Wayfinder

I think there's a reason why DE dropped the deal on this game. It is not very good, not very fun, not worth your time. Just buy PalWorld, Valheim, No Man's Sky, Dragonsword Awakening or something else. I have a soft spot for devs who got some issues with their publishers, tried to convert their game to single-player without monetization. I bought and played it 4 hours 2 years ago at release, but got buried by absolute bangers that year. (Shadow of the Erdtree, Spare Marines 2, Black Myth Wukong, POE 2) I gave it a fair shake recently because I got nothing to play. What a waste of time. Art Design/Vibe: 8/10 - Very good initial impression. They are going for the cartoony proportions with the characters and architecture. Not jaw dropping or anything, just decent enough. - I don't like the high-tech/cyber space looking portal while in a fantasy setting. Not sure what we're going for here. Story/Lore/Quests: 2/10 - Instant skip, typical with MMO's/Chinese Gatcha games where you'll get waterboarded by proper nouns and terminologies. Not the biggest deal breaker. - I couldn't care less for the lore. Not super interesting. - Questing, typical MMO questing, kill a bunch of stuff, pick up stuff, go talk to this guy then that guy, turn in for rewards. There's job boards like MMOs, there's Main quests, there's chain of side quests. - The worst offender for the side quests is that it'll require you to run "expeditions", their versions of dungeons. It can start by RNG from inside these said dungeons and go anywhere from 10-20 minutes long. The issue is that, it will require you to run these dungeons multiple times - RNG triggers an NPC to give you a side quest while inside an instanced dungeon > you have to complete the dungeon run first where the quest was initiated > load a new instance of the same dungeon > fetch a thing or kill a thing > complete the dungeon run > load a new instance again of the same dungeon the 3rd time > fetch another thing or kill a thing > complete the dungeon run > go back to the same dungeon, the 4th time, to turn-in and complete the quest > complete the dungeon run. Map Design/Exploration/Dungeons: 2/10 - There are open zones with instanced dungeons. - There's no wow factor in the open zones. - The open zone Map UI is exceptionally bad, you can't make out the terrain/elevation/invisible walls. It's like literally like someone did it MS Paint. You have one job. - World traversal is a complete jank. There's double-jump but you can only double-jump then ledge grab and very specific ledges. There's no flying, no climbing anything, there's a mount but it's pointless. - The press and hold jump button to jump higher, whoever designed this, you're stupid. Then you would trigger the double-jump after holding the jump button and you got like zero forward momentum. And yet, they have the audacity to put some "jumping" challenges. - The dungeons are very claustrophobic and not enough mob density. Not sure how 2-3 players would play in this space. - The dungeon modifiers specially are the worst offender here. Either constantly dropping aoe poison, constantly dropping aoe bombs on the ground/when opening chests, constantly dropping aoe burn, aoe explosion on kill. Basically Day 1 POE 2 modifiers, the most unfun design ever, you kill something then explodes on your feet type of thing on a claustrophobic space. Character/Equipment Progression: 1/10 - The RNG and over-complexity of this game rivals Korean MMOs. Even if you gift this to me for free, I'll never play it again. Sure there's a lot of content and grind here you could argue, but is it a satisfying and meaningful time spent? - There's character levels, capped at 30 for some reason you only get 7 skill points out of 12 to max out your 4 active skills, why? - There's Wayfinder rank, not sure what the cap is, and I'm also not sure how this increases. From leveling this you get Talent points, which is kind of a stat stick tree. - There's the Affinity, 3 affinity with max cap of 15 each, basically more stat stick multipliers but for some reason, you won't be able to max it out at 45, you only get 41, why? - You have echoes, have 5 different types, more stat sticks. Offensive echoes would roll with offensive stats, defensive echoes roll with defensive stats. - You have your weapon and 3 accessories with a set bonus, only 1 of 3 should be craftable it seems. All 4 equipment plus your character will gain echo slots where you slot said echoes. The bigger RNG comes from having the correct/more desirable echo slot types. 3-4 of these per equipment that drops, on top the RNG of actually getting the accessory piece you would need to form a set bonus or the weapon you are building towards. - There's "awakening" of character and weapon type where you gain passive bonuses on top of the weapon itself. Combat/Boss/Scenario Design: 2/10 - This game is not that difficult on Normal Difficulty + World Scaling. World Scaling is almost mandatory as side quests will have you run lower level dungeon over and over. - Controls are snappy enough where you can dodge cancel an animation. Weapon and character active abilities are serviceable, fun enough to press on rotation. - Boss designs are pretty bad where they are going for action RPG on the combat with dodge i-frames/stagger bar/stamina meter but the bosses are designed like an MMO. What this means is you got invulnerability phases, a bunch of nonsense like bosses/ads constantly dropping damage markers on the ground from constant small circles, moderately sized circles, large circles, room-wide rectangles, etc. - Most of the time you are running around avoiding BS, constantly dodging and killing ads, instead of hammering and using your skills at the boss.