I’m already feeling bored of this after 7 hours. The combat and character movement mechanics are decent for the most part, although they need some intensive fine-tuning. The movement feels just a tad bit floaty and I hope dynamic foot placement during locomotion is eventually added. Movement needs to feel sharper.

I found the setting to be unoriginal and bland. It takes generic high fantasy art styles with cartoon visuals. The world isn’t that interesting and it feels like the same formula I’ve already seen a 100 times. Even some of the enemy designs are just very generic and similarly seen in numerous other games with no added detail to them to make them stand out. There are multiple aspects of this game I have experienced in every fantasy game I’ve ever played. I’d go as far as to say this game feels like an imitation of Immortal Fenyx Rising, Fortnite, or Genshin Impact. There’s really nothing about the games environmental design that makes it stand out from other games. The textures all feel very copy and paste and nothing looks different to each other. Every rock has the same texture, every blade of grass, every tree, there’s no diversity in vegetation or landscape. Most of the islands sort of all look the same as well. Most enemies are copy and pasted with appearance.

I really also do not like the map design at all. It’s based around floating islands requiring flying to get around. And just to unlock flying you have to have progressed like 5 hours into the game. It severely hinders the feeling of freedom and exploration. I don’t want to be forced into questing or have exploration locked behind having to complete a quest.

In terms of the combat system, I found it to be somewhat stale. The melee weapons don’t feel that good and archery is downright awful even with the hand shake perk. It feels like my character has crippling Parkinson’s disease. The melee play very poorly resembles a souls-like. It needs a large overhaul especially in terms of progression. Progression feels extremely slow, needing copious amounts of flame to spend to get upgrades and you get these from enemies so the game turns into a big grind. Skills should be obtained with simple skill points from leveling up. And movement when attacking is heavily restrictive. Once you swing your weapon, you are locked into animation and can’t cancel out in order to perform a dodge or any other action. The player should have total freedom of movement in combat. I would take a look at Conan Exiles and what they did. Imo the step-dodge should be scrapped and replaced with a roll. Allow the player to use this ability in quick succession and the dodge should immediately cancel any attack.

I also can’t tell what this game is trying to be. A challenging souls-like, a sandbox building game, a story and quest-driven experience, or a survival crafting game? Everything is kind of just blended together a bit messily.