Ephesus Reviews

Do not consider buying this abandonware. I bought this in Q2 2022 and there were two updates between then and December. The first completely broke my ability to play the game. Updates only ever come before a sale, and they never really fix anything. My assumption is that they are only there to try to trick people into playing this non-functional thing with a pretend update.

With the quests and everything in the game, there are many ways that you can push the limit of trolling. It has good vibes tho. Since it is early access, it has some bugs that are understandable, but since I bought the game, they update it quickly according to feedbacks. It wouldn't be a lie if I say that there is one update per hour rn. Cheaper than Forgotten City

This game is massively under-produced. I wanted to stop playing 20 mins. into it, but tried to give myself an hour to try it out. Unfortunately, the health bar did not give me enough time to do that and it froze upon reload, after my character died of starvation, shortly after running into a bear. At least I think it was a bear, because the graphics are underwhelming for what the Unreal engine can handle. However, the graphics are not as bad as some of the reviews make them out to be (That's actually one of the things that prompted me to buy this thing for 6 bucks - curiosity about the quality). The motion blur is plain annoying, the rain effects are not worth the drain on the hardware, the controls could be smother, and the whole thing feels awkward. Despite that, the creators did manage to build a beautiful city. It's obvious they put effort into the detail of the buildings, but otherwise the quality is something out of the early 2000s. They other reason I picked this up is that it set in the classical age/ancient Rome. There are not too many open-world games covering that topic. So, it is a market niche. Nonetheless, the game is questionably historic and does not make that up with entertainment value. I could forgive the super-bright cleanliness and potatoes in ancient Rome, if i wanted to keep playing. The "vast free world" is also questionable, on top of the large memory requirements. There isn't even a highlight or scroll-over feature to let you know what can interact with in that world. That made the first 15-20 mins. a guessing game. It was like playing King's Quest 1 all over again without needing to type (Yes, I'm old). Sure, it had potential and was one of those games I wanted to like. Unfortunately, I must to agree with the flak the other critics gave this game in Early Access. A word of advice to the producers - don't use your game intro as the brunt of your screen shots. It's false advertising. I know you worked hard on this thing, and I want to give you credit for the effort. I don't regret paying you to try this out, but you would have been better off giving out beta copies and working this for another year. Folks - Kingdoms was way more enjoyable and that was made as a solo project. Spend your money on that instead (if he ever finishes it), unless you're as curious as i was. Cheers. - TMC

At present, I cannot recommend this to anyone as it is. Early Access would normally mean that you've passed a pre-alpha stage, and could be consider either late alpha (pushing it), public beta stage (norm of early access). Here should've at least finished a private beta test suite of the the game play mechanism, and engine rendering. As it is now, it's quite hollow, it lacklustre of content, the entire game engine performance rendering is not well developed at all. Do understand that this is just an indie studio, but honestly, there should've been more thought put behind this. There should've at least been a kickstarter or something before just jumping and trying to get this publicly available, it should've come with a good set of road map for a proper public beta release. This could've even just been a prologue of the game just to give a scope of content (normally this is done freely and is meant just for feedback bases only, and you can keep iterations on the prologue as well to keep getting some feedback for breaking changes or so) I do hope that this comment will be taken for constructive feedback, and not seen as something that is a type of critical feedback to just damper on the work done already. It is hard to work on anything new and for that alone this is creditable, and do see that they have a good conceptual idea for a game.

Picked this up on 1.0 launch day. It's really rough still. Possibly worthwhile for $10 if the theme and setting really grips you, but there is a lot to put up with. General performance issues - chugs more than I'd expect even on medium settings on a 3090. Also, the motion blur is wildly extreme. Recommend turning that off immediately. There is also some quite severe head bobbing when moving and performing actions, and no way to turn that off as far as I could find in settings. Lots of LOD issues with trees - meshes popping in and out of existence at seemingly random distances. Some trees look like their mesh is completely malformed with twisting trunks. The very first NPC I spoke too had dialog that just told me directly the game mechanics and still mentions the game being in early access. He also just directly references the game being a game. There is no tutorial to speak of, and the UI is clunky and sluggish. Building an open world game with quality game feel is a challenge, and I applaud a small team trying to tackle such an ambitious goal. However, it feels like there is a lot of work left to be done here -- this doesn't quite feel like what I would hope for from a 1.0 release.

The game has a beautiful design by reflecting the theme of the era. There are some noticeable mistakes, but it can be brought to a good point with a good development process planning in the future. In particular, I would suggest focusing on playable content and dynamics.

The game runs shockingly poorly. The world is half designed but mostly empty. There seems to be a quest system that has been terribly implemented. The UI sucks eggs and there is no tutorial. The trailer above looks really nice but that is not how the game plays. Definitely avoid this. https://youtu.be/K1-RyvRZvso

Basically (as of now) a show of ideas, not a game, and buggy as hell. Not even the 'Exit Game' confirmation button works. Graphics are rough and nothing like in the videos, but probably will be way better in the future. And yes, I've played highest settings on a GeForce RTX2070, Ryzen 7, 64 GB RAM rig, which incidently didn't even wake up the GeForce but capped out FPS at 28 nonetheless, despite setting the cap to 144. People don't look natural, movements do neither, ragdoll effects are almost year 2005, AI is stupid as hell and conversations need a redo. Hopefully it'll be better in a couple of months. As of now, no recommendation from my side.

This should not have come out yet. Hardly works, constant bugs, nothing to actually do. This is not even half way to an alpha. Check back in a year or two. Am not refunding as I really do have high hopes and I got it for only $10. For now, they should be looking for testers, not customers.

Game is hardly playable in it's current state. Graphics look good in the trailers but don't get sucked in just yet. It's simply not ready. Despite other reviews, this game doesn't run well. I would say it's barely playable. Purchase if you want to try it out and maybe support the development team but I couldn't in good conscience recommend this to anyone as it stands. Still in Beta so a long way to go and the concept is great so it looks promising however it's not worth any amount of money right now. Purchase if you wish but don't say you weren't warned when it crashes, freezes in menus or frame rates drop. Even on the highest graphics setting, graphics are still poor imho. I would love for this to have been functional but unfortunately, it functions BARELY.