Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem wants desperately to be the next great action-RPG in the Diablo lineage. You get an isometric loot-fest with gorgeous Cry Engine visuals, a classless character system, and a wheel-based passive skill tree that genuinely rewards theorycrafting. On paper, the bones are strong. In practice, the game has spent years fighting its own launch reputation, and that reputation was earned. The classless build system is the headline feature and, honestly, it delivers more than the mixed reviews suggest. Rather than locking you into a warrior or mage archetype, Wolcen lets you mix skills freely, pairing physical melee abilities with spell slots, cycling through a Determination and Willpower resource system that forces real decisions about how you spend your damage budget. The passive tree, called the Umbral Gems wheel, rotates in segments so you can align different class-adjacent stat clusters without fully committing to one identity. For build-crafters, there are genuine hours of enjoyment here. Skills level independently, support gems slot in to modify behaviour, and a late-game specialisation system adds another layer of customisation that Diablo 3 never bothered with. The campaign is where things get uncomfortable. Three acts take you through a story that starts with apocalyptic promise - you are a soldier-turned-exile caught between angels and demons in a world that clearly had ambitions toward BG3-tier lore density - and then stumbles badly in the second half. Dialogue is wooden in stretches, quest logic occasionally breaks, and the pacing collapses into a repetitive loop of kill-the-big-thing, collect-the-artefact, repeat. The writing never reaches the layered payoff that the worldbuilding promises in its opening hours. Side content is thin, and most of it feels like filler padding around the combat loop rather than anything that reveals character or advances the world. Post-campaign, the endgame involves Mandates (modifier-stacked map runs) and a city-building layer called Stormfall, where you invest resources to unlock passive bonuses and crafting options. It is functional and adds replayability, but it sits at a mechanical remove from the main action, feeling more like a spreadsheet tab than a world you inhabit. Multiplayer co-op exists and works reasonably well in practice, though the playerbase is thin enough that you will likely be running it with friends or solo. The honest assessment: Wolcen is a flawed but not worthless action-RPG that suits a specific player - someone who wants a classless loot-grinder with genuine build depth and does not need the story to carry its weight. If you are chasing narrative payoff or expecting the polish of a Path of Exile or Last Epoch, you will run into rough edges that no patch has fully smoothed. But if the Umbral Gems wheel catches your eye and you want 30-40 hours of theorycrafting your way through escalating difficulty, there is a real game here underneath the launch-era baggage. Monika, Scout Team