Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem First Impressions

The action-RPG genre has always been something of a niche genre, dominated largely by a select number of titles, each with their own dedicated fanbase, such as Diablo, Path of Exile, and Torchlight. Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, developed and published by the aptly-named WOLCEN Studio, stands out as a bold new attempt to break through the stagnant market and offer players something different.

When Wolcen first kicks off, you’re given the option to either play online or offline. Now, this could have been fixed by the time of posting, but as of now, the developers have stated that, bizarrely, progress between the online and offline components will not be shared. If you played part of the campaign solo in offline mode, but then jump over to the online co-op mode, any progress, including levelling up, with that character in the online mode will not transfer to the offline mode featuring that character.

Now, in 2020, I have absolutely no idea why any action-RPG game that features both online
and offline play wouldn’t allow players to transfer character progression between online and offline play. Blizzard has been supporting this functionality in Diablo for at least a decade by now, and even other relatively small action-RPGs have enabled this feature. If you’re going to allow online coop in your action-RPG game, why would any developer not develop the framework upon which nearly every other action-RPG is designed around?

After this point, the next thing you’ll see is the character customisation process, although I strongly hesitate to use the word process here, as that would imply there is at least some effort on the developer’s end to allow the player to make it a true transformative process. Instead you have a simple choose your gender option, followed by eight or so eye colour choices, maybe 10 or 12 skin colour choices, and about a dozen hairstyle options. The only option that gives you more than a handful of options is the hair colour palette. Although given how easy it is to implement a hair colour selection option, I would think this is a basic requirement for any RPG.

When going back to gather screenshots of Wolcen’s character creation process, I decided to have a bit of fun with the albeit limited toolkit, to see just how beautiful a specimen I could create given the resources at my disposal. Suffice it to say, the final result was a masterpiece.

The story for Wolcen is a mixed bag. While the initial premise is fairly well executed, many of the characters tend to rely primarily on tropes rather than meaningful character development. Since this critique is intended to be spoiler-free, suffice it to say many familiar videogame tropes come into play, such as the “princess is in another castle” trope. This specific trope is done to death in many instances throughout the campaign, with the result that it doesn’t necessarily build up drama, so much as just build up resentment due to its frequent occurrence. Other tropes, such as the “longtime ally turns into enemy” trope, get brought up too, and can likewise be borderline cringeworthy. If you’re the kind of person put off my trope-driven storytelling, this game will definitely cross into that territory for you.

While the story evolves over a series of main quests, just like any action-RPG, there are also plenty of opportunities to engage in side quests. Players are encouraged to explore and go venturing across the world, as well as fight your way through underground dungeons,
where you can defeat hordes of enemies, earn high value loot, find gold, and face new challenges.

How you choose to fight off enemies is left, by and large, up to you. In addition to your primary and secondary abilities, both of which you pick at the start of the game, but can later replace if you choose, you can also buy or unlock mana based spells and abilities,
which can come in a number of forms and have a variety of effects.

What spells and abilities you can use are determined by your weapon loadout. Certain spells are only for spellcasters, certain abilities can only be used by gunslingers or archers, etc. Personally, my character was your typical mage/spellcaster, so my cooldown spells were pretty straightforward. Burning my enemies alive with magic fireballs always feels endlessly satisfying. The enemy variety, always a crucial element behind any great action-RPG, is quite diverse. I’ve currently put in just under 11 hours of gameplay, and I’ve already run into easily a dozen, maybe two dozen, types of enemies, each for the most part having their own unique attack style, although many of them seem to have the same total amount of health.

The world feels very distinctly populated. There are a number of vastly different biomes, each with their own colour tone and environment style, each of which offers mostly its own distinct set of enemy types, quests, sidequests, dungeons, and other gameplay opportunities. The visual capabilities of the CryEngine, not often illustrated in this current generation, normally so heavily dominated by Unreal Engine 4, are really shown on display here with the beautifully rendered art style.

Weapon looting is very commonplace, as can be expected. However, like Diablo, there are consequences for equipping weapons outside your chosen character class. While unlike Diablo you can choose other types of weapons outside of your class’ default weapon type, you won’t be able to access your secondary right-click ability, directly limiting the overall damage you could be dealing. So if you’re going to swap weapons,
it better be for a short duration and for a specific purpose.

Where you can experiment is in your armour and other equipment. In addition to the default flat defense stats, many types of armour and equipment have secondary passive item stats. These include, but are not limited to: increased health regen time, increased mana regen time, increased movement speed, increased chance of dodging enemy attacks,
increased resistance to X damage type, etc. You get the idea. Additionally, your primary and secondary mouse attacks automatically level up over time, increasing their total strength and effectiveness, following a similar trajectory as your character’s personal levelling system, in my experience running almost parallel to one another.

Then of course we get into the area of bosses. Currently I’ve only faced about a dozen bosses, not including the tutorial boss. This is where the game tends to get a little aggravating. Bosses, as anyone who’s ever played an action-RPG like Diablo can tell you, are enormous damage sponges, soaking up whatever damage you hurl at them, and dealing you grievously critical wounds in return. As if this isn’t difficult enough, some bosses, like my least favorite one thus far, the dragon, have this irritating habit of summoning basic and medium tier enemy the moment you start dealing any serious damage to it, to the point that it becomes near impossible to lay your hands on it.

The character modeling and attack animations of the bosses are really very refined. Each feels different to play against. You can’t just copy and paste the same tactics over and over again and expect to live for long. Also, in my experience, prepare to die a lot. Wolcen doesn’t venture into Dark Souls territory, but it can be very unforgiving during boss encounters.

Now I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the epic embarrassments that were,
respectively, the day one and day two server failures. During the first two days of the game’s launch, on the 13th and 14th of February, the game was flooded with players, to the point that the game experienced a series of periods where the game’s servers would be completely down. The game has since stabilized, but it took a few urgent bug fixes before the developers were really able to get a handle on the situation. Not exactly ideal when you’re trying to showcase the best your game can offer to newcomers.

Now let’s talk about characters. One, or rather two, of the things the game does pretty well
is the writing and voice acting for most of the characters, major and minor alike. There’s a lot of pretty decent humour, although nothing I would consider hilarious. Even when you’re talking to NPC quest-givers or overhearing conversations between background NPCs, you get the feeling that the developers had enough sense to not take the game into an entirely serious direction. This makes for an unexpected but welcome distinction from the more mature and visceral combat sections.

Now, this is an incredibly minor note, but in Wolcen, at times companion characters have a tendency to unexpectedly teleport ahead of, next to, or behind you in a way that is very reminiscent of Doctor Watson from the old Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment game. Odd minor game bugs like this don’t detract from my opinion of the game, yet they do stand out as memorable in their own right.

Another aspect done well is the soundtrack. The soundtrack for Wolcen is beautifully composed, and really nails down the epic tone and scale when it’s supposed to, while also providing calmer melodies for the more peaceful hub world areas. If you’re into epic cinematic-like fantasy soundtracks, I would definitely recommend listening to Wolcen.

So, my overall takeaway? Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is not necessarily a Diablo clone, at least not nearly to the same degree as other similar action-RPGs try to be, and in fact it does a decent job of improving on the foundations where Diablo, in my opinion, lacked. Satisfying blood and gore? Check. A compelling story that actually makes you at least somewhat care about your character and the supporting characters? Check. A loot system that mostly allows for experimentation, instead of arbitrarily declaring certain weapons off-limits despite allowing you to pick them up? Check. Fully rendered cinematic cutscenes in addition to the usual text bubble based conversations? Check. However, while Wolcen gets a ton of points in regards to presentation and style, the inconsistent optimization, the bugs and server outages, the inability to share character progress between online and offline play, and the developer's slow response time to fixing critical game bugs and gameplay issues are all major detractors worth keeping in mind.

Would I recommend buying Wolcen, for those interested in action-RPGs? Yes. Odds are if you liked or loved Diablo, you’ll fall head over heels for this one, no doubt. But for those who aren’t interested in delving into deep RPG mechanics like managing cooldowns, upgrading skills, understanding and making the most out of active and passive weapon and equipment stats, etc., you may require a bit more hand-holding than this game is ever willing to provide.