Cloudheim

You see those characters that appear in the trailer? Those cool looking and well designed characters? I've met most of them, and none of them left an impression on me. This is how I feel about this game in general. Except for the combat. The base/shop building is "cool" but most of it still boils down to a more lackluster version of your typical open world base builder. I play a lot of open world survival craft so I may carry bias, but having a basebuilding system in place that's (from what i've played) perfectly safe from anything and only serves your income and crafting stations, you're not incentivized at all to build something cool nor something practical. Shelter is arbitrary, you have to "unlock" floors and walls so starting out things will just look ugly. Combat being fun is good, but combat feeds into equipment and loot, which turns into equipment and money, but there's really only novelty that money can buy you, in the sense that you get stronger and master weapons and the game hopes that you don't get bored of fighting things all the time with its arsenal. There's an imbalance in how the game feels. Characters and NPCs don't have bland faces, they look at me like they're brimming with personality, and yet all I find when I interact with them is 4 lines of dialogue about this giant turtle, and there's probably 10 NPCs like this, that or tutorial dialogue. That's not the main problem. There's no story here, no "meta quest", you basically fall into the world and it tells you to explore. The game feels like a sandbox while it presents itself as an adventure. Exploration. Exploration is maybe the second best thing they did for the game after combat. But like I said, everything starts to feel empty after a while. Ruins don't have stories, wrecked ships that are only accompanied by elite enemies and buried treasure, mountains that only reward exploration but the only thing the game can offer is loot. Everything just ties back to loot, and if you like that, then this game is for you, but I lost interest really quickly.