It’s rather strange to be suddenly addicted to a game you didn’t even know existed before this week, but that’s exactly what has happened with Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, the unfortunately titled but actually quite good ARPG that has just made its official debut on Steam for $40 (use code “TeaWrex”!)
I guess once upon a time this was a Kickstarter title called Umbra, but over the years and $400,000 in donations later, it’s finally here, and outside of some rather bad server issues at launch, is racing up the charts on Steam here in its debut week. And once some of my fellow loot-shooter streamer buddies started playing this and posting screenshots that looked more or less identical to Diablo 3, I knew I wanted in.
Wolcen is a hybrid of Diablo and Path of Exile, though it leans heavily on the Diablo portion as you can tell even if you spend just a few minutes with the game, from its UI to its inventory system to its item rarity and affixes to its health orbs and even the damn segmented XP bar along the bottom. It is a Diablo clone through and through.
And that’s…fine with me.
Look, I don’t care if Wolcen is ripping off Diablo as long as it’s doing it well, and so far, it feels like a lost, low budget Diablo expansion that pulls all the right levers in my mind to get me to keep playing it.
About five hours in, I am still in Act I of the story. I am making my first character a rogue/archer, though with the way the game works, it feels like you can respec into either melee or magic-based classes at any point, as I keep unlocking skills for both of those, and you can re-allocate your skill points and character tree at any time for a cost.
The Path of Exile portion of Wolcen is apparent when you look at the massive, sprawling, node-based skill tree that is more intimidating than it actually is. I’ve just been going down the ranged weapon paths and there’s not really any huge risk because if you end up making some disastrous build, you can always respec later.
Wolcen, so far, is less obtuse than Path of Exile, easy to hop into and get ahold of the game’s various systems if you have any familiarity with ARPGs at all. Like Diablo, each skill can be modified as you level, though there are a lot more mods for skills here than in D3, which makes endgame builds potentially pretty interesting. I have started to find some unique purple loot which I believe is Wolcen’s version of legendaries, though I don’t know what a “full” endgame build looks like yet. I’m not sure anyone does, given that the servers for this game only became stable about a day ago.
I bounced off Path of Exile because I thought it was overly complex and the gameplay just felt…off to me. Wolcen is easier to grasp and gameplay feels better. It’s not as polished as Diablo, and yet for this much smaller team, I am deeply impressed with how much they accomplished here. The game feels as instantly addictive as D3 did between its gameplay loop and looting, and I can already tell I am going to be taking (at least one) character to max and beyond while I wait for the next season of Destiny to start.
There are…some issues. Some are technical, like the fact that in the opening cave, my archer was unable to target certain enemy bats which made progress quite difficult. Sometimes these elaborate levels can feel overly long and same-y as you encounter identical enemy clusters again and again and dispatch them in identical ways. And while there’s a story, it’s about as generic as you get in this type of game, though obviously that’s never been a strong suit of this genre. At least there are a few actual characters I remember and some actual cutscenes that may not be Blizzard CGI, but are pretty okay for such a small game all the same. Still, I’m not here for the story. I’m here for the loot and leveling.
This will not be the last time I talk about Wolcen because I’m going to move deeper into the game and report what I find. But I can safely say that with Diablo 4 probably 2+ years away at this point, you could do worse than a game like this to tide you over until then, and I assume it will only continue to improve over time. So far, I am extremely impressed and unfortunately for me and my work schedule, painfully addicted.
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