This game gets a recommendation BUT with a few massive asterisks:

The game overall is really pretty. It plays smoothly, even as I played the majority of my playtime on the Steamdeck.

The story is so forgettable I nearly forgot to talk about it. Its soooo bland. Its been a while since I had a game where I skipped dialogue while muttering "Bla bla bla" to myself.

I have to emphasize again that I REALLY like at least the Meele combat classes and the various systems put in there. There are some shooty classes, but as mentioned I played mainly on a Steamdeck.

I have long since lost the ability to play shooters with a controller or at least I can't do it to the degree as I could during the XBox360 PS3 era after which I changed to PC.

A big incentive for a lot of people to play a game like Wayfinderm is that you could theoretically upgrade every little aspect of your characters and weapons.

You can upgrade weapon types, have a passives tree, active abilities to level up, you can slot in echoes that give stat increases but also can trigger certain effects. You can equip additional Items of and artefacts of increasing rarity and then slot echoes into those as well. You then can upgrade certain affinties which of course has additional increases to your stats.
Then there are artifacts and items that you can place in your housing that ALSO give additional stats increases as well as timed effects. Finally there are a LOT of different potions that you can brew, additionally to healing potions, that do all of that again but with much shorter timings.

The issue with this is the requirements. EVERYTHING needs like 4 to 5 different incrediences to get upgraded or crafted. And its not the same 4 or five things. Oh no. It must be like 50 different things you need for crafting and upgrading and many of them are required in many of the other various upgrade paths and crafting recipes. Its ridiculous.

This gets worse by the fact that I am 30 hours in and I am still in the, supposedly, first area of the game while the various dungeons use the same few tile sets of rooms that I have already all seen after a few hours into the game.
And you need to go into these A LOT. Because not all incrediences and upgrade Items are available in all of the dungoens.

So you need to slot in crystals, that are basically modifiers for these dungeons which impose certain effects on the dungeon environments as well as the traps and enemies within.
Which is neat until you realize some Items can only be gained by using specific modifiers on the same set of dungeon room tilesets that you already encountered for the last 20 hours, over and over again.

And the payout seems rather abysmal which probably stems from the fact that this was once a free to play MMO with monetization that was apparently extremely predatory, when it came to materials (and cosmetics, but quite frankly the game is extremely generous with them and there is no in game real money story any more).

The Grind is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ real, and the repetition is getting rather off putting.
After over 30 hours into this game I want, no NEED to see more environments, dungeon tiles sets and enemies.

The thing is this:
This is a visually excellent and gameplay wise rather good game.

It is in fact so good that I know I'll be coming back regularly, at least when commuting from and to work, or when I have a good podcast to listen to in the back, to play more.

And I know for a fact that certain players will LOVE this kind of grind and the push for every percentage of power.

So I still give this game a overall recommendation.

Just be aware that you won't finish the story in a decent time, even if you start ignoring side quests to try and push it onwards, that the story isn't really worth it anyway, that the gameplay gets rather repetitive and that upgrade progression gets VERY grindy.

Really nice game. Gameplay loop is good, grind is there, difficulty is on point. But Wayfinder shares same destiny with Kingdoms of Amalur (which is also visually similar and I like very much). Some side quests in the game feels like labor, say like too much MMO, like "bring 10 fishes to me" or "kill 50 rats". If you can bear those types of quests, main storyline and dungeons are really good and diverse to keep you going.

Wayfinder is going to be a case study in the games industry in 5-10 years as AAA studios continue to fail, while AA and indie studios go back to making boxed product experiences. Wayfinder feels like you have a totally unlocked power fantasy MMO with 0ms ping and all the content available to you without opening up your wallet every five minutes. It's hard to comprehend how incredible that feels when you're so accustomed to having everything gated behind paywalls or time locks.

The core gameplay loop is super fun and the amount of content in this game, even at full price, is astounding. I hope that other studios look at the success Airship Syndicate had changing direction and follow in their footsteps.