This is a really nifty sandbox action RPG. At first, it is stupidly hard to wrap your head around the combat, so I would recommend people to just go into their first, easiest Fight Area (FA) expecting to die. Don't use potions or anything until you can kill a room of mobs without taking damage, and when you get to that point, commit to the FA run. But once you get it, which might take like 20 minutes of trying, it should really click. There's no way to completely ignore it by playing a mage either because you cannot start out as a mage. One thing I will say is that as soon as you get the hang of things, the game becomes pretty weird. Like you're an absolute god for like the first few levels, but then when you do 4 skull FAs, it feels like bosses have at least 10 times more health than they should unless you grind the hell out of an FA that can drop good loot for you, or just happen to get lucky. So that's another piece of advice, your build is almost certainly not the problem, it's just a lack of gear because you cannot mess it up before you're like level 8 or higher due to how few skill points and so on you are even given in this game, so you can't really fail their allocation until you're high level. One BIG negative for me is that the world is so insanely derivative that if you're a fan of a lot of different fantasy settings, you'll very, very quickly see references and basically plagiarised lore everywhere you look. They've basically just taken what they like from a lot of fantasy settings and just put it into their world wholesale. This is how an amateur Dungeon Master creates a world for whatever tabletop RPG they run, not how a professional game studio should create a world for their game. Warhammer fantasy and age of sigmar really stuck out to me as major... inspiration, I guess They took a lot of aesthetic design from those, naming conventions and so on. A song of ice and fire is another big source of inspiration and while it is a freebie, Lord of the Rings is of course there too, but that seems to be limited to pretty minor references here and there. Also, the pantheon is very uninspiring to behold. So as a result of the setting being so derivative, I just stopped reading any and all lore entries, which is a shame because they probably spent a thousand hours writing those. As I said before, it's a good sandbox game, with a lot of stuff to do, pretty fun combat system and what more do you actually need from a small indie studio? I hope the game does well so the team could maybe expand and create a very impressive sequel. Maybe hire more people to work on world building and writing so they can just rework all of their lore to be at least somewhat unique for whatever their next game is. I wish them nothing but success, and this is a very, very good first showing. Edit: Now that I'm basically done with the game and joined the rank of 3.7% of the playerbase that has actually killed the final boss, I will say that Alaloth himself was probably designed before being a pure mage was an actual playstyle in the game because it feels like he is designed entirely around the idea of you being a melee fighter. He's an absolute let down of a final boss with honestly just stupid moveset that's aggravating rather than challenging, he is immune to status effects that mages rely on and he keeps moving around so he rarely stands in your ongoing damage spells. I cannot emphasise this enough, he is not a hard boss to kill, just annoying and designed in a way where he simply counters mage playstyle. I killed him on my second attempt, despite his entire design working against my specific character build. A build which you cannot change once you enter the maelstrom, by the way. Yes, the goddess who lets you respec at her shrines is standing RIGHT THERE, but simply does not let you respec. So if you've got some sort of a weird build that works everywhere else in normal gameplay, but is just absolutely incapable of beating him, such as for example, a summoner build, you're basically soft locked because Alaloth does not have a manual save function. Which is odd because I can't really think of any point in the game where I would have ever even considered save scumming. Like the game just isn't designed in a way where anyone would spend any time reloading saves unless they would like to, for example, load a save before going to the final boss area and getting stuck there. Aside from that, I did enjoy my time with the game, but I have some issues that may or may not be a result of bugs. For example, I've beaten all the dragons, and even got the legendary armour for it, which promptly sat in my chest because mages are extremely heavily penalised for wearing that stuff, but there's one more dragon in an area of the map that I simply could not access, and couldn't figure out how to access. The guy in front of the teleported just kept telling me that the dragon hunter faction controls it, and won't let me teleport to the last dragon unless I have their permission. Mind you, that entire faction worships the very ground I tread upon after I killed five dragons for them, and I don't see any quests there, and after scouring through my extremely bloated quest log, I never found anything to do with entering said area. Nothing came up on google because the game is quite niche so I just didn't get to kill the sixth dragon boss on that island. Which was a bit of a bummer. This game has map markers, vast majority of quests have them, but sometimes it decides to play coy about letting you just play through the content. Surprising amount of content in the game is like that. There's a big banner going like, ''Here's a new questline you can do! It's somewhere over there, go do it.'' and then you look at the website, it says the same thing again, then you go there in game and the fighting area just doesn't let you enter, and none of the NPCs seem to have anything to say about them. Then the quest that allows you to do the new content is in some random town that you never have any reason to visit because there's nothing there, aside from some dude who begins the quest that allows you to go kill some demon boss. And no doubt some people will call me a little baby who needs their hands hold and tell me that I'm the reason why Skyrim is the way it is, but let me stop you right there, I prefer Morrowind, but Morrowind tells you exactly where to go, with excruciating details, just without map markers. Also, this game is basically a dungeon crawler, just without randomised dungeons. If I had to guess, I'd assume the developer played Daggerfall at some point and it's been a lifelong inspiration, but even daggerfall tells you where to go, and allows you to enter basically any zone you want without talking to some sort of an NPC to be allowed entrance. So while I complain about the lack of direction, it's not because I don't know what I'd like to do as a player, it's because the game just won't let me enter a boss Fighting Area without some Faction or NPC giving me permission to go there, and sometimes that faction has nothing to even say about the subject until you've done some other quest for some completely different NPC somewhere else. I'm only complaining about the lack of transparency on what boxes you have to tick in this regard, and I hope that hypethetical next game made by Gamera either makes it so you can go anywhere you want at any time, kill any boss and so on, or they at least tell you where to go and what to do in order to be allowed to kill said boss. It's a dungeon crawler and boss killing game, so you may as well just let me do that. And as I've said several times, it is a good dungeon crawler and boss killing game, last boss notwithstanding, but it does have some problems that I hope will be solved either with patches, or with Alaloth 2, so even after editing a bunch of complaints in here, I still recommend the game.