Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

Once its major bugs are resolved, Wolcen's clever ideas could let it compete with the heavyweights of the action RPG genre. For now, though, too much of the mayhem is caused by bugs to recommend it.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem attempts to stand out with deep, free-form character creation, but it has far too many problems with all of its underlying systems.

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

I'm sure Wolcen could be a good isometric hack-and-slash adventure. The problem is, this console port does its utmost to hide all of Wolcen's positive qualities with a constant barrage of crashes and performance issues, rendering a game that should be escapist fun into a frustrating slog. In time this might be worth your attention, but significant patching will be required for it to be so.

Wolcen is a decent action RPG with a few issues that hold it back from greatness.

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.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem nearly turned out as the game I expected. I love my freedom in developing and mastering my own character. Boss fights are epic and the world generally good. There are bugs, however, that shouldn't be in the game. Difficulty ranges from far too easy to too hard in comparison - the boss fights are good but you're not prepared after many too easy passages. I had a lot of fun with Wolcen and think it's a good game. When the developers hold their word, it could turn out great in the future.

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 remians buggy and broken. After a four-year development, the game still looks like being in ALPHA test, obviously, not everyone can stand it.

After a somewhat bumpy start and some patches that were quickly pushed in, Wolcen finally seems to be running steadily. Our first impression of having a Diablo clone in front of us has hardened due to the background story with gods and demons, but visually as well as roleplaying technology, the title offers significantly more depth of detail. The free character development makes it easy to experiment with different classes, especially since no decision has to be final.

For now Wolcen is a solid ARPG, but it can be even greater. The question is: will Wolcen Studio take that opportunity?