Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

Despite its many minor flaws and even significant issues, Wolcen nails that action-combat-loot dopamine drip that fuels the longest-lived games in the genre. Even after four years of pre-release tinkering, Wolcen is pretty messy, but enough fun at the core that the problems are worth dealing with, at least in the short term.

Wolcen stands firmly on the shoulders of Diablo 3 and does a surprisingly good job of replicating its formula. Forceful combat, interesting ways to develop a character and fancy graphics come together in a decent campaign, even though it feels overly familiar and even a bit unfinished at times: The end game needs more content and variety, the balancing seems a little off and there is a good amount of bugs left in the game. While Path of Exile or Grim Dawn clearly remain the better options right now, there might still be a bright future for Wolcen - if the devs keep on patching things up and adding new content.

I really like Wolcen very much. This talent tree - complex and full of variants on the one hand and user-friendly on the other hand without gaps - has been my wish for Path of Exile for years...The cutscenes are also great. It's just a shame that the story runs out of air in the last third.

It is not the new Diablo, nor an action RPG with great new additions: it is instead a game that celebrates features brought to success by others, to which we add some personal ideas that work.

Extraordinary beauty (and extraordinary bugginess) aside, Wolcen is a run-of-the-mill ARPG that takes "inspiration" from every popular game in the genre and mixes it with its own questionable know-how. [Issue#244, p.64]

Some good ideas but with a price too high and with too many limits.

Wolcen can be as fun as it is visually stunning. It has some brilliant ideas in terms of character development and feels great once you in a fight. But it also has a lot of technical and balancing issues that may prove that it needed more time before release.

Beautiful and interesting ARPG following the steps of Diablo and Path of Exile, but severely lacking in general polish.

Despite the game have a great combat feeling and create tons of fun on looting, it's such a pity that Wolcen: lords of mayhem remains buggy and broken. After a four-year development, the game still looks like being in ALPHA test, obviously, not everyone can stand it.

This game is, unfortunately, buggy and broken. It was unable to fully utilize its time in early access, but you can still find moments of genuine fun if you look hard enough.

Wolcen could have been a contender in the ARPG arena, but it can't get out of it's own way for more than two seconds. Perhaps in time WOLCEN Studio will patch everything up and allow the game to shine as it deserves, but right now the game fights you at every turn. Wolcen is game that is as fun as it is frustrating. I like Wolcen; I simply wish I could love it.

With a good campaign and a nice combat feeling, Wolcen shines in the Hack'n Slash genra, even if it has a lot of bugs and suffers from difficulty balancing issues.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem has all the tools thanks to ARPGs that came before it. Sadly, its online mode has had a litany of issues, the controls could use some tweaks, the loot pool isn't as deep as you could imagine, character skills need some rebalancing, and a slew of shortcomings lead to a questionable launch after four years of development. Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem can surely reach the cream of the crop among ARPGs with more improvements, but it's going to take time.

Hack-and-Slay heaven and bug hell: Wolcen be thy name. While the battle system and the visuals lay the foundation for a promising motivation cycle, the enormous amount of bugs as well as annoying gamedesign blemishes keep pushing you away.

A mountain of issues gets in the way of the gratuitous monster murder and engaging customisation.

There may never have been so promising a game so completely destroyed by launch bugs as Wolcen.

The resounding impression is of a game that has not emerged from early access because it was finished, but simply because its developer needed it to. Wolcen's early success may suggest that was a wise decision. We do not expect it to last for long. [Issue#344, p.122]