Witchfire

+10hrs in, I can confidently say this game has huge potential, yet some balancing issue regarding odd difficulty spikes, and grind. First and foremost the art and visual work achieved here are amazing. The maps have unique tones, the atmosphere is heavy and gritty between arcanic fumes, ashes and dirt, the wind's terrific howling and the somehow disturbing sun. Enemies design is pettrifying good, and environnements look grounded and threatening, yet are a beautiful sight. The immersion is perfected by the great soundesign, which also provides practical and satisfying feedbacks. Overall, the production of Witchfire is haunting, in the best way. Even optimization is on point, without any bug encountered on my end, and a rock solid 80/+100 fps. Now gunplay is nice too : the arsenal is pretty varied, the animations are cool and the guns kickback is nasty and gorgeous. The special abilities of weapons are well implemented in this build-crafting game. The spellcasting accompanying the arsenal is no less good, with fabulous FXs and chain effects. This is FPS entertainment as it should always be. And if you top that quality with the ability to customize your playstyle, you can only appreciate that passion. There's a flow of action in this shooter that is nothing you see often. It is super dynamic and requires map awareness, strategy and of course an unwavering focus. As for the (meta)progression system, let's say there's a ton of things to unlock (and upgrade), for finetuning and survivability purposes. You can loot and equip items in specific slots, in order to combo the desired effects, and hopefully forget about being glass canon. ===================================== Now I wish the experience would stand by that. But truth be told, the game has a glaring issue. Discovering a map for the first two times is a delight that reminded me of Elden Ring. But having to farm them somehow breaks the mystic of it. Indeed the game sadly hosts the modern trope of endless ressources collecting. And it doesn't deliver as well as expected. I don't think a video game is better if I sink 50-100hrs in it. But I believe it can become a disastrous experience if you design it like a slog. In short words : when you hit a difficulty wall (as it's the case for me in Velmorne map), you have no other choice but to farm XP from previous maps, which is a chore and a bummer really. Aside from that, I understood that when you increase difficulty (there's a thing calle "Gnosis" that you have to study in order to explore maps deeper), you can't roll back to the previous one apparently. So when you're reaching your limit, you need to farm and improve/level up your character and stuff, but you also have to pray that it makes a real difference. Otherwise your choices were a big waste of time. ===================================== I give Witchfire the benefit of the doubt, because it's a gem of craft on so many levels, it'd be a shame to not give it a chance. So I hope developers will reach balance eventually and offer a smoother progression curve.