Din's Champion

It’s a cool game, but it’s too clunky from a design standpoint in ways that future updates are unlikely to fix. I can’t recommend it. Lighting is terrible. Without a heavy investment in light runes, you’re in trouble, and the torches you can place don’t work underwater or in areas without background blocks. Crafting structures and chests need a lot of extra space around them, or the game will not allow you to place it. If the blocks beneath them are destroyed, they fall straight down and can end up occupying the same space when your base is damaged. This WILL happen during a recurring quest that damages blocks around you because an Overlord builds an “earthquake machine.” Block placement is slow, so building large structures takes forever. Placing platforms to navigate caves is just as slow. Fall damage is high and unforgiving. Environmental damage is the same. Using any fire spell spawns environmental fire that kills you in one hit if you aren’t building vitality, or in about four hits if you are. It barely damages enemies. There is a hardcore mode with several achievements tied to it. Many traps spawn with low visibility and still kill you in a single hit. Several enemies use a “caltrops” spell that will almost instantly kill you unless you stand still for its seven-to-ten-second duration. The enemy can still attack and kill you during that time. There are also many enemies which are invisible and do high damage. Unlocking every class is virtually impossible. One class depends on finding god shrines, which are rare, cannot be located, and get destroyed by projectiles, explosives, environmental fire, or enemy attacks. These are different from the god shrines some quests tell you to destroy. Another class unlock requires lifting five curses. The curse-removal quest is incredibly uncommon; in my playtime I was offered it once. There are twenty item tiers, and storing all of them close enough to a crafting station is unintuitive and difficult. Crafting stations don’t show the range they pull items from. Even at maximum chest size, storing twenty tiers of the various gems takes many chests. Experience requirements rise exponentially. People on the game’s Discord say you can enchant a full armor set with experience-gain multipliers, but you still need a few hours of grinding to get the gems for that armor, then a few more hours killing enemies to level. Completing each world’s main quest does not give a meaningful amount of XP. Going from level 90 to 100 took about 15 worlds of quests on level-100 worlds. Classes cannot be reassigned. Skill points within a class can. If you made your first character and later unlocked better options for your build, you have to roll a new character. Stat points cannot be reassigned. Most endgame gear requires a minimum of 400 points in a given stat, while leveling only lets you put 250 into any one stat. That means you have to enchant armor specifically for the bonus you need, and replacing that armor usually locks you out of your best weapon. Enemies are not intelligent and often get stuck behind walls, where you can snipe them with no effort. That’s balanced by most enemies one-shotting you if you don’t invest heavily in defense. If an enemy kills you, it gets promoted to a higher rank, which makes reclaiming your items harder. Navigation in liquid is miserable. Touching any liquid drops you to 30% jump height and 30% move speed, plus whatever extra debuffs that liquid has. You cannot place torches in liquid, so if you fall into a pool too deep to torch from above, you have to climb out blind. This might work as a tech demo. It does not feel like a game that left early access. It does not respect the player’s time.