I admire the devs for sticking with the game and releasing something to the players on their own dime instead of bailing, that's why i didn't refund. As someone who primarily plays MMOS, this was my most anticipated game at the time of release. We know now that didn't work out, but I still enjoy playing ARPG's single player, so after I heard things turned around I picked it up.

Unfortunately, because this game was Frankensteined together, it's neither an MMO or a good single player RPG. A lot of MMO mechanics were left over, such as running the same dungeon (with even the same puzzles) over and over for progession. These are things I tolerate in an MMO because me and my friends are blasting through them. As a single player game it becomes repetetive very quickly.

this game is worth the money. Very nice game to play solo and collect everything OR super fun with friends, doing dungeons together.

Im so glad that they decided to make this game in a solo/coop looter shooter instead of the MMO.. I just hoped they would add more wayfinders, more weapons, bigger maps etc.. they have a really fun game at their hands but it's not so big imho..

Hopefully they will add more or they will make Wayfinders 2 even bigger !!

Wayfinder is a stylish and well-put together game that ultimately I found bland and uncompelling.

The art style and the world of the game is very crisp, very reminiscent of something like World of Warcraft that blends an illustrated style with more detailed textures for things like stonework, timbers, and terrain.

The game ran well on my machine, maybe a few hiccups here and there, but I didn't have any egregious slowdown or crashes.

You have "classes" kind of that allow you to have a set of abilities you can cast, as well as a weapon that you use for most of your primary attacks. The weapon isn't locked to the class, and changing the weapon changes the style of gameplay. There is a huge variety here to try, from sword and board to firearms, and this selection of weapons is fantastic and a huge plus in the game's favor.

For customization, each "class" is a character who you can change color palettes of, but you don't really get any deeper options. As you play you unlock dyes that can be used on your weapons. Not only can you unlock dyes, but each weapon you collect of a type, say swords, unlocks the model of that sword you can use as a cosmetic skin to use on any sword. This kind of acquisition-based customization is something I found myself desperately wishing that other games did instead of selling poorly-designed and expensive cosmetics in their shops as microtransactions.

There is some kind of in-game shop I gather? I received a notice that I received some kind of currency that is specific to an in-game store, but I was never able to find this and I can't tell if it's leftover from some of the patches they did to rework this to a single-player game versus if this was something that still existed or not. If there is an in-game shop, be advised that apparently there is no way to access it...

Which, speaking of, if this was not clear, the game at some point was meant to be an MMO, and after a rough go of it, the game was revised to be more like a coop RPG game that can be played mostly offline unless you're playing with friends. The efforts to do so must have been massive, and even if I am still not a fan, it must be commended that the devs are invested enough to take the feedback about the game and try to make changes to allow it to shine.

There are dungeons and an overworld to explore, and the rest you probably know; you gain experience and more equipment by exploring and doing more dungeons, which allows you to explore more and do more dungeons, etc, etc.

So, if this sounds good on paper, why aren't I recommending this? There are a few things that really ring hollow to me. Firstly, the classes. None of they seemed fun or interesting to me. Since switching from an MMO into a more offline experience, the game did not seem to adjust your class selections, and at the beginning you are granted a choice between I think 3 starting classes. The rest you need to find and unlock by exploring. While maybe this made sense in the MMO version in order to incentivize running content multiple times and extend player engagement, I was bitter about having to choose from a few uninteresting characters when I know more exist. But even more critically, not a single one of these characters looked fun. I grudgingly selected Niss, The Shadow Dancer, and my suspicions were confirmed that I would not like her gameplay. But the larger problem is that no one in this game has an interesting kit. In a game with skills like this one, I expect skills to move the needle in combat, to be some kind of X-factor that makes the characters feel unique and powerful, especially since all characters can use all types of weapons. But really none of the skills made me want to bother to continue using them. Part of the reason is how hard they were to even use properly, which I will discuss below when I talk about the camera. But you never use a skill on a character and think, "what a great ability." Because they were so ineffectual, I stopped using them entirely, just playing with the primary weapon, and if your skills are so boring and so bland as to feel like I'm doing chore to weave them into combat in your game, then this is a red flag. But as I said, none of the characters looked interesting. Not a one of them. Maybe I would have tried to stick it out to unlock someone else if there was someone I was really excited to play, but all of them seemed boring.

The game also takes a really, really long time to get going. Again, the remnants of the MMO phase of this game leave you with a large hub city that is largely empty. The amount of time I had to spend running around to talk to different NPCs was annoying, it felt like it was deliberately wasting my time. I am aware this may come off as the impatience of someone who just prefers faster paced games, but everything from the initial intro and mission, to the grindy tutorial that you are forced through when you first start the game, to the glacially-paced elevator that you must wait around on in order to transition from the hub city to explore the overworld all tested my patience. I was too bored, too frustrated, too tired to fully engage with content once the game stopped lecturing me long enough to do so. There are quests you can get from NPCs in the hub, but I really didn't want to do them. Other games might garner you with a quest to unlock some checkpoints outside of the city, but Wayfinder seems to think what players really want is to ride a huge, sluggish elevator back and forth as you locate crates and kill specific mobs and then waste even more time running back to turn these errands in.

When you are actually in combat, it's hard to control and feels really unsatisfying and half-baked. In Wayfinder, you always attack toward where you camera is pointing, which maybe works better on console, but on PC it drove me crazy and ruined combat. In a game like Wayfinder, with lots of encounters having multiple enemies and projectiles flying around, you need to have a high level of situational awareness. Now, in a shooter, of course you attack where you look because it's your crosshair. In a game that also has melee weapons, obviously I like any normal person would execute an attack and hold my WASD keys in the direction of what I'm attacking as I pan the camera around to make sure I don't have anything I need to dodge to avoid. And every time I did this, my character would start attacking wildly off to the side and completely miss whatever they should have been attacking because they were attacking towards where I am looking and not where I am pointing with my movement keys. With the exception of the guns in the game, the camera and the direction of your attack should never be linked in this way. This alone quite quickly convinced me that this would not be an enjoyable experience for me, and I am at a loss for why they implemented the combat and attack system like this. There is no one other game in my years and years of playing games I have ever seen do this, and I think it's clear to everyone except the Wayfinder team as to why.

This is unfortunately the fatal diagnosis of Wayfinder; it is not a fun game. There isn't anything that pulls me in, there isn't any "wow" moment, it's physically a large space filled with things, but the contents of the overworld felt stretched too thin to be substantive. I wanted to give Wayfinder a fair shake, but I could not force myself to continue playing it. Wayfinder sits in a category of games that cause me to feel exhausted when I think about played, that I will look for reasons to avoid starting up. I just cannot recommend a game like this.

I wish the team luck, and hopefully they can improve something about this game to give it its primary hook, but as it stands now, it just feels too bland for me to choose it over other similar titles.