INFESTED

WOLCEN: LORDS OF MAYHEM is as buggy as it is bloody.

- Fraser Brown

An unhealthy number of hours spent carving my way through ARPGs ensured that Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem feels like putting on a familiar, bloodstained gauntlet. It’s another misadventure set in a world full of unrelenting hordes of monsters, all seconds away from popping like balloons filled with blood and gold. Unfortunately, the bugs and balance problems are just as numerous, and they’ve proved to be a greater challenge to overcome.

In a genre that keeps trying to do Diablo II again, Wolcen’s reliance on its predecessors isn’t egregious. There are gem slots, cursed chests, an intimidating passive skill tree – some ancillary, others crucial – but rather than feeling like a hodgepodge of earlier ARPGs, it’s unified by the game’s true objective: building your perfect dungeon-delving hero.

Wolcen takes this fantasy and runs with it, much further than Path of Exile or Diablo. Most notably, there are no fixed classes locking you into a choice early on. You make your own out of gear and active and passive skills, drawing from lots of different archetypes to create something just for yourself, or borrowed from the theory crafters busily crunching numbers and experimenting with builds.

HERO LAB

I’ve lost sleep thinking about the labyrinthine passive skill tree, the Gate of Fates. Like