It’s a Torchlight-themed early access MMORPG. Except it’s only sorta Torchlight-y, it isn’t actually in early access, and it isn’t really an MMORPG. It’s like they imported Torchlight assets into whatever generic game engine Perfect World has hanging around, rigged up some incredibly linear quests, and then shipped it.

I played it on Xbox, because Game Pass, but I can’t imagine it’s that much better on PC. Certainly not paying $40 to find out, though.

I played to level 20, completed the first act. It just . . really wasn’t good. Class design was bland. After unlocking some Unique weapons it got a little less bland, but I got to a really not-fun rut where I’d have a build based on transformative unique weapons, but would be capped at lower DPS because the unique was a lower level. They have a Diablo 3-Style legendary aspect system, but that doesn’t work if the thing you need is part of a set bonus.

As a final anecdote, I experienced one of the most frustratingly condescending things in this game: I played on hard, because it really wasn’t a hard game with challenging mechanics. At one point I got stuck in a wall. Because sure why not. Couldn’t town-portal back, couldn’t dash out, full-on stuck OOB. The game helpfully killed me as a “solution” to this state, which, ok fine, that’s one way to do it. . . but because it’s a Diablo-style ARPG it costs to re-rez you. So I ate the 1500g or whatever it was to respawn on my corpse, assuming it’d put me back in bounds. It didn’t, it respawned me right where I was, out of bounds, and killed me again after a few seconds of flailing about. Ok fine, there’s other options of respawning at the dungeon start or back in town, problem solved.

The time loss was frustrating, and the needless gold loss was frustrating, but what got me was that after dying because the game is built poorly, the game had the audacity to throw up a “Maybe try normal difficulty???” message on the screen. This was the ONLY time I died in my time playing the game, and I probably could have gone up one more tier, and it was due to the game detecting I was in an unplayable state. And it gave me a “awww is hawwd mode too dwifficult for dis widdle baby gamer???” message. Nope, I’m done.