Action RPGs are my favorite kind of games. I could play them forever if unstopped. I have over 3000 hours easily in ‘recent’ ARPGs and I’m always willing to try new ones. When I heard about Wolcen, I really wanted to dive in, but reports of bugs, weird balance issues and other wonkiness kept me at bay… for about a week. After 45 hours I can safely report that Wolcen needs some more work before it gets to a point where I could easily recommend it to everyone, but they clearly had a running start, being inspired by other ARPGs as it is while making interesting design decisions on their own, so they’ll probably get there. Regardless, I still had a good time with it!
After creating a simple character - getting already the choice of melee, ranged or magic, I was presented with a very familiar settings screen, allowing me to choose between the story and a mode not unlike the bounties in Diablo 3. Some weirdness struck me then, like the split between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ characters (and how the game would always default to online even if I had 4 offline heroes) and how the news ticker down right just wouldn’t scroll. I launched into a story with elements strongly reminding me of Warhammer 40k, did a small tutorial and arrived at the first chapter.
The game uses many concepts from Diablo 3 and Path Of Exile; You have infinite-use potions, but they have charges. You have a dodge move on cooldown like in the console versions of Diablo 3, you have energy shield that protects your health and has different interactions than regular HP, skills can have modifiers like support gems, but their effects here are a bit more boring. Wolcen does a lot differently as well; You have stat points when you level up, for one. Usually I’m not a huge fan of stat points systems, but here I think it kinda works. All stat points increase your damage, they’re not required to be above a certain threshold for gear purposes and they allow you to focus your characters in certain directions. The skills you can use is based on the weapon you have equipped (staves for magic, swords for melee, among others) and you have Willpower and Rage, two resources that you need to balance in order to use certain skills.
The passive skill tree is a large sprawling mess a bit like Path Of Exile, but much more flexible. You can rotate the tree around, allowing you to pick pretty much any node you want, which makes me unsure about the whole skill tree format, but it works, so it’s not that big of an issue. There is a wide range of build defining nodes on that tree, so you can make pretty interesting characters, in theory. In practice, some of the balance of the game is truly strange. I had summoned creatures with 1/100th of my health that didn’t do anything and just die. Newly-created characters that could barely kill trash mobs without dying as well. I had some luck with a few build ideas, but I think the game needs a little bit of a balance pass. The difficulty ramps up progressively, with some story bosses just being a tad too hard that I had to switch to ‘story mode’ difficulty at times. When you die, you can use a second wind, but after three, you’re kicked out of the fight.
Speaking of gear, you have gems that you can socket in pretty much everything for some extra stats, which there are a lot. It’s really tough not to have my eyes glaze over gear comparisons at a certain point. You’ll have different types of gear - heavy, bruiser, rogue, mage - that influence the kind of defenses and stats there’ll be on them but otherwise it’s just a stat spaghetti where you’ll have to either care about really specific stats, thus ignoring the rest, or just equip the highest level thing. During my time I never found any build-defining unique items as well, which was a bit disappointing. You also unlock ‘aspects of apocalypse’ which are transformations that make you invincible and change your skills for a few seconds, which is a nice addition as a panic button or when you want to dispatch large group of enemies more easily.
There’s a lot to like in the maps as well, they’re well designed and pretty easy to go through (unlike, say, Grim Dawn), you’ll find plenty of side dungeons with objectives related to killing monsters, shrines that give you boosts and the trifecta of normal, rare and elite enemies to test your mettle. The design of some of these maps is really nice, especially when the camera pans in different directions (something you rarely see in that kind of game) in order to show you more of the scenery. Some bits of the story are okay (even tho the whole game ends on a cliffhanger which feels really cheap).
When you complete the campaign, you unlock the Champion of Stormfall mode, which at first glance looks like a Diablo 3 Adventure Mode with new complexity layered over. In theory, you run random maps to get production points that you use to upgrade buildings using a few different currencies in the game. These buildings unlock various effects, like more stash space, different dungeons, better prices at the vendor in town, etc. In practice, it’s suffering from the weird balance issues that the rest of the game does; You -can- create new characters and play this mode when unlocked, but they won’t be able to do anything because they won’t have enough money to upgrade anything and the maps are too dang hard. In Diablo 3, the game is scaled to your level in a way that a level 1 character will have no difficulty defeating a level 1 elite enemy. In Wolcen, a level 1 character will die three times to the first ‘rare’ enemy they find. You start with no skills and they must be found (or bought), so you’re left with very little to do until you’d luckily stumble into one piece of gear. And even then, it takes forever to collect enough money to upgrade anything, even if you use a character that went through the campaign. This whole mode needs to be rethought a little.
In any case, I had a good time with Wolcen and I’ll probably get back into it at some point in the future after they patch all the kinks out. Even if they don’t and that was my only experience with it, it was an overall positive one, even if the crashe, glitches and other balance issues bothered me to no end, it still was a well done action RPG that tries a few new tricks and shows other developers what they can do and should try to aspire to. If you’re chomping at the bits for a new ARPG and can stand some just-released jank, Wolcen is really neat in the few things it does differently.
