Age of Reforging:The Freelands Reviews

Too many text grammar/typos and other bugs (black screen at camp, recipes going missing once purchasing), and stealth/crime mechanics component that feels unfinished for a game that is 1.0. Such a shame it is good concept game and has ok bones. I could ignore the 2015 character avatar graphics if the other things were fixed.

Dont bother. Half the time people are invisible and the quests give totally misleading directions. It feels half baked and had me rolling my eyes at the thought of playing any further. I kept hoping it would get better but no.

From the glitches to constantly trying to heal and rest and the starting difficulty I made a huge mistake buying this game.

Ok clunk aside. This game is huge like huge huge. Its super fun and the start of the game is brutal until you power scale.

The game could be a lot of fun, but it definetly still needs work. I was chased by spiders that i have no hope of defeating, so i entered the Breawoods area in hopes of evading them. But no.... no matter how long i spend in the area, the spiders dont go away. so now im stuck in there with no way out. its the 2nd time ive started a new game due to this issue, and its just too annoying to want to play.

This games has a lot of good parts wrapped up in a fair bit of jank, both the funny and the bad kind. If you can get passed some odd jank and a few lack of QoL ( looking at you Inventory management and zero hotkey to fast sell to vendors ) its a great game. The camera is also a bit close up for me and can make it hard to see things far off in the top down mode. Behind the shoulder cam feels awkward too as you tend to get stuck on little things and combat is a camera mess if you play a class that likes to jump or charge around. I do warn that quests can bug out and can be hit or miss on what to do next. If you like to solve things by yourself this shouldn't be to bad. If you don't mind bricking a quest or two by picking up a quest item before you're on said quest because you did it out of order, you can save it for next playthrough. You can have many different play styles and many different builds. Mixing classes and skills you can make many a wacky build. You can build up merc's for many different styles as long as you have the skill book for them. There are many classes and spell schools that you don't start off knowing about and are found throughout the world that once you know how to get, make for fun class building and ever great for a new character build playthrough if you know how to rush to them. I would recommend playing the game on "easy mode" to start, as the food spoil rate seems to be really high while on the over world map and trying to learn the game with no food and full merc costs is rough. I say most of this because despite all the jank, bugged quest, camera jank, characters getting stuck when jump around walls or cliffs, this game is still a blast to play and I very much look forward to seeing these Devs update this game and bring this uncut gem into a brilliant sparkling one.

So much fun, I am thoroughly enjoying this gem! Growing up with games like dungeon siege, dragons dogma, sacred, tales of symphonia, I see so many great components of these style rpg's executed really well. The overlay travel map is engaging, combat skills and leveling is diverse and visually satisfying to watch. Crafting is an extra bonus that makes looting worth while, the food buffs do add up. Character customisation and party management feels so immersive along with a beautiful array of classic creatures and enemies to combat with. Significant npc's have so much individuality! Love the humour thrown in, and appreciate the quest plot/ or just helping out with mercenary quests. I am really hoping to see this game grow, and wish the devs get the support here for their hard work.

This game is not 1.0 It is still Early Access. In my 3 hours of gameplay I've experienced countless game breaking bugs including immunity, improper targeting, unresponsive movement (WASD). If these issues are patched I will change my review, but given the game is advertised as a 1.0 product I'm leaving my feedback for others to be cautious of another potential abandonware situation.

Age of Reforging: Freelands is a plausible attempt to recreate Kenshi's "craft your own story" magic on a medieval fantasy foundation. The gameplay, especially in combat and world exploration, is a reminiscence to Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. The world map is populated by bandits, monsters, merchants, villagers, and soldiers that are constantly at odds with each others. You can of course take side with one of the belligerent in said conflicts, such as saving a group of poor villagers or helping bandits to rob them instead. You have all the usual cRPG stuff. Trading, crafting, sneaking, stealing, skill checks, murderhobo-ing.. all included. If you played PoE, pathfinder, divinity, and bg 3, you immediately understand what to do. This game has a lot of content for an early access game, and along with that, comes a lot of bugs and crashes. There is no voice acting. The story is.. serviceable. There is not much to say honestly. Just imagine Kenshi with a storyline. That said, this game is really hard. I say this in a kinda bad way. Some encounters are straight out both unavoidable and unwinable. I'm no stranger to hard games like Dark Souls and Kenshi, they are hard but fair because you can choose to avoid many problematic fights. In this game, you'll frequently find yourself in a situation where the only way out is to load the game. For example, some orc ambushes happens so fast, yet the mc runs like my grandma (he is neither encumbered nor debuffed). Orcs have 0% avoid rate early on, hence once you get caught in the world map, you are not allowed to flee from the battle area. The orcs outlevel and outnumber you a lot and with only 2 party members, there is nothing you can do aside from loading a save. You can micromanage, but the feature is pointless when the controls are extemely clunky and unresponsive. I had my character stood frozen mid fight because the game decided to cancel his aggro after killing one enemy. Having a 360 degree camera also introduces a lot of bugs like being unable to select some enemies at certain angle.. and often i selected the ground instead of the enemies, making my crossbowman rushes to the enemies instead of shooting them. UX is a mess right now. Thankfully these problems are not inherent to the core gameplay and should be easy to iron out by the devs, assuming they continue to support the game.

Seems like it could be a genuinely fun game but it's just too buggy to justify the purchase at the moment. I think the developer did a disservice to the players by not releasing this game into Early Access first, and if I'm wrong and the game was previously in Early Access, it had no business leaving that state so soon.