Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem Review

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem was released on PC back in 2020 to mixed reviews but Wolcen Studios has gone on to iterate and improve upon the base game, introduce new end-game content, and develop a fourth and final rogue-lite campaign chapter – “Endgame” – that coincides with its arrival on consoles. All those updates and the new content is included in this console port, ensuring this release offers a lengthy, complex, and engaging action RPG.

Of course, coming from a tiny developer relative to juggernauts like Blizzard, it lacks polish in spots and has a few peculiar quirks, but the biggest issue I have with this console port is the unwieldy gamepad control scheme and UI navigation that constantly interrupt the flow.

Family drama and demonic invasions

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is set in a beautiful but deadly medieval world – one with light science-fiction elements and no shortage of paranormal monstrosities. Your customisable hero is one of three orphans of a demonic massacre, rescued and trained by the fatherly Grand Inquisitor as “Purifiers” – an army dedicated to wiping out supernatural threats like cultism, witchcraft, the undead, and demons.

During a mission to wipe out an enclave of the mysterious “Brotherhood of Dawn”, earthquakes open glowing fractures, dead souls emerge to attack the living, and your hero briefly transforms in an angelic-looking avatar to drive off a demon. Despite saving the day, this display of unearthly power creates a rift between them and their siblings, Purifier forces, and the Grand Inquisitor.

After the somewhat disjointed prologue, the narrative picks up and does a decent job of alternating between traditional end-of-the-world threats and the political machinations of several factions that you’ll both fight against and ally with – often involving a talkative AI companion. A cult is clearly manipulating events behind the scene, yet leaders are reluctant to recognise the greater threat and rather squabble among themselves. It doesn’t help that the demonic forces could be thwarted by the remnants of an ancient primordial race, but their followers and technologies are long-forgotten. The story moves along at a brisk pace, pushing you through four lengthy and mostly linear chapters set in different regions, with little fluff beyond “side quests” that are just random challenges doled out in procedurally-generated mini-dungeons.

Discussing the narrative might seem off as its rarely the focus in this genre, but Wolcen Studios has clearly put a lot of effort has been put into the storytelling, with fully-voiced in-game conversations, somewhat janky in-game cutscenes, and lightly-animated montages. Sure, the writing draws on way too many clichés – think reluctant heroes, scheming leaders with no regard for their people, villains revealing their plans before attacking – but it does the job given the pulpy tone that never really delves too deeply into the broken family aspect.

Grind any way you please

Gameplay-wise, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem clearly owes a lot to Diablo II and III – but it’s not just another derivative action-RPG with a new coat of paint (see Vikings – Wolves of Midgard or Warhammer: Chaosbane as examples).

You explore a beautiful, CRYENGINE-powered world from an isometric perspective, featuring some incredibly detailed environments, vistas, great ambience, and suitably epic soundtrack. You interact with a handful of quest givers and merchants in visually-impressive but small hubs. You battle hordes of foes across the surface or through procedurally-generated dungeons towards event triggers – usually a boss fight. You gain experience and gear that enhances your ability to tear through even bigger hordes of enemies, earning more experience and ridiculously-named gear, in a never-ending cycle to make numbers go higher. It’s a well-worn formula that still holds up.

The familiar systems include four attributes that roughly align to brawler, rogue, and sorcery archetypes; gear that boosts parameters like health regeneration, resistance, movement speed, dodge chance, attack speed, and critical chance; and socketable gems of varying quality to further boost your gear. Even the slowly-charging “Aspects of Apocalypse” ultimate is a familiar mechanic, albeit with four unlockable forms featuring unique skills.

What really sets Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem apart is own deep but flexible class system that encourages experimentation and creative hybrids.

Filling your hotbar with powerful active skills, summons, and auras is based on the weapon types you’re wielding – think melee, ranged, or magical – and an associated “Enneract”, a consumable skill item that’ll you’ll collect by the dozen. Summons are persistant once equipped, but active skills and auras are sustained by willpower, converted from rage generated by your basic attacks, encouraging you to stay on the offensive. Like your hero, they level up with use, unlocking over a dozen modifiers you can mix and match.

When it comes to passive skills, each level-up rewards a point to invest in the “Gate of Fates”. It features 21 sub-classes, spread across three segments you can rotate and link, allowing you to further refine your character build by investing in nodes that boost your primary attributes and unique buffs that fit your playstyle.

As someone who spent dozens of hours as a Necromancer in Diablo II, and dozens more as the Demon Hunter in Diablo III, I was thrilled to discover Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem allowed me to build a roguish necromancer. In one hand, I had a ricochetting, ice-infused pistol and the ability to summon phantom archers for area-of-effect damage; in the other, a magical catalyst that allowed me to sustain a small army of undead ghouls and golems with enhanced threat generation and health buffs to draw enemies away from me. If I got bored, changing it up was a simple as swapping weapons and reassigning the appropriate Enneract skills.

An endless battle against cults, demons, and gamepads

Unfortunately, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem on console comes with several caveats – all of them related to the gamepad control scheme and UI navigation.

Manually aiming some active skills felt too slow given the ferocity of combat. Battling in areas full of breakable objects would often have my hero auto-targeting inanimate objects instead of enemies. Managing your inventory, selling items, and levelling up all felt clunky and unintuitive, lacking one-button shortcuts for common actions, while what looked like prompts for d-pad shortcuts simply did not work. Trying to select map transitions was a pain if breakable objects, allied NPCs, or summons were nearby.

As a result, the minute-to-minute gameplay in Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem often feels great on console, but it’s continuously blighted by interruptions as you slowly navigate menus to free up your inventory or wriggle about trying to get an interaction trigger properly aligned. There’s a flexible, entertaining, feature-rich, and well-priced action-RPG at its core, so I’m hoping with a couple patches and tweaks can resolved these issues and give console gamers an experience as polished and slick as the current PC build.