Archaelund

Turn-based, isometric combat is decent and sometimes difficult. Story and the 1st person exploration of the lovingly designed game-world is fantastic = Oblivion vibes.

Bought this game back in Jan '24 time frame. Lots of bugs, some of them game breaking and the story was very short. It's had a few updates since then and figured I would give it another shot since they added new content since then. A lot of the old bugs got fixed, but a few of the game breaking ones are still here. Pro's The game is a good classic RPG party style game which I love. The story is fun, the world has a lot of hidden treasures and secrets when out exploring, and the combat mechanics (when they work) feel nice. Con's F5 and F9 are your most used keys because you will have to save and reload a LOT. -Combat can soft lock your game and force you to restart if your characters can't detect tiles to move to or enemies are pulled into combat even though they are behind a wall and unreachable. There is no way to flee combat so you're forced to reload a previous save. Battling on a hill? Better zip-zag the most inefficient route to get to that enemy if the tiles are ever detected to begin with. -Leveling up seems very minimal. EXP is slow to grind and Character growth is at a snails pace. I made a goblin rogue that even at level 5 could not equip the most basic of leather gear. It was still wearing his starting rags. -Fast traveling is only back to town, never to anywhere else. Enjoy the walking. -I swear there is something wrong with the combat on these % based metrics...90% chance to hit? Fail/miss 5/6 times. Yeah yeah... "90% chance isn't a 100% chance" arguement is as well and good, but reload a failed encounter and that same 90% chance fails 5/6 times again.... those statistics do not make sense. But when I have a 96% chance to disarm a trap or pick a flower I fail more often than not as well... so some kinda math doesn't seem to be mathing right. -Bored and need money? Sell rags. They give you 1 gold when selling, but costs 0 to buy back. -The map.... is.... AWFUL.... When zoomed out the locations of interest do not display their names unless you hover over them for a solid minute. When zoomed in the names show up a lot faster but that doesn't help if you are trying to find a location you are not close enough to zoom in at. The world map loads slow, has no interaction, and will sometimes just straight up crash the game. There is a HUGE problem with this games map and it's been like this since I bought the game a year ago. Nothing has been fixed since then in regards to the map. I have hopes this game will get some kind of turn around in future updates, but from the first time I played it til now... the only shine I've seen added to this game was more places to explore. The game still performs slow, game breaking bugs, and in need of some serious balancing issues.

Archaelund - it's good for what it is; it has a large world for you to explore, turn-based combat, a challenging low level start where every victory feels earned. It also has jank, combat initiation is weird and consists of walking right up to an enemy and clicking on it, if it isn't already aggresive and you are shoved right into combat. The NPCs, at this point, are so lifeless they might as well be T-posing. The world is big, but it's empty so there's no real [i]point[/i] to explore other than filling out a map. I still enjoy it though, and I would recommend it to not everyone though. There's a lot to love but hidden within a pig lol.

I'm early on, but I am intrigued! My closest point of comparison might be if Betrayal at Krondor took place in Morrowind? I delight in the first person exploration, but wish it were a little harder to get stuck on the geometry. You can poke in every little corner if you're obsessive, or count on your characters' spot checks to let you know when there's a tiny gem on the floor. Combat so far is very positioning-centric. You'll swing and miss a lot until you get a handle on how flanking works (perhaps paradoxically characters with high speed are more effective if you delay their turn until late in the round after the slower front liners have made opening moves). It looks like things open up quite a bit after just a handful of levels, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how that goes. The most interesting aspect to me are the classes. It looks like maybe 40% of them are available as of this review, but there are solid thematic mini stories you can tell based around them already. I've got a meathead pikeman who's noble, assumes they're good at everything, and rushes into trouble where she is swiftly overwhelmed. Her long-suffering squire carries her stuff, does most of the heavy lifting in terms of tactical victories, and tries desperately to talk his lady out of the messes she flings herself into. They've employed a guide (navigationally and spiritually) to try to steer their expedition towards some semblance of success. Finally, there's a thieving goblin that won't stop following them around because once the monsters are dead she's the only one that can acquire the treasure from locked and trapped treasure chests. It's cool! I can't wait to see more. Edit after about 12 more hours: this game rules. please see a brief transcript of my hapless squire Dunkel's very bad day: Dunkel suffers 2 damage Dunkel suffers 2 damage Dunkel suffers 2 damage Dunkel suffers 2 damage Dunkel suffers 2 damage Dunkel suffers 2 damage Dunkel checks for Diplomacy (66%) and rolls 17... Success! Each party member gains 27 XP Dunkel has gained a new Talent: Visions of Ancient Horrors Dunkel is insane

If you loved Exiled Kingdoms this is a must have. Classic RPG style, plenty of depth, but intuitive enough to enjoy your first play through. Combat is challenging enough to make successful builds and combos feel rewarding. I hope to see some polish and shine in the full release, and look forward to exploring more of the world in future updates. Impressive work for a single developer!

Purchased this gem because I needed a game to play and I played Exiled Kingdoms. It's a lot like EK except this game is better in every way possible. The game needs a few brushing up but for the most part it's very polished; great story and lots to do. The character build (picking your stats, career, skills, magic) is almost overwhelmingly in depth - and that's a good thing. So much possibilities and replayability from that fact alone. I'm on my 4th build after i put in 40hrs on my 3rd build. Thoroughly enjoyable for people that are into the meta of char builds. The biggest fun for me from this game is making that perfect group (of my imagination ofcourse) and watching them grow into the heroes that I envisioned.

games a masterpiece lol i dont mean visually which is still fine but at the moment about 50 hours of playtime and always adding more always updating its OLD school DnD its eye of the beholder its daggerfall its amazing just get it

"Explore a vast open world..." Yeah, right. It's appalling how bad the play balance is in this game. Don't plan on getting very far in anything but "Explore" mode. Having fully explored the beach, I haven't seen a party survive the first level of the tower. This needs some serious tweaking before it becomes playable.

I do like what they are doing here. It really has the potential to be something special. One thing it does very well, is give that sense of challenge, that "Wow I survived and conquered" feeling missing from way too many modern RPGs. Pros- 1) The sense of freedom to explore the world as you please. 2) Interesting class system, where you choose "careers" that can be changed every 3 levels. This is very promising as it offers unlimited potential to build unique builds. 3) The tactical combat shows ALOT of promise. 4) Great enemy designs. 5) Fitting atmospheric music. 6) Recruitable NPCs, with room to really expand on this. Cons 1) Need more "randomness" in both loot and monster encounters (You can get random encounters when resting, but its too little of a good thing). These are key to replay value. 2) Level caps are WAY to low. The heart of an RPG is watching your characters survive ordeals and grow powerful from the experiences. Once your characters stop developing, that's when people get bored and move on. Wizardy 8 had an amazing character development system that kept player characters growing right up to the final battle. Something like that is needed here in some form or another. 3) Game still needs to be "optimized" but it IS a work in progress so I can't really say much more than that till I see how it is when completed. As it is now, it feels a little clunky. Things like sound effects when characters move and attack, battle crys and screams of pain would do WONDERS for the combat for example. 4) The recruitable player characters is a great addition. Not sure how many you can have at once in your roster, but I hope it is expanded upon. So what's the con? They NEED personality- More imput while they journey with you. Maybe even personal quests. That's my opinion as like many of you, a veteran of the genre. I TRULY do think they are making something special here though. Its definately worth the current asking price and if it grows the way I am hoping it does, the ones who got in on it early will be getting a great bargain. Because it has the potential to stand alongside the titans like Wizardry, Ultima, or Elminage with a few tweaks and tune ups. At least worth keeping an eye on if not outright buying early access for any fan of this genre.

Firstly, this is a great game as it is. Yes, there is some jank, but for 25$ I have had more fun with this game than many other AAA titles. If you enjoy old school RPG's, and tactical games that are challenging, then you will have fun. I honestly restarted the beach about a dozen times just trying out different classes and combos, and that was just a blast. I will also say that while the beach is fun to search and find secrets, the open world after the tutorial definitely gives a sense of disappointment. There were so many locations where it would have been great to find something and it was just bare and empty. It really feels like they have all of this space to put things, and just haven't used them yet. At least, that is my hope.

The same charm as Exiled Kingdoms, a dev that actually listens to it's audience and a rare case of real care and dedication. This game will be stellar, but is already enjoyable now, although it's rough around the edges. If you can stand that, get it, otherwise wait until EA is over as I am sure it'll be sorted out by then.

I will say at time of review I've only just completed the tutorial and fallen off a ledge to my death where I then stopped and decided to write this review. This game is fun, and a very interesting idea combining the IMO better exploration of the first person RPG's with the IMO better combat of CRPG's it works fairly well playing almost like kingsfield during exploration and in combat closer to the newer CRPG's of recent years. My only issue with the game is like one bug in particular, after any combat it seems like shaders or something break, water, cobwebs or whatever was chosen for the shader (?) moves with your mouse up and down, with the water it can cause you to drown and heavily obscure the screen, my first run through of the beach I couldnt see any of the loot so I beat everything naked. its fixed by saving and reloading after a fight but it takes me out of the game to have to do that every time or deal with whatever is floating.

While Gameplay have changed it still has the cozy atmosphere of Exiled Kingdoms, I enjoy it so far Edit: So far my ass, on the next level of diffuculty, I miss 6 times in a row with accuracy 56%, that is BS. Also fights may initiate while some enemies are behind walls and you get trapped in an engagement where you cannot hit them. PLs Make it so missing an attack at least do minimum damage and prematurely end fights to avoid such problems

Engaging. Exploration is fun.

Fun game