There's an air of familiarity to Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem. It's an action role-playing game with heavy inspiration from Diablo and Path of Exile, from their high-fantasy gothic settings to their destiny-bound protagonists and plethora of abilities to dabble in. Wolcen wears its influences on its sleeve, and while it makes changes to their established foundations, it stumbles so many times along the way that it just feels lost by the end of it.
Wolcen's
opening obscures some of its more novel ideas, with a stale and
predictable narrative that makes it feel generic. You play as one of
three siblings born and bred for battle, but cast out from the only
family you know when an unknown power awakens within you. It's a plot
filled to the brim with exposition, riddled with vaguely explained
fantasy jargon and worldbuilding that never clicks into place. It's easy
to forget about entirely after the first few hours, with only the
stilted dialogue and awkward cutscenes reminding you of the
uninteresting events dressing Wolcen's main draw.
The
setting, however, doesn't fall prey to the same oppressive medieval
look. Gloomy caverns and bright, colorful forests are equally impressive
backdrops for the equally outstanding visual details buried within
them. The variation across Wolcen's three acts is impressive too, as it
whisks you between the opulent, gold-laden halls of an ancient sacred
ground to the blood-drenched trenches of a chaotic battlefield.
Wolcen's
most substantial twists begin with character creation. Outside of basic
cosmetic options, your biggest choice from the outset is what weapon
you want to start with. You aren't asked which role you want to embody
or what classic archetype you want to build towards. Wolcen won't
directly ask you that at any point, letting you craft whatever type of
class you choose--in theory, at least.
Each weapon you
equip changes your basic attack, but you’re free to pair that up with
any combination of abilities. Abilities are picked up like loot, letting
you learn spells, melee flurries, and ranged barrages and swap between
them easily as any other piece of gear. Each of these abilities feeds
off of either willpower or rage, which form two halves of the same
resource meter. Consuming one generally fills the other, while basic
attacks from your selected weapon will typically recharge one or the
other in tandem. Your ability to pair together different abilities is
restricted by how well they synergize within this tug-of-war between
willpower and rage. It’s entirely possible to open a skirmish with
spells that build rage, which you then use for abilities that both
require it and build willpower in return, letting you seesaw between the
two disciplines.
In the early stages I was able to
create a mage-warrior combination, slashing foes with a single-handed
sword while raining down ice on them with magical abilities. Each attack
looks spectacular in motion; bright red glyphs accompany fire spells,
with burning embers left in their wake glistening off the dark and
dreary caves I found myself exploring the game's opening hours. As you
start layering abilities onto one another the screen is filled with a
gorgeous cacophony of colors, not only communicating important
information to you visually but coating the surroundings in stunning
effects and reactions to the destruction you're causing.
Wolcen
lets you redefine your combat approach at any time, too, which allowed
me to eventually skew towards a full mage in the later stages of the
campaign. Although there’s a resource cost attached to rebuilding your
character's attributes and selected skills, it’s low enough to
facilitate experimentation a handful of times during the campaign. It’s
especially handy when your build just isn’t working, letting you start
from scratch and build in an entirely new direction if you want.
You
define your character's attributes by spending points on four talent
archetypes--Ferocity for damage, Toughness for health, Agility for
speed, and Wisdom for ailment effectiveness. You also have access to a
daunting, large skill tree with rotating tiers, allowing you to create
paths through it that combine talents from different disciplines. It's
an extraordinary amount of agency that can have you spending hours
poring over damage percentages and critical chances, carving out a path
for you to follow enroute to your perfect build.
The
problem isn't with the freedom Wolcen affords you, but rather just how
broken much of it is. The large skill tree features hundreds of nodes
that make incremental differences to your character, but a large portion
of them don't function as described. Abilities that are meant to
cohesively work together don't react in the manner you've carefully
planned out, making whole builds entirely useless. It's not only
frustrating to waste the time pursuing a dead end, but it also limits
the number of viable ways you can create a character entirely.
You'd
be forgiven for not noticing this immediately, given how unbalanced
Wolcen's difficulty is. Its three long chapters are mostly padded out
with extended linear sections where you're shuffled from enemy encounter
to the next, with each one hardly more challenging than the last. It's
satisfying at first to walk into a large group of enemies and watch them
explode into a mess of gory guts, but the power fantasy wears thin when
you're so rarely asked to adjust your strategy to keep up with any
semblance of challenge.
A sense of difficulty isn't entirely absent, though. Each
of Wolcen's chapters features numerous boss fights, most of which
increase the difficulty so drastically it often feels like a different
game. While you were effortlessly mowing through waves of enemies just
seconds before, most boss encounters give you confined spaces to work
within and foes that can kill you instantly with single attacks, sending
you back to the start of their multi-phased fights. These encounters
forced me to entirely rework my character around them specifically,
tossing aside strategies that worked just fine moments before.
Overcoming these boss fights can be rewarding, with a similar sense of
relief to that found in Soulsborne games. But they are continuously
jarring to take on, especially when all the action surrounding them
doesn’t match up to the same level of difficulty. It makes the long
sections between boss fights feel routine and dull in comparison.
Exciting
loot drops could alleviate the doldrums of making your way through
Wolcen's long and protracted chapters, but free-form class system means
that you will be inundated with scores of weapons, armor pieces, and
more that are either too worthless to equip or don't apply to your
playstyle at all. In the same vein as its skills, many of Wolcen's rarer
items also drop with attributes and magical abilities that don't match
the class type they belong to. You can only tell what type of item and
what rarity it is at a glance, which can help you skip over many items
you don't consider useful without diving into your inventory. Yet
despite this it's incredibly easy to fill up your limited backpack space
far too frequently, forcing you to pause the action constantly to sort
it out. All this useless loot makes small excursions to side dungeons
less interesting too, and you end up focusing on how repetitive their
objectives are and how similar their overall structures start becoming.
All of Wolcen's shortcomings are further exacerbated by an abundance of technical issues, which can range from irksome to game-breaking.
All
of Wolcen's shortcomings are further exacerbated by an abundance of
technical issues, which can range from irksome to game-breaking. In my
20-hour campaign, I had instances where my character would refuse to
walk straight, hilariously choosing to moonwalk through stages instead.
This was accompanied by numerous instances of missing sound effects,
enemies disappearing through level geometry, broken hit boxes preventing
me from attacking, and subtitles that frequently mistook my female mage
for a male protagonist. These didn't halt my progress, but various
other bugs made the already challenging boss encounters all the more
infuriating. The worst of them cropped up during Wolcen's final climatic
encounter, which contains an incredibly easy to trigger bug that
prevented me from doing damage to the boss and forcing me to restart the
multi-staged fight, ending my time with Wolcen in considerable anger.
This
is to say nothing of Wolcen's online mode, which is kept separate from
the single-player one--meaning you have to maintain two separate
characters, and there's no way to transfer your character from one mode
to the other. Although online play lets you cooperatively tackle the
game with friends, it introduces a whole host of other issues ranging
from irritating lag on inputs to disappearing gear and progression
wipes.
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is frustrating to play
for the majority of its campaign, leaving you with little motivation to
dedicate more time to endgame events. There are many technical issues
that can be fixed to alleviate some of this frustration, but it's the
deeper ingrained problems with difficulty balance and character build
viability that keep Wolcen from fulfilling its enticing promise of a
free-form ARPG. It has all the elements in place to become another
engrossing time sink, but it doesn't execute well enough on any of them
to make it worthwhile.
