I don't have any play time on the Steam version, but I have about 2K hours (Chunk of that being AFK, but still) on the web version, which is identical to this version. It's just a chromium wrapper.
The game is mildly entertaining whilst leveling, but pressures you to buy more inventory slots at the price of $1 per slot, by making quest items take up room. And upon reaching the max level, thirty, the professions require you to buy more slots or sell a bunch of soulbound loot. The professions are extremely grindy, requiring you to go back and collect absurd amounts of resources from earlier stages of the game, which cannot be bought (except from other players), and then craft that into varying, now useless, items, until you reach the next stages' ingredients. Repeat that three times for each stage, and then do all three stages seven more times for each profession, or at least the five required for your class.
Finishing the professions are required to get the second-best gear in the game, or hope slightly-inferior versions will drop from the base level thirty dungeon, which gives you two items for about twenty or thirty minutes of wave dungeon, where the only thing that changes is the amount of damage that monsters deal to you. On top of that, the items granted to you could still easily be worse than what you have, or in the rare chance they're better, the game pulls from all classes, making it very likely it'll be useless for your class.
Once you grind out the professions and have this second-best gear, you'll be able to run through the Bitterburg dungeons, where the best loot in the game drops*. However, a full party of five is usually required, and each takes about an hour to run. Only three items drop from each dungeon, one per boss, and they drop for the entire party, meaning if a coveted item does happen to drop (again, pulled from all classes, of which only three classes are really used), you likely won't get it.
So let's say slog through that with hundreds of the exact same two dungeons done over and over. There are three pieces of gear that you can't get from the Bitterburg dungeons, in reality. Advanced boots and gloves, and an advanced weapon. The weapon can only be crafted by learning a soulbound book you receive as soon as you reach level thirty, and requires you to be level thirty in your profession, so if you scrap it while doing professions and later decide to build that class, sucks to be you. In addition, when the three additional classes were added five years ago, current players were not given these books, locking them out of these classes to an extent.
The advanced gloves and boots can only be received by gambling with Royal Bear Crates, which can only be unlocked by doing seven repeatable quests each day, one for each dungeon in the game. Once you spend thirty minutes getting one (and then walking all the way back to the main town at the top of the map, as there is no sprinting or fast travel, save for party teleport scrolls [and yes, teleportation can easily be implemented. It even comes back every Christmas in the form of Christmas cards, which can instantly teleport you to a town.]), you have a less than one per cent chance of getting the gloves or boots for your class, and usually get materials worth, at most, a tenth of what the crate would have sold for to other players. And due to a known glitch that has been around for years, you will get the minimum specs on those gloves and/or boots.
There are seven classes in the game, and they can be freely switched between at will by changing your armor and weapons. While that sounds great on paper, There are five pieces of armor for each class (head, chest, gloves, legs, and shoes), as well as seven different weapons for each class, meaning half to a third of your inventory (depending on where you are in-game, as you are given a few single-slot inventory upgrades), including the hotbar, is now filled with gear for a single class. Wanna develop another one? You better be finished with your professions or purchase fifteen dollars' worth of inventory.
Most games of this genre would include a character swapper too, in order to allow you a new character to play through the game and try a different class. But not in Stein. In fact, creating a different account will get all of your accounts banned indefinitely, usually for years.
This game was developed by the developer Elros over a period of a year back in 2018, at which point it was handed over to the current "developer," Freeky. Since then, nothing has happened has happened. A few balance changes and some bad seasonal updates that are more an excuse to add hundreds of dollars worth of cosmetics to the game. And they return the same time every year in a different color. In fact, the developer will only respond directly to you if you express difficulty with in-game purchases; you have to communicate with him via moderators elsewise.
In that eight years, Freeky has promised to release virtually every feature that players want in the level forty update, which was originally slated for 2020. Steeds so you can actually move around faster? Level forty. Proper trading system between players? Level forty. Day/night cycle, which has been showcased as early as 2019? Level forty. Nothing has come of it. He even stopped updating the roadmap back in 2024 so people would stop asking questions.
Since then, the game has fell further into disarray, with the US and Asia servers offline for weeks or even months at a time, and a concurrent playerbase of about twenty, most of which are AFK players.
TLDR: Game abandoned save for cosmetic updates and poorly-made seasonal updates, with extreme monetization and grinding at the end-game. Passable for a few hours if you play with a group up to that point, though.
