Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem Review (Chewy Speaker)
Other reviews have (rightfully) discussed all the bugs, so instead I want to cover the absolute mess that is the over all game design up to and including Act 4.
The marketing tells you skills can be customized with 16 different modifiers each, however almost all of them consist of "deal 15% more damage". Most skills don't have any meaningful choices beyond "Summon one less minion but more damage."
For a classless game, you're still restricted on what skills you can use by your weapons. Unfortunately there's no main-hand spell weapon, so it's impossible to cast spells with a shield. The weapon restriction is a bigger issue than it might seem since it highlights how few skills there actually are in the game. There are 12 Warrior skills, 13 Rogue skills (Daggers get to use Warrior and some Rogue skills, so they are an exception) and 18 Mage skills, of which 4 are summon-related. Since you can slot 6 skills at a time, there's not much real choice unless you go for a hybrid build.
The rotating passive wheel is a much better idea in practice. It actually heavily restricts freedom since you are still bound by what sections are adjacent and the devs decided that different sections (Warrior, Mage, and Rogue) should never be next to their related sections, so you have to path all over the place just to make a simple Two-Hander build, for instance. And there are so few sections in total that if you want to be a Warrior character and survive early you better build around Block since that's your only option in the second ring. Thankfully pathing is not expensive, but that leads to another problem where you end up with so many passive points that there are no real choices to make in your build, though I guess that's fine because most passive nodes are pretty boring anyways, including the big notable ones.
Speaking of being better in practice, it's amazing the "Resource Opposition System" survived Alpha, much less a single proof of concept. Playing a melee character and want to use your sweet shield charge ability to engage enemies? Better hope there's crates nearby to generate Rage, because by default you lose ALL of your Attack resource after combat. The only way around this is to build your passive tree around rushing to a specific 3rd tier node that causes your Rage to regenerate instead of your Willpower. I don't know if I can think of a worse way to handle this, to be honest. If skills are going to be locked behind your weapons, have your weapons decide your "equilibrium point". All melee? Rage regenerates and Willpower fades away. Half and half? Have them balance out to 50/50. Even hybrid builds are made super clunky by this since if you don't have the necessary resource and you try to use a skill, your character does nothing. Why don't you auto-attack when out of resources since that generates? Instead, when you need to be teleporting away from danger, you're just standing in middle of it.
Entering Act 4 as someone who never played Wolcen before now is super confusing. The story goes from climax to immediate cliffhanger to your character suddenly showing up at the city from Act I and being VERY concerned about an NPC you met once at the beginning of the game. No explanation for the time gap or even what happened, and apparently no other characters are even worried about whether or not the Big Bad is still roaming around? I get that part of the point of the story is that you are supposed to figure out as a player what happened to your character, but last time you were in the (single) main city, the entire thing was falling apart and it was filled with refugees. Then you get to Act 4 and everything is fine all of a sudden and no one even mentions what happened to make things better.
Also, the (Act 4) voiced dialogue constantly differs from the on-screen text dialogue, and in three back-to-back conversations seconds apart, a captured enemy was immune to pain so you had to send for a specialist alchemist to get a truth serum, then when you go to send for the guy, instead your only option is for your court alchemists to work on a solution for the spell that is keeping him immune to pain, then after clicking the button to do so, you are told that the alchemists successfully cleared the no-pain-drugs from his system. Which is it? Spell or drugs? In addition, the tutorials for the endgame systems that are introduced in Act 4 clearly haven't been updated since its release, since they tell you to start Infrastructure projects that don't exist and congratulate you on successfully completing a project that wasn't even an option, much less one you did.
While some of the issues are baked into the DNA of the game, many others are either bugs that have existed since launch 3 years ago or design issues that they could solve in a single patch or even caught by a single QA person playing the opening of the brand new act with the sound on and also reading the text.
Ultimately it's clear that the Wolcen devs don't care in the least about their own game, so why should we?
If you're desperate for a new ARPG, it's fine at $10 USD but I wouldn't pay a cent more.