Recent reviews by P13

The game feels super underwhelming;
- Combat plateaus almost immediately with progression, with almost everything past the first hour being minor numerical upgrades. Some small utility bonuses such as fire damage on melee weapons, but overall nothing really changes.
- Mage builds peak within the first hour of play, upon unlocking the 4-combo spells, and get little additional progress past that. Two "spells", alt cast, a defensive utility, and the same minor numerical upgrades on armour.
- Speaking of armour, the set bonuses are EXACTLY the same across archetypes - Tier 2 and Tier 5 melee armour give the exact same buffs, the only values that change is defensive values. There's no real reason to craft half the armour in the game, the armour increases didn't really feel like they made a meaningful impact for the bulk of progression, and skipping tiers is easy.
- Skill progression is underwhelming, Magic is -stamina cost on casting, melee is -stamina cost on attacks, both have some small utility spells added along the way (like the aforementioned fire melee weapons). With that said, the basic armour set bonuses have more of an impact on archetypes than the level progression.

Building is fine, farming is fine.

Crafting is clunky, resources drop on the floor and XP goes to whomever picks them up, anyone interacting with a chest locks out the contents of that chest for anyone attempting to craft (incredibly annoying in coop). This isn't an issue for building, just crafting.

The world feels small, currently. I know there are plans to expand it over time, and add more regions, but the current regions feel tiny. The first post-shroud area of Enshrouded, or starting "island" in Valheim are enormous compared to the first three regions of Dragonwilds combined.

Aesthetics are fine, game looks okay for what it is. That said, I have a 4090, the game defaulted to max settings, and it struggles to deliver 60 FPS consistently. A little more excusable than the likes of Borderlands 4, given Dragonwilds is an early access game, but it's another off the shelf Unreal performance hog developed by a team that would rather half-arse their lighting with Lumen than put in the effort to get good performance. There is no reason I shouldn't be seeing mid 200s or higher FPS, if tiny indie games can achieve it with similar aesthetics, so can Jagex.

TL;DR
Overall, 9 months after the game released, and one major content update later, it still feels like the game is undercooked. Compared to the likes of both Valheim and Enshrouded, the character progression is shallow and boring, the gear progression is practically pointless save numerical upgrades on damage/armour, and the world feels tiny.

For a game developed by two students, this is a phenomenal game.
The gameplay is well polished, and well balanced. The art is beautiful. The game runs incredibly well. I have yet to find anything I find even mildly annoying about the gameplay.
The cherry on top is the incredible mod tooling that has been provided to help modders create more content.

It's a week before the end of the year, and this is absolutely my personal GOTY for 2025.

Good game

I want to enjoy this game, in fact I did enjoy the first 15 or so hours of it. I'm not the biggest fan of the design of the map, or the aggressive monetisation being shoved down my throat, but the actual moment to moment gameplay is really enjoyable and I'm sure will only improve with more time.

Now onto what I dislike;

The monetisation:
- Region rewards are buried at the bottom of the store, so you're forced to scroll through the entire storefront to find the not paid content
- Paid content rotates in and out. Can we not with the FOMO store? It's predatory and disgusting practices. Screams mobile game. Then again, with the plans to bring this to mobile, I'm sure it's only going to get worse.

The progression:
- Main "story" progression has you following a series of objectives and challenges that tutorialise the game. Except it makes absolutely zero sense given you're taught how to manual in the third region, which you need to have completed 250 challenge objectives to unlock. In 250 challenges, I think I already know how to manual.
- 24 hour cycling challenges are obnoxious. I've been trying to progress the third area enough to get some unlocks I want, so I log in in the evening, I complete my 3-4 challenges that have rotated in for the day, then I quit the game after 30 minutes because there's nothing else for me to do. Let me progress at my pace, and offer a reward for coming back every day. Don't disrespect me or my time by demanding I return every day.

The aesthetic:
- Skate 3 looked pretty realistic, given its release date and hardware it released on. Skate (not) 4 looks like Fortnite. If I wanted to skateboard in Fortnite, I'd go play Fortnite.

The anti-cheat:
- Why? Why does this game have a kernel level anti cheat? Not only does it have a kernel level anti cheat, but it's infamously unstable and known to cause hard system crashes. Are you afraid that someone is going to kickflip across the map?

Performance sucks, but the game itself is fantastic. Solid improvement over BL3 for gameplay, once the game is actually optimised.

Edit: Was a positive review, but Randy Pitchford is a clown and needs to learn some basic PR skills, most importantly when to stop talking.

I opened this game
I saw it was Unreal 5
I started playing this game
I saw it was running at 300 FPS native 4k without upscaling or frame gen

As a fellow Unreal 5 developer that has worked on some major UE5 titles, this is worthy of some very high praise. The game looks fantastic and runs phenomenally well. Regardless of the gameplay, you've won me over within the first 5 minutes.

Solid little game; impressive visuals and fun gameplay. Little short, but it's $2 so it's not asking for much; more than worth the buy to support talented indie devs on their journey.

Fun gameplay, accessible respec and crafting costs allowing you to try out different builds as you play, and a roguelike mode that was surprisingly enjoyable.

Has some rough edges with the balancing, but that's hardly a point of contention as I still managed to beat the campaign and roguelike modes, and even post-campaign endless up to level 200+ enemies, so it's not prohibitively difficult.

As much as I love Stalker, and I know I'm going to love this game, I can't currently recommend it if you play on an Ultrawide monitor.

Yet again another developer has failed to change the default Unreal Engine config to change FoV scaling from Vert- to Hor+. Config edits don't work to override this for Stalker.

Is good YEP