Finally found the time to play through, game is not worth the price it is marked as. It’s a decent game, but it will not hold a candle to other ARPG contenders, clearly. The game as it is could be compared to Torchlight 1, but even torchlight is better.
The story, is ok, seems to follow typical viking stories so, I have no complaints though I am not well versed on the subject but it was mildly entertaining. The dialog could be pretty funny and really out of character at times. I thought the voice acting was alright, better than some other recent games I have played, probably better than the few voice lines GD had.
Side objectives for currency, interesting idea, shitty to play with. Backtracking to find that one totem you missed is a pain in the ass, seriously, fuck that. I like dungeon crawler games, and puzzle games, so the side areas with the chests behind puzzles were nice to have, though most of the puzzles were pretty much just ‘push buttons in this order’ and it would tell you the order only one screen earlier.
Crafting, for a game that hailed itself for having a great crafting system, it really is not. Basically, you farm currency by doing the sidequests mentioned above, completing raids/maps, and selling loot. Once you have enough, you try and craft a weapon which can randomly roll as two qualities, magic (1 affix) or unique (2 affix) and have up to 3 slots for runes. Only weapons/shields and chest armor have slots, everything else is random affixes. Legendary items cannot be crafted to my knowledge, I have no interest in playing NG+ to find out. Artifacts can be created by combining their pieces when you find them. (things like mjolnir and gungnir) That said, the artifacts CAN be good if the stats weren’t completely random. If you get lucky, cool, if you abuse the save/load system, cool, otherwise it will probably be trash. Affixes, there is only a handful of affixes that can roll on your gear. It’s really pathetic. Not much else to say about that, it’s just sad how the crafting system which was supposed to be the heart of this game is so awful. It’s not even crafting, it’s gambling. Thank Odin for the runes, that is the saving grace because you will never get 2 affixes you want on an item anyway.
Difficulty, the game is pretty freaking easy for the most part. Sometimes you forget to update your gear and you get your ass whipped, but if you visit the shop regularly, the game is basically a cakewalk. I played MP, and we finished most boss fights within seconds, they are that easy. The only difficult sections of the game were mostly because of weird hitbox/pathing issues. The final boss for example, it’s impossible to hit him in his second form unless he uses this one attack where he causes tentacles to erupt from the ground… then you hit the tentacles and it harms him, somehow. Stupid.
Skills/Classes… I only played a few levels of the 2 hander class, not enough to get info on it, but the staff class I played 30 levels worth, which is enough to max every skill. Staff class as to be expected imo, plays as a caster. Animations are slow and I don’t think there is a way to speed them up. The active skills were pretty strong feeling, but the passives were mostly pretty crappy I think. Things like ‘while wearing cloth armor, you have 10% chance to reflect 100% damage’… I really don’t want to be hit at all while wearing cloth armor, so I’ll pass. There were many many passives like this that were just really dumb and poorly thought out imo. Damage was fine for this class, but I was playing MP as I said above, so maybe thats why it felt like that.
Overall, not overly pleased with this game but it was a nice distraction. Now I need something else to play when I’m not modding…
