Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

 

I'm at the point where I'm willing to play basically any co-op Diablolike ARPG. I've heard about Wolcen for awhile, and even leading up to its release I heard famous streamers and influencers call it A "Path of Exile killer" like its going to be this next big thing. Then I heard that after its release, it totally flopped and no one liked it. Thats the extent of the information I had about the game before buying it. I managed to buy it for like $2 so its no real loss to me either way.

Upon starting it up you get a difficulty selection of "Story mode" and then Normal. I find it funny the game even has a story mode but whatever. I guess Normal is the hardest difficulty until after you beat the game a few times and it unlocks higher ones? Dont know but we picked that. Then you get a simple character creation where you adjust your appearance, but past the first 10 minutes of gameplay we totally forgot about it. The co-op is thankfully well implemented, you just invite your friend to your party from the main menu then upon clicking Play you both start the game. Then the game starts off, first with some lackluster slideshow still images but then the game starts to impress us with these high budget looking 3D cutscenes that look like something out of Lord of the Rings or something. Its a common feature the game has, it presents its self as fairly high budget with frequent use of action packed cinematic cutscenes that other games in the genre don't really go for. It asks you to choose your combat type, like Melee, Ranged, Magic, or something like that. We both just picked the warrior type, as usual for these games. Then the game starts off similar to any other arpg, you have only bare essential simple gear and you go around killing monsters picking up loot upgrading your gear and stats.

At first everything seems promising, the graphics can be stunning, with these amazingly detailed enviornments and cinematic scenes with nice blurring effects in the distance and impressive vistas. The tone of the game is dark and immersive, the overall interface and UI looks well done and more pleasing than a lot of other games in the genre. Then after getting a few level ups I start to notice this big skill tree called Gate of Fates which is this giant web of interconnected passives and buffs, directly inspired by games like Path of Exile. "Wow, thats crazy" I thought, as if the game would be really challenging, deep, and full of interesting puzzles and problems to solve with my build. The sad reality is that quickly the game starts to reveal its self as phony, like an illusion of being this deep game with tons of interesting mechanics but really none of it is meaningful or matters at all - it's all a facade. And I'll tell you why:

Not long into the game I started to wonder if the game has enemy level scaling like some other bad ARPGs do. This means that everytime you level up, the enemy levels up right alongside you - effectively almost making leveling up pointless or even worse, detrimental as the enemies only keep getting stronger. Even if a game has this, it can still be an enjoyable experience, but more often than not ARPG's with this one "feature" makes it a crippling flaw. Turns out Wolcen does indeed have enemy scaling, but it works in certain brackets, I'm not quite sure, but usually every time I would catch up to the zones enemy level, the next loading screen/zone they would be right back alongside me or slightly higher. So, shortly into the game I decided to do an experiment where we just run past every single monster and see how long we could get away with that and how punishing it is. Well it turns out you can get away with it the whole game, and its not punishing at all. You can simply run past every single monster in the game and they wont even be able to catch up to you, stunlock you, kill you on the way, they effectively do not matter. At least in other games like Chaosbane, Grim Dawn, etc, if you try running past every single monster they will frequently corner you, or do so much damage on the way that you'll frequently die. But not in Wolcen, in Wolcen the enemies will barely do any damage to you as you sprint past massive packs of them, its fucking stupid and makes the whole game feel worthless.

The only punishment to simply running past every enemy in the game is that there are mandatory campaign Boss fights you'll encounter. These fights basically gear/stat/skill check you. Thankfully the game has some semblance of difficulty in that these bosses frequently have multiple phases, and if you die on phase 2 or 3 you'll have to redo the whole fight. So what ended up happening is a few times after sprinting past mostly an entire Act/Episode and we encountered one of these bosses, all we would have to do is backtrack a minute or two, kill a few packs of monsters to catch up to the zone level (which didnt take very long as seemingly the monsters were never that much higher than us desipite deliberately avoiding getting any XP for long periods of time, scaling?)  and then going back to town and picking up a few new pieces of equipment like a new weapon or something. Then we could kill the bosses. The bosses are probably the "best" part of the game, in terms of engagement and actually having to do something. If youre mechanically skillful, good at dodging and knowing when to use your health potions, the bosses are fairly doable even if your characters suck. So it was never too much of a problem for us. A few bosses we would fail a few times and get stressed, but it was mostly because we had to learn the attacks and patterns like a lot of bosses will do attacks that light up certain areas of the arena that you need to avoid or you'll pretty much always die. If a co-op partner dies, you can click him to resurrect him over a few seconds. It seems like you can keep resurrecting even if you are being attacked, too. So it doesnt interrupt you, making it even easier.

After finishing a mandatory boss, we just went back to running past every single enemy again until the next mandatory boss. Rinse and repeat until end credits. It was that stupid. The game tries to fool you by making you think it has any depth to it or the enemies are real threats, but theyre not.

To make matters worse, the itemization loot stats, and skill systems are just not that interesting either. The stats work as items you can randomly find, or purcahse from a merchant. Then you consume this item and it permanently unlocks the skill. The skills are broken up into different tabs on the UI like Melee, Ranged, Sorcery etc again. I just simply looked at/used all the Melee skills. But really all I ended up doing the entire game is using the default Anvil hammer skill for the first half of the game, then in the second half of the game I realized you could buy skills from merchants and used another two skills, this jumping spear that generates a lot of Rage, and a shout skill that just buffs you with more damage. Another staple of shit poorly designed ARPG's along with Enemy scaling is the Generator/Spender type skill system that games like Diablo 3 and 4 are now famous for.  Instead of just having mana like traditional ARPG's, you have weak shitty default skills dedicated to generating resources needing to cast your actually powerful main skills, and then you have your main skills that consume the resource. For me, the main skill was this Anvil hammer AOE slam, and the generator skill was by default the sword slash attack. Eventually I just ended up using the jumping Spear skill as my generator, so the gameplay loop just looked like spamming 123 for my generators and buffs, and then holding down Right click to do my main skill. Nothing exciting or fun really, and I hate the entire generator/spender system in the first place. The skills were so unexciting and uninteresting that I never even cared to use anything else than the default. Maybe a big reason why is because your skills simply level up by using them. So that means if you find some new exciting skill, guess what, it will be level 1 while the one youve used the whole game will be level 30. So it felt like swapping to the interesting Level 1 skill would be shit until you've used it a bunch. This isnt nessesarilya bad thing on its own, but I just couldnt be bothered to experiment much when the default Hammer attack worked well enough, especially considering all the enemies are meaningless and you just run past them anyway. Whats the point of even caring about any of the mechanics or character progression in the game then? Nothing even threatens you to make it matter anyway. The skills also use this weird system similar to Chaosbane/Diablo 3 where you get a certain amount of points you can allocate on the fly, to buff the indiviudal skills in different ways. This is just stuff like 15% more damage, add a big AOE explosion, less Resource cost, etc. Nothing super deep, and usually I would swap these passives around every few levels without much thought and it worked fine.

The itemization is not interesting either. Resistances are something I quickly realized I should care about. Usually in other ARPG's you would put on items like +10% fire resistance. And your fire resistance would go up by 10%. In Wolcen its not like that. Items have "resistance scores" that are dozens to hundreds of points, that then get added to this overall resistance pool (I think?) that then raise your resistances. Like you can put an item on that says "Resistance score 200" but your global Fire resistance would only go up by 2%. Its very stupid and I dont like how its done at all. The other stats are stuff like +health, Force Shield (dont know what that is, assumed it was Magic shit) % elemental damage,  Material damage (Why is it worded like this? Is it just melee damage?, it was always tiny amounts like %2 so I barely gave a shit),  % Rage generation, Cooldown reduction. Just really not that exciting itemization or stats at all. I never dropped any unique colored items or anything that made me hyped. For the most part I barely gave a shit about items at all and only used whatever wepaon made my "Average damage' go up on my main skill. Until the second half of the game I was still wearing random Blue gloves that I didnt even care to replace. The game thankfully has a loot filter, and you can go in and disable tiers of items you no longer want. Very soon into the game I disabled all White and Blue items, some of the lowest most worthless tiers. So that meant for most of the game I was barely finding anything. The game really doesnt have that many loot drops, and the ones that do drop just arent that interesting, especially when you realize most of the enemies dont matter.
The health potion system lets you have two potions, they can both be health potions, or you can use other things like a Rage potion. For the whole game I just used two health potions, and you can get better ones as you progress the game which become increasingly important. The health potions recharge as you get kills, so yet another idea taken from PoE. The potion system is fine, it atleast added challenge and excitement during boss fights but other than that I barely noticed.

And that passive tree I talked about? its almost like you cant really go wrong. Its broken up into different colors, Red for melee/warrior type stuff, Green for dexterity Rogue, ranger stuff, Purple for magic (I think) . All I did was go towards all the Red nodes and the bigger passive stuff for like Health regen/damage.. very basic things. I avoided anything with Criticals cause I dont like how inconsistent Criticals are in ARPGs. Worked out good enough. Barely ever died (maybe 5 times total?) and had enough damage to take down all the bosses. There is this feature where you can select parts of the tree and sort of spin the different rings around to almost totally customize your own path and tree, which I'm sure during the marketing for this game they boasted so much about and probably what made people consider this a PoE killer. But really I only even noticed it was a feature more than halfway through the game, and even then it hardly changed how I played the game. maybe its more important after youve dumped hundreds of hours into the game and progressed to the 'endgame' or whatever, but for a casual one-run playthrough it barely matters, like everything else.

The game has impressive amazing production value with all these cutscenes and tons of dialogue and writing, but its such a bizarre mishmash of ideas that it quickly caught me off guard with how awkward and stupid it all is.  The resemblance is uncanny. Like why the fuck does everyone look like they are taken directly out of Warhammer 40k? meanwhile everything else is like dark gritty horror vibes and then the next moment its like youre watching an episode of Star trek? I dont get it.And then after awhile all the constant cutscenes and story interactions start feeling like something out of a Sunday morning childs cartoon with how cliche, generic, and how much of a trope everything is. Like only a few hours into the game we just started skipping all the dialogue (theres tons of it) thats how little we cared.

Not sure what else to say about Wolcen. Sure, I sort of appreciate how there are these ARPGs that don't require tons of brainpower and googling and researching how to play the game without making shit builds or fucking up, but at the same time these games are way too shallow and forgiving. There is zero challenge or difficulty outside of a handful of boss fights, maybe only 3 boss fights actually. You can respec everything at a moments notice, I was able to just constantly respec both my passive tree and all my skills, it costs gold or whatever, but its such a marginal amount I never noticed or was short on anything. After literally running past the ENTIRE last act of the game, I dont think we stopped to kill a single group of enemies, we were suddenly at all these sorts of cutscenes with the characters saying "This is it! this is the end" type stuff.  Wow, we're at the end of the game already? I barely killed anything. The last boss has 3 phases...and we killed him the very first try!....even though we barely killed any monsters the whole game or gave a shit about loot or our characters. That should tell you how pointless the entire game is. Yeah, we had to tryhard and sweat a little mechanically during the last boss, but it was still very managable and doable considering how little effort we put into powering up our characters. Makes me think maybe we made the whole game easier by not constantly leveling up and making the enemies scale up alongside us, Who knows.

Turns out Acts 1-3 is the original release of the game in 2020. But recently in late 2023 they released Act 4 alongside with the Console release of the game. I have no interest in playing post-release content, and for multiple years the games ending was the last Act 3. I'm satisfied with just finishing Act 3, getting the original ending, and not having to play another act of what I know will be more of the same shit. I'm just not interested, I beat the game. Its not good. Its funny because they put out this big advertisement like "Wolcen: ENDGAME update" and stuff. Who the hell wants to play the 'endgame' here? Not me. Wolcen had real potential in the art designs, mostly enviornmental, the UI is decent, great graphics and you can tell a lot of work and money went into the production and cinematics of the game, but the actual core RPG gameplay just totally missed the mark. Also can I point out how the game has a "Story mode" one more time!? The hardest difficulty (by default) is a fucking joke and breeze to play through, so I cant even fathom how easy "Story mode" has to be.
I'm not sure who Wolcen appeals to, gullible people who cant figure out that a game is extremely shallow and is just wasting your time with 'fake' gameplay? Who knows.

3/10