Enshrouded Review

Enshrouded is a call to adventure both as a story and as a game. Initially I was skeptical and didn't have the best first impressions as someone who has played a lot of different open world survival crafting games. However, As I continued playing I started to see the simplistic beauty of Enshrouded and how it awakened my lust for adventure. Lets dive right in.

Story: 

Long ago a wanderer appeared in the land of Embervale with an Elixir. It was a cure, a blessing, and a weapon, said to have been concealed by the ancients due to it's might. The rulers of Embervale accepted this gift, and with the elixir came power, mistrust, and a longing for more. Humanity dug the elixir wells, ripping apart the land and each other to quench their thirst. 

The Elixir made humanity fight amongst itself for it's power, but unbeknownst to them, a curse was slowly emerging from the depths of these wells to the surface of the world. The Shroud, a fog that only spreads and devours everything in it's path.

Facing their downfall, humans united with the ancients to forge the Flameborn. After centuries of sleep, it is time for you to awaken, Flameborn.

Enshrouded paints a very grim picture of the world and what has happened to it. You awaken alone in a capsule of some sort, essentially naked. The only thing that you see is a small flame that guides you to the outside world, where you witness how much The Shroud has spread while you were slumbering. The flame tells you that it is time to reclaim your lost kingdom from The Shroud, and to do that, you have to find the source of it and destroy it.

Most of the story in this game is told by exploring and finding journals that are scattered around the world, so it is up to the player if they want to engage with it. However, what is currently in the game is interesting enough to make you curios on the mysterious origins of The Shroud and what happened to the kingdom and it's people during your long slumber.

Gameplay:

Enshrouded is an open-world survival crafting action game that puts a heavier emphasis on combat and crafting. As a Flameborn, you start out with little more than the clothes on your back. You'll have to use the classic survival technique of punching trees and gathering rocks to get started. The game provides a straightforward tutorial through a quest system that teaches you how to navigate, gather resources, and use the different menus. If you've played similar games in the genre, you'll feel right at home. 

Fairly quickly though you see the shroud fog in the starting area. At first, you might be intimidated by the enemies that appear inside it, but as you venture into it, a timer starts ticking down. As the Flameborn, your flame protects you from the shrouds influence and from death. However, the flame can't protect you forever, so you have to be quick on your feet while traversing the fog. 

This leads into the main game loop of Enshrouded: Gather, craft, build, adventure, venture into the shroud, level up and fight. Similar to another game named Valheim, the food in Enshrouded gives you a temporary buff that can extend your life meter and various different stats, usually related to combat, but it never outright kills you if food isn't consumed regularly. This definitely makes it easier to take your time planning and building before your next adventure.

The game recommends that you build a proper base very early on, and the building mechanic in Enshrouded is surprisingly deep. Compared to other games in the same genre, Enshrouded doesn't stop you from placing blocks and furniture with a high degree of detail; you can even clip objects into each other for that extra touch. While most games have a limit on how far you can push their building mechanics, Enshrouded does not. It honestly has a surprisingly deep building system.

Combat is fairly simple; you have a dodge roll, a regular combo and a parry if you're using a weapon or a shield. Initially, I thought the combat was too simple, and in reality, it does start out very simple. However, Enshrouded doesn't want to overwhelm the player at the start with too many skills, and the combat will open up more as you find different weapons and, more importantly, once you gain experience.

As you level up, you gain skill points that are used to unlock not only permanent stats but also new abilities such as double jump, changing your dodge roll into a blink teleport, a counter, and a sneak attack, to name a few. This feature makes Enshrouded stand out from it's peers in the genre. There is a lot of variety in both weapons and playstyles. Best of all, if you don't like your current skills, you can easily reset it at home base and change your build entirely. 

If I had to talk about what the biggest strength of this game is, it would have to be the world itself. There is no random generation when it comes to world and level design. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy random generation in these type of games, but the catch is that, more often than not, encounters and set pieces don't feel that impactful as they could be vs a handcrafted one. Enshrouded has balanced this well and made everything you find on the map meaningful and interesting, which makes it fun to explore the world as any good open-world adventure game should. Of course, the only issue is that once you have experienced the world fully, then you do kind of know where everything is when playing with friends or on a second playthrough.

Pros and Cons:

Let's start with some pros: this game looks graphically gorgeous. The lighting, in particular, really gives much more life to the world itself, and more often than not, I stopped to just look around. Being an indie game with a smaller team and cheaper price, this game graphically rivals some major studio productions out there.

The whole world may be handcrafted, but it doesn't stop you from destroying it. There are a good amount of ways you can terraform around your base and in the open world itself (there's nothing like some good old explosives!) This gives you a good incentive to experiment with your base build and to find more unconventional ways to get around different obstacles.

You can adjust the game's difficulty or, more importantly, its crafting speed times and even weapon durability. If you think the game is too easy, then adjust enemy health and damage. Do your weapon break too easily? Increase their durability, or even remove it all together. Really, nothing stops you from making the game easier or harder for yourself. Of course there are preset difficulties too, where one actually turns the game into a full-on survival game where you have to care about consuming food regularly ( just in case you wanted a more survival experience).

Now lets go over some cons: inventory management. You have a pitifully small inventory even after a few upgrades. More often than not, you will be deciding on, "so, which one of these can I throw away and which one do I have to keep?" To add to the inventory management frustration, Enshrouded doesn't currently have a quick stack to chest by standing nearby option. So after every adventure, you will manually go over each chest, and hopefully, you have been smarter than me and actually organized your chests. . . . Thankfully, though, you do unlock early on a magic chest which allows all of your crafting stations and NPCs to get direct access to materials so that you don't have to carry it all around.

There is still a bit of a "clunky" feeling to moving around and fighting enemies. It is a bit hard to explain in words, but imagine that after learning enemy patterns, you should be able to parry them easier, right? However, even after all of that, I managed to get attacked on spots where I could have sworn I had my shield up or that I did cancel my combo in time. It is not as bad as I make it sound, but after playing for a good while, it is noticeable, especially against faster enemies. 

I don't fully vibe with the magic system. It is similar to Runescape's Dragonwilds, where it is ammo-based and it needs to be crafted by a more complex system than arrows. However, on top of it being ammo, you still have an MP bar under your life bar, and the idea is that you switch between a two-handed staff to cast your spells and then back to a one-handed wand to do regular attacks that recharge your MP. 

To me personally, it feels like two systems that are a bit contradictory to each other and take up inventory slots that could have been used for gathering more items. I would have liked if you could learn these spells permanently and then find staffs that allow you to use them. This won't be an issue for everyone, ill admit, but I do think it would be a better experience if there was a better way to stash ammo and spells in general.

Closing thoughts:

Enshrouded is a game that gave me a bit of a rough first impression but fairly quickly charmed me with its clever adventuring and fun decision-making for your character's build. The more I spent with it, the more I wanted to go back and continue my journey in the Embervale. Even if it can be a bit clunky as of right now, it is still a fairly priced game that gives you a much better experience than most open-world triple-A's on the market. It is impressive how much developer Keen Games has managed to do with a smaller team and budget. 

It is still not fully finished since it is an early access game, but it has been getting consistently updates and the game keeps getting better overtime. I can safely recommend this game as it is because for a third of the price of a modern day triple-A game you not only get a great game to play with friends, you also get a great single player adventure with a lot of heart and passion to it.

VERDICT: Recommended

Reviewed on PC
Review Copy was Provided