Quick overview - The game has plenty of potential and takes some getting used to in order to enjoy. Recommend playing with friends and getting the game on sale.
Full Review *as of an hour of gameplay*
Wayfinder is a fairly basic ARPG that has you select a pre-built character and their matching skills and playstyle. Each character has 4 abilities and a weapon ability, as well as various passives. You can upgrade these abilities as you level up, but your character will always only have these specific 4 skills and weapon skill.
This somewhat limits what you can do in build variety but given the myriad of other mechanics, I think this is the better decision to make rather than going all out in the manner of PoE or Diablo and having an entire skill tree.
Speaking of the other mechanics, there is A LOT of clutter when first starting this game. You are hit with cutscenes, lore drops, assumed character death, timeskips, and tutorial pop ups that flash on the side of the screen mid-combat where you do not have time to read how a mechanic works and when you finish the fight the pop up is already gone.
This game has REQUIRED reading and there is a decent chunk of it. It is very important to stop and read how each ability works in tandem with every other ability. It is paramount that you read each artifact and stat block to understand how your abilities are MEANT to flow instead of just experimenting and finding your own way to play.
Combat is a bit clunky, especially in the tutorial. I picked Niss as my starting character. An assassin build at first glance, it quickly becomes apparent that you are a quick footed front liner meant to be in the thick of enemies and taking huge advantage of your AoE, your dash, and most importantly, your parry.
As Niss, in the tutorial, the game explains a tiny bit of how the abilities work, emphasizing using the dash as this triggers your passive, etc etc. But dashing without being able to lock on to enemies (in the tutorial) makes it feel uncomfortable to use the ability that this character centers around which might lead many to drop the game before really getting into it and understanding how its meant to be played.
After escaping the tutorial, I checked the keybinds (i am on controller) for the lock on button. R3. Which I pressed in the tutorial and it did not work. After confirming the keybind and adjusting volume settings - the game hard crashed to desktop. Upon restarting the game and trying again, did not crash a second time. But something is a mess here and can lead to you just ending up at the desktop.
This DID roll back the previous content I had just completed, including speaking to Omen (our main lore npc), using a tower unlock (this leads to unlocking characters, cosmetics, etc) and changing my characters style. All of it was rolled back. In this instance, this was harmless, but a CTD could roll back an entire dungeon run.
After some exposition, some more tutorial nonsense, and activating some fast travel points, you finally get let out into the world. Combat remains clunky until you finally understand how its meant to flow and when it does flow, oh man it feels so so so good. You start building combo meter which ups your damage, you get the perfect dodges, master the parry timing and make all enemies your proverbial ♥♥♥♥♥.
Combat shines the most during boss fights where you are able to unleash the full potential of your combos and skills. But in tiny skirmishes, most enemies are dead before you get to do much and in cases where they don't die early you are suddenly surrounded by more and more mobs. It almost feels as if they are respawning every 30 seconds and its easy to get overwhelmed.
All in all, this game has quite a lot of potential, especially when played with friends. I will be keeping the game and diving deeper into it
