Conclusion

ARPG players rejoice! There's finally a new game out that offers a fast-paced action-RPG experience. Wolcen is clearly inspired by titles like Diablo 3 and Path of Exile. What started out as a small-scale development project has now turned into a AAA gaming experience, and the game actually launched before schedule. Wolcen Game Studio was very smart to put it out just now, because Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 have been announced recently, which means they can ride the ARPG attention-wave from gamers who are starved to see new dungeon-crawling action. Unlike other titles, Wolcen includes both online and offline gameplay (you can't transfer characters). Online servers have been spotty, or down all weekend because the developer underestimated the massive success of Wolcen—they're working on fixing issues and adding capacity right now. In the meantime, I enjoyed a nice weekend in offline mode, and also brought you some benchmarks.

If you've played other ARPGs before, you'll feel right at home in Wolcen. The character creator, while basic, does give you a bunch of option to customize your player's look. I think adding a bit more choice would be nice, but given limited resources I can understand why they went with only a handful of options: male/female, four face variants for each gender, a dozen eye colors, eleven female hair styles, six for male, and nine beard options, plus colors—most bases are covered. The next step is choosing your starting fighting style: melee, archer, or caster. This is not a permanent choice, and Wolcen doesn't force you into a fixed-class playstyle. Basically, all this does is give you your starting gear.

Once your character is ready you're thrown right into the action and get introduced to the characters and story. I have to admit the story is solid, interesting, and captivating. Major story events are rendered through in-game cutscenes, which are of decent quality because of CryEngine's abilities. Gameplay is very entertaining; you're slowly learning the mechanics and gain new skills throughout the first hours. The skill tree is big (not POE enormous), but there are LOTS of choices, and you can reset it whenever you want. Combat is fluid in all classes. However, definitely go into the options and enable "Basic attack" as it lets you hold the mouse button for your character to keep attacking—by default, you'll have to spam left-click, which might cause the character to move, too. Holding left shift to attack without moving works, too. Wolcen does not have gamepad support, which for me is not a big deal, but I've heard other people complain and just wanted to mention it.

As expected from an ARPG, there's TONS of gear to find—most is randomly generated, but just like in other titles of the genre, unique items exist, too. A solid gemming system is implemented as well. Transmogrification (changing item looks while keeping its properties) is probably the best implementation I've ever seen. It gives you the results you want in a quick and painless way. While the developer has added a lot of quality-of-life improvements, there's more to be done. Selling items is a bit cumbersome, an option to sort the stash would be nice, and once you start researching stats and their effects, it would be immensely useful to be able to see your character's overall stats (crit chance, damage, resist, etc.) while your inventory is open, so you can try on and compare looted gear quickly.

While I found the difficulty laughable at the start, it does pick up as you progress through the acts. This forces you to learn mechanics and synergies, so you can dish out more damage while staying alive at the same time. Ground effects and movement mechanics are introduced progressively, too: don't stand in the fire. The difficulty curve has a bunch of spikes though, especially the act bosses are tough, much tougher than anything the game threw at you up to that point, so expect to die unless you already git gud in Bloodborne and are a master of dodging.

Overall, I have to say I'm extremely pleased with Wolcen and what it offers even though it's not a revolutionary new game. The class-less design paired with lots of skills and a large passives tree is great to explore, although I almost wish the cost for respeccing would be even lower. Why is there even a cost? My recommendation is to not worry about the online issues too much and rather spend a couple of days in offline mode to learn the game, how skills and effects work and what your favorite playstyle is. The developer already announced that there will be plenty of new content coming in the future, stating, "our internal plan is to release one free major gameplay extension every 4 months, and 1 new story expansion every 8 months. It will allow us to bring new exciting game modes, enemies, items, skills in the game, and also extend the story of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem."

Looking at our screenshots, I have to say these graphics are topnotch for an ARPG. The world is richly detailed and textures are excellent. Models, animations, and effects are great, too. The fact that an older version of CryEngine is used isn't really noticeable in the visuals. Wolcen only supports DirectX 11, which seems to make life a bit more difficult for AMD cards. When comparing our performance results with the average FPS numbers from my reviews we can see that NVIDIA clearly has a large advantage over AMD, especially at lower resolutions. At this time, neither AMD nor NVIDIA have released GameReady drivers for Wolcen, especially on AMD's side does it look like there's some potential for further optimization. Once you crank up the screen resolution, all cards lose performance compared to the average. I'm not sure why; maybe, it's the isometric top-down view, or simply a lack of optimization for higher resolutions.

Hardware requirements are very modest overall. For fluid 1080p gaming even a RX 570 or GTX 1060 is sufficient. To achieve 60 FPS at 1440p, a GTX 1070 or Vega 56 is enough—not bad at all. For 4K, the requirements go up drastically, though. Only a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti can drive 60 FPS here. VRAM usage is extremely reasonable, exactly 4 GB for 1080p, which ensures all cards can run this resolution easily. Even the GTX 1060 3 GB does fine and sees no FPS loss. For higher resolutions, VRAM usage is barely worth mentioning as it goes up only slowly (5 GB at 4K), and cards in this segment have 8 GB VRAM or more.

Wolcen is a solid new entry for the ARPG genre that will keep you busy for quite a while. Do not just look at the Steam aggregate review score since most people complaining are having issues with online gameplay. Time will tell whether it can compete with Diablo and Path of Exile in the long run. At $39.99, the game isn't terribly expensive, but not cheap either, especially considering POE is free to play. If you're an ARPG fan and starving for a Diablo-like experience with the class fluidity you dreamed about, don't skip this one.