This game has soooooo much potential. It’s gotten to the point where I leave it running on my PC during the day and connect through Steam Link from work. I love it...I’m addicted. For what it does well, it’s a 5/5 game for me. I’ve played 237 hours at the time of this review. Obviously, a lot of that is background idling while sleeping or working, but that also means the game has essentially been running nonstop on my PC since release. The problem is that it doesn’t yet do some of the things it really needs to do. I’m still giving it a thumbs up because I want people to play it and I want the game to succeed, but as of right now I think it is simultaneously one of the best games in its genre and one of the most painful. I want to min-max the absolute crap out of this game. I genuinely think there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of potential here. The systems are deep enough that I find myself experimenting with builds, comparing damage, changing priorities, testing breakpoints, and trying to squeeze every little bit of performance out of a character. That part is fantastic. And I’ve had to learn most of it the hard way. I’ve hit wall after wall throughout the game, and every time I hit one I’ve had to figure out what I misunderstood, what part of the build stopped scaling, what I should have invested in differently, and sometimes completely respec just to keep progressing. That process is actually one of the things I enjoy about the game. I like figuring out why something worked for 20 levels and suddenly doesn’t anymore. At the time of this review, I’ve cleared level 235. The current record is 250 by Haqua. So I’m already pretty deep into the game, but I’m still finding new things I misunderstood about the systems and still changing the build as I learn how everything interacts. The problem is that experimentation becomes physically and mechanically painful. Respec costs need some attention...honestly, almost all of them. At higher levels, changing things becomes incredibly expensive, which discourages experimentation in a game that practically begs you to experiment. I’m now at the point where fully respeccing requires 500+ clicks. Then your hand slips on the mouse, or you’re playing remotely on your phone, and you accidentally click something you didn’t want. Now the build is screwed up and you get to start fixing it all over again. At some point I realized I’m not even competing against the game anymore. I’m competing against myself and my ability to never accidentally click something I’m not supposed to click. I would love to see some kind of lock system where you can lock individual skills, talents, symbols, rings, or upgrades so they cannot be accidentally selected. This would be especially helpful on the first tab where you are buying skills with gold, but honestly I would like to be able to lock almost anything. After thinking about it more, though, the easiest solution may simply be allowing individual respecs instead of forcing a full reset. If I made one bad choice, let me undo that one choice instead of having to redo every single choice since the beginning. This is especially true in the Skills tab, where there are more than 150 nodes, and some of those nodes need to be clicked three, four, or even a dozen times each. One accidental click shouldn’t mean rebuilding the entire thing from scratch. And BTW...this is even more true in the Ring system than anywhere else. If I decide I want to move away from Ring of Fury and try something completely different, I can be looking at 1,000+ clicks just to redistribute those points. That makes experimenting with another ring build something I almost don’t want to try, even though experimenting and figuring out what works is one of the best parts of the game. That becomes especially frustrating because respeccing isn’t something I’ve done once or twice because I was bored. I’ve had to do it repeatedly as I’ve pushed higher, hit another wall, learned something new about how the game works, and realized that a decision I made 50 or 100 levels ago was holding the build back. That kind of learning and rebuilding should be encouraged, because it is where a huge amount of the game’s depth comes from. And yes...I’m going to play the disabled veteran card here. 😉 My hands only have so many clicks in them each day. Requiring hundreds, or in some cases more than a thousand, repetitive clicks just to rebuild a character is legitimately uncomfortable after a while. Accessibility aside, though, I think almost everyone would benefit from fewer repetitive clicks and more precise control over respeccing. I’d also love to see a prestige system that is on par with the rest of the game. There is already so much depth in building and optimizing a character that starting over could actually be something I look forward to if there were a meaningful long-term progression system attached to it. Give me a reason to push as far as I possibly can, reset, come back stronger, make different choices, and then see how much farther I can get the next time. This game feels almost built for that kind of loop, and a deep prestige system could add hundreds or thousands of hours to it. There are a few other quality-of-life things I’d love to see too. The game generates a lot of files while you play, including what appear to be per-level files, and after multiple runs they can really clutter the same folder as the combat logs. Giving those their own subfolder, or automatically cleaning up anything that is no longer needed, would help a lot. Despite all of that, I have continued playing this since launch. BTW...Valheim just launched too, and I’m playing that and this simultaneously, but Monday through Friday this is basically the only thing I play. That probably says more than anything else I could write. I’ve already put 237 hours into it, I’m still thinking about builds when I’m not playing, I’ve pushed to 235 when the current record is 250, and I’ve literally been remotely connecting to my PC from work to check on it. There is an insanely good game in here. A few changes around respeccing, accidental clicks, experimentation costs, prestige, and general quality of life would take it from “I love this game even though it hurts me” to something I could recommend without hesitation.