After about 10 hours of experiencing Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, I would like to share with you my first impressions of this fascinating ARPG title.

As you know, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem – the ARPG game hack & slash game of French developer Wolcen Studios was officially released on Steam last weekend. The game receives special attention from most gamers because of its gameplay and visuals, and I’m also among these gamers. After a while of experiencing version 1.0 of Wolcen, please share my first impressions about it.

Gameplay

After more than 9 hours of Wolcen experience: Lords of Mayhem with a melee character (2-handed weapons, skill points according to Child of Fury and Arm Maester), I have to say Wolcen’s sense of guillotine is very is already.” Thanks to CryEngine’s graphical power and impressive sound effects, the techniques that my character launches give a sense of lashing out at the powerful target, like enemies bursting under a hammer blow ( skill) or flings far after being hit by the protagonist.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem và những ngày đầu gian khổ

You choose the weapon to start the game, not the character’s gameplay.

Wolcen’s character-building system is the second bright spot of this game. Initially, the game requires you to choose one of three schools: melee, long-range, or magician, but it is entirely for reference only because gamers can learn any skill they want, wear on what people I like whatever your initial choice is. Similarly, the game’s active skill system is divided into four categories: warrior, thief, archer, magician. Each skill requires different requirements, such as using a bow, cane,… But these categories are not entirely “rules” that you cannot overcome – there will be items that allow warriors to cast spells, wizards rush into fights, and the like.

Meanwhile, the game’s passive skill system (called Gate of Fates) will stun you because of its monumental level. They are divided into several categories, like the character class system in traditional RPG titles. Still, here you can freely learn any skill you like, just by satisfying the only requirement is unlock. These passive skills are also divided into three rounds, and gamers can rotate the rounds to enable/disable the learned skills. Therefore, gamers can ultimately create purebred or hybrid characters and change back and forth at any time with just a few simple operations on the skill system.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem và những ngày đầu gian khổ

I have only lit up a small portion of the skill system.

A little unbalanced

Setting up “evenly” for characters is also not easy. The game has five equipment colors: white, blue, yellow, red, and purple, corresponding to the standard, rare, very rare, legendary, and unique levels—the search for enough gold equipment (scarce) for characters that are not too difficult. However, the problem lies in the rank of equipment – because there are 12 different equipment slots without weapons, it’s normal for you to be stuck with low-level items when you reach high. My character even wears shoes and uses level 9 weapons when they reach level 22!

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem và những ngày đầu gian khổ

Earning a set of colorful equipment is not difficult. It isn’t easy to achieve equipment on a character level.

Why not change higher level shoes? That’s because the level 21 blue shoes have an index worse than the old group 9 shoes. This makes my character a bit weak despite being divided points in the direction of 90% damage – 10% defense, most evident when meeting the first Act’s boss. I got him throwing onions so many times, and I only managed to get through when I spent almost … 10 minutes running around to throw long-range skills to pull blood and steal, rolling around dodging like I was playing Dark Souls!

But the experience that gamers build or gunner build with this boss is very light. The tank can easily solo this boss without hesitating about taking damage, while the gunner easily dodges the boss’s attacks by standing at long distances and moving very flexibly. Maybe the Wolcen Studios development team should reconsider a bit about the balance between character builds, such as a slightly nerfed Tank or DPS should be buffed. I can not say much more about the magician characters because it has only spent about 9 hours in the game and has not been able to try all the build methods. Still, Wolcen’s exciting experience was suddenly “discounted” by the Act 1 boss.

Bug

By the time I made this article, five days have passed since the game was officially released (version 1.0), but of which, up to about … 2 and a half days, the game server was “offline.” Including Saturday and Sunday, the game server worldwide was shut down for maintenance and updates due to severe bugs after its release late at night on the 13th and half of the day. The Asian server of the game encountered an error causing the game. The prime area (including me) is not accessible. Of course, it is still possible to play offline, but when you accidentally create an online character and go quite far into the story, creating a new name to play from the beginning is not impressive at all.

Issuing server troubles regularly is typical and can be understood when the number of gamers soared from less than 1,500 to more than 63,000 (according to Wolcen Studios data), but what’s not sympathetic is the version deemed “perfect” with numbering 1.0 again has too many bugs. I’m lucky I didn’t encounter any bugs during the game. Many gamers complained about various issues, from light things like losing stuff to heavy items like how the character “evaporates” online or offline. And this is precisely why the game server is shut down on Saturday and Sunday to fix the bug.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem và những ngày đầu gian khổ

The skill level up when used, so the plowing from the beginning is very frustrating.

Currently, the bug has lost equipment, and temporary characters have been fixed. However, some other bugs still exist that allow many gamers to perform fraudulent tricks when playing online such as dupe map, hacking money, hacking skills. The most severe problem of the current game is that many of the game’s passive skill table skills are entirely ineffective – perhaps 50% are not working or not in the way gamers think. Although the game focuses on PvE and plowing, these problems affect the player’s experience. Especially those who accidentally play co-op and pick up items dupe or spend time tinkering with the way to build and then discover what you choose is futile.

Conclusion

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is an attractive game. With hands-on gameplay and a deep skill system that promises to give gamers many different ways to build characters but feels that version 1.0 that Wolcen Studios has just launched probably should only be numbered … 0.5. The development team certainly needs to spend months, if not years, to edit and hone the game to match gamers’ expectations. I will give you a more detailed review of the game in the next few days, after spending enough time to understand all about this game.