hit you with his remaining combo before you can even get up.

What about Companions?
They are semi useless. They cannot(maybe) even take on a normal enemy. At best they are a minor distraction and at worst they are a detriment by getting in the way.
The quests they give only give gear? Do they upgrade them at all? Why are they here?

The Keep
You can purchase upgrades and hire people for your very own keep. What do they do you ask? Nothing. The Blacksmith is a normal Blacksmith. The Cook is a campfire before you go into a dungeon.
The upgrades you buy seem to only improve the appearance of the keep and don't upgrade any of the hires, so why waste your money on this.
you can get tax once a year lol

The Overworld
The exploration is done in a similar way to Mount & Blade except all the Cities, Towns, Dungeons, and other random locations are evenly split all over the map that makes it look quite cluttered and annoying to navigate.
Also covering the map is random mobs of various races and strength just roaming around the set locations where they spawn, chasing you when you are near and offering basically nothing as a reward for killing them.

Game is largely unchanged and still ♥♥♥♥♥ (didnt fix the numbers)
they seem to have added more bosses and locations but i dont see a reason to do them, they are the same old bosses expected of this game with the same dungeons with the same problems.

Quick early review:

Pros:
-combat really shines
-parry, dodge, block, heavy and light attacks with ranged attacks are possible.
-there are a bevy of active and passive abilities
-loot is good
-plenty of quests
-stamina management
-prep for dungeons
-cooking and crafting seem straight forward and useful

Cons:

-world assets are static, not much is interactive or able to be destroyed

So far so good for the level of development it seems to be at.

8.5/10

I have been waiting for a game to combine what I love about games like Baldur's Gate and Diablo, this game almost pulls it off.

Unfortunately, the game is far from being good at one let alone both.
The combat is actually fun, they need to add M+KB (mouse-facing) controls because how they are implemented now, there might as well not be any but, controller feels nice during combat.

Boasting a deep narrative in the Steam description is really stretching it. After a bare bones character creator. You are dropped into a small combat tutorial. It teaches you the basic, lock-on, heavy and lite attacks, blocking, dodging. Then you are told to go to the leader of whatever race you chose, you are given the task of finding 4 artifacts, opening the way into a city, and killing a god. Pretty good so far, but that's it, it doesn't turn into an epic quest, you just go around into fighting area hubs, clear out a little map with rooms, and loot a chest.

There are people to talk to and do side quests for while looking for the 4 artifacts but, they boil down to the kill, deliver, and fetch quests. Rarely do you ever receive a follow up or meaningful story that adds to the world. Traveling the world is just you moving an icon on the map which is just so boring and lets you go everywhere on the map with out consequence. As a player you are just selecting towns, points of interest, and fighting areas, and watching a load screen. There are a a lot of load screens, the game is a bunch of tiny hubs so every screen change is a loading screen. There's loading screens for changing floors at the inn.

I am doing the same thing I did at hour 3 that I am doing at hour 15. My character is maxed and I haven't even went for the main story quest. I have barely changed my gear, there are only like 12 skills to choose from so barely any builds to try.

For some reason, this game is so simple yet in a way complex. It doesn't hold your hand, you have to figure it's systems out but when you finally do you realize how simple and uninspired they are.

The game feels very flat and while the learning phase is fun once the shininess wears of a bit you start to lose wonder for the game and begin to see this empty world full of loading screens. every dungeon or fighting area I've gone too is just one small area with a couple rooms. No stairs, no puzzles, just clear out the monsters and loot chest.

I wanted this game to be good so bad, but it just isn't.

Played for about 10 hours.
Had all of my gold gathered during that time just taken away by a random side quest where you get robbed without any chance of getting it back by someone drugging you.
Thanks for that, devs.
Small hint: Don't annihilate your players' progress, players don't like that.

But that little incident was just the cherry on top of the cake that made me not recommend the game.
The issues run much, MUCH deeper.

The game is beautiful, truly.
And the combat, once you actually get to it, is fun.
But it is so full of really bad, and really OBVIOUSLY bad, design decisions I have no idea where to even start:

UI hotkeys are random. Sometimes F will confirm something, sometimes you'll need to keep it pressed. Sometimes you'll need to press T, sometimes keep THAT pressed. It's just full-on random. There is no rhyme or reason to this.

The flow of level ups is VERY awkward. Instead of doing the standard from 30+ years of gaming via XP, you only level up when you beat fight arenas for the first time. Those arenas are all distributed evenly throughout the map, but each kingdom has only one of each difficulty (and you won't be able to beat harder ones until you gear up). And because you will spend so much time travelling around and walking around in quests, not fighting, you'll have hours without level ups and then maybe 2-3 all at once. It's just a very off-putting pace.

Most abilities and perks are disappointing and for the largest part, useless and you will be MUCH better off just attacking normally. Just a few examples:
- There's a perk that gives you a 15% chance of ignoring 15% damage, in other words ~1.5% less damage - that's so obviously weak AF I have no idea how it made it into the game.
- There's a skill that lets you raise your damage by 10% for 10s - that's already not much, but it also has a cooldown of 60 seconds. ALL of the skills that buff you and/or your allies are on that level of useless. Enemies beyond the lowest tier have so much HP, even a 50% damage increase for 10s wouldn't do much.
- One skill lets you whirl around with your weapon - but each hit does only 35% damage (upgradeable to 70% I think). The speed of the hits is only minimally faster than your normal attack speed. AND, to add insult to injury, you are completely vulnerable while spinning around - it's a straight up trap.
I could list a lot more here, but it all boils down to: Abilities outside of healing are mostly really, really bad and level ups feel incredibly bad because of that.

The game smothers, ABSOLUTELY SMOTHERS, you with lore dump after lore dump and dialogue after dialogue after dialogue and quest after quest after quest. Because the game basically forces you to travel everywhere instead of sticking to a region (unless you want to grind the same dungeon endlessly), you will have so much text dumped onto you, you'll very quickly tune out and just go "next, next, next, skip, skip, skip".
A real shame, because clearly much thought was spent on the writing, but the pacing all but annihilates the desire to delve deeper into the lore.
I think I had about 30-40 open quests after only 3 hours of playing. While I was reading what people said to me initially, after some time I stopped because it's just way too much exposition.

You cannot craft from stash. You have to (slowly) go to the inn to get your things if you want to craft anything. Every. Time. You could keep more in inventory, but then you'll have MUCH less space for loot to sell - which is your only real income source, the quest gold rewards are so small they might as well not be there.

The map movement is possibly the weirdest I've ever seen.
Instead of just being able to zoom freely and click anywhere in order to go there - you know, normal map movement - in the "movement mode" you can only move manually and your zoom is severely constrained. But then there is another map mode where you can freely zoom and move the map around - but you can't move in that mode.
Oh, and in movement mode, the time doesn't stand still even if you don't move... OH COOOOME OOOOOON!
Oh, and you can "wait until day/night" to enter an area (important for some quests and stores) - but that waiting time will wait until the MIDDLE of the day/night instead of when it starts, which seems like a big waste in the time-sensitive campaign mode.

I really wanted to like this game, but at every corner, from the pacing to the level ups to the UI itself, there's just baffling decision after baffling decision and it becomes too much for me to enjoy or recommend.