Enshrouded

This is my first time ever leaving a Steam review—that’s how much fun I had with this game, but also how intensely frustrating it was. As a huge fan of open-world survival crafting games with over 500 hours across titles like Palworld, Once Human, and Soulmask, I’d say Enshrouded is well-made, but definitely not well-refined. There is a fine line between rewarding difficulty and plain inconvenience, and this game leans way too heavily into the latter. Key Issues: Excessive Stamina Dependency & Painfully Slow Regen: Nearly every action—running, climbing, gliding, jumping, and blocking—drains stamina. Compared to games like Palworld, the regeneration rate here is ridiculously slow, making basic traversal feel tedious. Clunky UI & Item Handling: Consuming an item temporarily un-equips your weapon because using a hotbar slot counts as "equipping" it. In the heat of combat, this feels awful. Frustrating Traversal & Navigation: The map guidance is poor, often leaving you wandering for hours. Combined with sparse fast-travel points, no mounts/vehicles, high sprint stamina consumption, and slow regen, simply getting to an objective becomes a chore. Disjointed Quest & NPC Progression: Game mechanics are unlocked via rescued NPCs, but quests lack clear priority or sequencing. You are frequently left with no direction on how to progress or gear up properly. In terms of combat, atmosphere, building, and exploration, I genuinely enjoyed it. However, the core gameplay loop doesn't provide enough motivation to overlook these constant quality-of-life annoyances. Given that these friction points remain long after its 2024 launch, it feels like an intentional design choice rather than an oversight. Since I don't agree with this design direction, I'm moving on to other survival games.

I bought Enshrouded to explore a massive world, raid dungeons, fight monsters, kill bosses, and collect increasingly sweet looking loot. Instead, I spent a significant amount of time discussing the architectural merits of different building materials with my wife. [h3]This is a recommendation.[/h3] I'm not normally a base-builder, but Enshrouded's building system got its hooks into both of us almost immediately. A box became a house. A house became a base. The base became a fortress. Then came the trophy room, because apparently killing a giant monster isn't enough when you can also mount its head on the wall. And that's when Enshrouded's real hook becomes apparent: [b]Everything you do gives you another reason to go do something else.[/b] The world is genuinely fun to explore. The biomes feel distinct, there are secrets everywhere, dungeons are excellent, and "wait, what's over there?" routinely ends 45 minutes later with you realizing you've completely forgotten what quest you originally left the house to do. Combat is great too. There are plenty of [i]"OH ♥♥♥♥"[/i] moments where something you haven't seen before shows up, a boss rearranges your guts, or a fight forces you to actually learn how an enemy/engagement works. And there is [i]loot everywhere.[/i] Weapons. Armor. Materials. Monster trophies. Random things I absolutely did not need but carried home anyway because [i]this would look great in the trophy room.[/i] Progression strikes a great balance between finding gear and crafting it. Both feel worthwhile, neither makes the other pointless, and you're rarely stuck behind an arbitrary wall grinding materials before you're allowed to have fun again. The storytelling gets the balance right too. There's plenty of lore if you want it, but Enshrouded doesn't hold you hostage to tell it. Talk to the characters. Read the journals, books, letters and items scattered around the world. Piece together what happened. Or don't. Skip everything and go cave a Cyclops's head in with your wife. [b]Enshrouded respects both decisions.[/b] Even the puzzles and scavenger hunts are worth doing. They're approachable without being insulting and occasionally make you stop and actually figure something out instead of following a glowing waypoint to the answer. Explore. Fight. Loot. Craft. Build. Solve something. Find something weird. Admire the scenery. Get murdered by something you weren't prepared for. Go home. Prepare. Go destroy the [i]something[/i], then return home and mount its head on the wall. [b]10/10 survival game loop.[/b] I went into Enshrouded wanting an open-world RPG I could co-op with my wife. I came out with one of the best survival games I've ever played, a fortress we're ridiculously proud of, and strong opinions about medieval architecture that I absolutely did not have before. [h3]Buy it.[/h3]

If you are like me and like Action RPGs, but also Minecraft, this game might be just right for you. It's so good I keep forgetting it's Early Access. Playing solo and coop both works very well. I put in more than 100 hours and I am not nearly finished with my first playthrough, I keep getting sidetracked in a good way.

I really want to like this game and I'm on the fence, but as fun as it can be at times it also feels like the devs just want to see you suffer. Map traversal is a chore. There are fast travel points but they are far apart and the entire map is a shattered plain of deep pits and canyons filled with Fog/Shroud. You will end up running everywhere repeatedly while trying to avoid fog but having to traverse it constantly. There are random patches of red fog a bit everywhere. It's incredibly easy to wander into it as the boundary is ill-defined, doing so is more or less instant death, especially if you were already in regular fog with your bar half depleted. NPCs flood you with so many quests that you can't keep track of which is important and what order they should be done in. They also tend to send you to overlevelled areas even if you are several levels lower than the enemies there. In this game, a few levels difference can be huge! Harvesting resources for construction and certain crafting recipes is So, So grindy! Crafting is a mess. There are far too many crafting stations, each with a hodge podge of recipes, sometimes they will only have three or so recipes each. Some items need to be built by talking to NPC townspeople instead of using stations. Some crafting stations also need to be built by talking to NPC townspeople, hidden in their crafting list somewhere. Why cant the alchemist just have you build him a workshop and be the central hub for crafting things? Why does every item need a different NPC to upgrade? Why are there glider recipes spread between different stations and NPCs? It is. A. Mess! Some crafting recipes take real world minutes to craft a single recipe for a component you need in bulk. The worst part are the dogs. Dogs are bloody everywhere, ruin exploration, and are the least enjoyable part of combat. 4/5 deaths? It was dogs. They spawn in packs and bum rush you. They are too fast to really avoid or kite, and have a leap attack that both does heavy damage and closes the distance. Every time they will just sequentially leap at you, taking out a third to one-half of your HP on EACH HIT. Just imagine, 6 dogs, all charging like freight trains, just reaching you one after the other in a line, all chunking your health bar. You can't stand and fight, their attacks are too sudden and you will get surrounded if you survive the initial rush. You can't kite, you will get some distance and they will close the 10m gap before you can charge a fireball, now your out of stamina so your really f***ed! You can't take them out with fireballs, they tank 3 of them and don't cluster close enough to all be hit at once. A two-handed weapon works ok if you can manage to fight 2 at once, but you will still get steamrolled by packs most times. You can't block, they will stun you during the initial charge, leaving you out of stamina, and by the time the barrage ends the first is about to leap again. You can't really parry, they are so fast that while you might get one sucessful pary, 5 more are on your ass. You can parry one, maybe 2, but even if they get stunned you will be blocking enough hits to stun you half the time, and you can't punish the one you stunned because the other 5 are winding up for another leap. And they are EVERYWHERE! Walk through the forest? Wolf Pack. Scavenger camp? Dogs in your face along with a scythe guy and a ranged harasser. Old fort? Wolves. NPC sent you to a crypt as a side quest? Guess what? The Necromancers have packs of undead dogs! 4 deaths out of 5 dogs were involved. I can take out a boss several levels above me by whittling it down, or kite groups humanoids no issue, but dogs? There's no bloody counter! It's F***ing Atrocious! Maybe the game gets better once you learn more of it's systems and hit the right side of the power curve, but it's so aggresively hostile towards new players that it makes for a very aggravating experience.

survival slop. same old same old.

I would love to play this game but sadly it just does not work on my pc, even at lowest settings my pc is just overheating, and having to wait 20 mins for shaders to compile is not ideal, maybe will come back to this game on console when its released. I do understand its early access but the game also isn't cheap and for it to be this intensive on your system is why I don't recommend.

The optimization is terrible, in the current market something like 80% of people can't properly play this game. The combat lock makes fights boring, and the challenge comes from there being 20 of the same enemy doing the same attack at you over and over. The pace is awful. The wings remove the depth in exploration, but the objectives are so far from each other that gliding is the only reasonable option. The build system is needlessly complicated, the crafting is similarly so. Fast travel is necessary but removes any connection to the world around you. The base settings make it so you don't lose your wings when you die, which means there is no punishment for death. It's either too easy, so you roll through everything, or it's nearly impossible, so you die, teleport to the nearest tower, fly with the wings you got to keep even though you died, and then pick up your stuff and die again. No depth, just complication. NPC's have no life or depth either, and might as well be a crafting table with some quests. The weapon upgrade system is decent and the player upgrades are alright too. I really did try, four different worlds with different groups of people, and at least 10 hours on each one. It's right up my alley in genre and still, It's just not a very good game.

Somehow i get like reaaalllyyy bad FPS spikes even after the tutorial cave. Its literally unplayable. i tried every option available and it even spikes in performance mode with every option turned on low or off. I don't have this kind of issue with any AAA game out there :( Changing from fullscreen to borderless didn't help either sadly.... I surpass the minimum and the recommended pc specs that the game says i need though :/ I'd also wish if there were body picking options / face picking options instead of those presets where you can only change your hairstyle. The gameplay itself seems fine! i love the graphics (from what i was able to see so far) Refunded until release :(