Enshrouded feels like a game I should love, but I find myself bored and slogging through it just to finish the content there is. I haven't made it to the desert or the new mountain area yet, and it's still EA, so maybe some of this will change.

Cons:
-There are only a handful of different enemy types that get reused through the entire game. This is a big map and you'll come across the same 4 bandits (5 if you count the dogs, 6 if you count the bosses) everywhere.
-Combat is essentially spam left click and dodge sometimes. Very little skill involved. There is no animation cancelling, so if you are currently mid wand flick, you're going to facetank the enemy's attack because you can't dodge it.
-The item progression feels terrible. You don't craft weapons, you find them. You do craft different armors, but they never felt like a true upgrade over the random pieces you find.
-The building system is probably great if you're a creative person, but for me, it felt extremely unintuitive and clunky.
-Optimization is terrible. The game itself runs ok, but when I open the map and zoom out, I can literally hear my GPU ♥♥♥♥ itself and my fps drops to 3 (you read that right, three). This has been a complaint by a lot of people with much better PCs than me since the game released. A year with such a glaring issue? That seems insane to me.

Pros:
-I really like how every piece of lore puts a new map marker or starts a new quest. Gives me a reason to check everything, and there is a lot to check.
-In theory, I do like the creativity that building allows you. You can put a new base almost anywhere. You like the way the ruins of that city that you just cleared of enemies looks? Well now you can make your own neighborhood in the middle of it using preexisting structures. That random tower looks cool? Well, now it's your random tower.
-Voxel based terrain alteration. The real stuff, not the "my pickaxe just makes a dent in the ground." You want to dig a tunnel through that mountain and build a base in the middle of it? You can do it. Want to dig a hole 80m deep and build a house down there like some thriftstore dwarf? Yeah, go for it.

Wall of Text incoming, so I'm gonna start with the TL;DR: It's a game with a lot of meat, but unfortunately its bones are very weak. If you just want to build a nice village or castle or whatever, go for it. Most of the bad mechanics are excusable for that purpose. If you are looking for an actual survival-rpg with good combat, this isn't it.

I got Enshrouded when it first launched into Early Access. On paper, it's like a wet dream. And I did play it quite a bit, most of the time spent doing what the game does best: building. But it's not only a base building game now, is it?

At first glance the game looked very promising to me. There was a lot of content right at the start, and if they were to improve the actual gameplay mechanics of the game, it would be candidate for an all time favorite. So I gave it time.

Now, it's 10 months and several major updates later, most of which seem to be "more content" in the form of reskinned enemies, more empty landscape and half baked additional mechanics. At this point I'm quite certain that the glaring issues will not be handled at all, and there will be just "moaaar".

Let's look at what the game claims to be: A survival sandbox action-rpg experience.

Sandbox:
This, they have down. You can spend hours on building (and grinding for materials to build, which can be a bit much at times), as I did. The building system worked great and the only thing limiting you, is your imagination and right angles.

Survival: Well, you can eat, and I see they have added an option to die after a certain amount of minutes after being hungry. They added a body heat system with the latest patch that only applies in the new region. No other "survival" elements, besides crafting. The survival mechanics being superficial do not hurt the game though, since another thing to have to grind for would hurt the game much more. I would just have omitted the term "survival" from the description.

Action-RPG: This is where the game sadly fails miserably. The combat is clunky and flat. The only type of "class" that has somewhat evolving gameplay is the mage class.

Combat: As said before, the combat is clunky. Combat animations seem inconsistent, merciless attack is straight up useless, since the animation goes on for too long, without an iframe. Targeting is inconsistent, too much forward momentum in attacks can easily send you off cliffs. In late game/hollow halls the game just throws hordes of enemies at you to increase difficulty, which makes parrying almost obsolete (except with shockwave talent, and even then) and range nuking by far the best option.
Numbers often dont seem to be tuned at all (even though they can be somewhat tuned in the world settings).
The base stamina regeneration is way too low. You spend a lot of time just walking around in combat dodging very telegraphed attacks by just sidestrafing, waiting for your stamina to come back up. This is especially true in early levels, in the later game it is compensated by chucking sugar like a fat kid in a candy factory. you could think this game is promoting diabetes. Kidding aside, I do get that they want to keep buff food relevant, and it's literally just one number to fix. Even with sugar, it can be a slog. The Buff food issue could have been solved differently, for example by having it primarily increase max stamina, give faster regen if you completely empty your stamina or halve the stamina on an empty belly. those are just off the top of my head.
Melee combat is lackluster at best. Even only having a heavy attack would mitigate some of it, but as it stands now, it's just spamming left click and dodging/blocking once in a while.
Ranged combat is spamming explosive arrows in late game.
I won't even cover enemy tracking, some of the enemy ranged attacks or scavenger matron poison.

Level-Curve/Progression: too many low level areas, no level scaling to keep low level areas somewhat interesting. High level enemies drop pretty much the same as low level enemies, outside of gear.

Movement/Input Queue: This is also very inconsistent. Sometimes it seems actions I input get queued, sometimes not. This can mean life or death in the game. Sometimes, I can double jump, sometimes, the second jump immediately opens the glider. Minor bumps in the landscape can send you yeeting off to the distance or down where you came from should you tread falsely. In general the sliding mechanic is more annoying than fun. You can compensate some of it by moving slowly/without sprinting/jumping much, but considering the size of the map...

Talent Tree (Circle): It's actually fascinating how they managed to make the talent tree both superficial AND overly complicated at the same time. All talents in the center of the Circle should be baseline abilities. Having to put (a lot of!) points into a stamina break finisher or sneak attack seems off.
Progression through the circle is often nonsensical, most of the nodes are just straight up stat increases or other passive bonuses with some forced alteration. Double jump is basically mandatory and should be a baseline ability as well, so should updraft. Finding another weapon often means respecing, and specializing in a certain element or damage type is also a moot point, since it mostly depends on the weapon you currently have as your main weapon.

"Role-Playing": Where RPG? you do have some RPG mechanics, like stat points and gear, but you don't really interact with the world or the people in it, once you have summoned them into your base. Of course they do give you quests, but you dont have choices, talking points or anything else that would qualify the game as a role playing game. You don't matter and "story wise" it seems you have only one way to go forward.


General Points:

Map Design: someone should tell developers that "big maps" don't equal "better maps". For the most part, the world of enshrouded feels empty (yeah, it's kind of a story point I know), with some rare PO(not so)I's scattered through a big, big world, where you will spend a lot of time digging your way up cliffs. It's nice that I CAN do it, but it's annoying how often I HAVE TO. There are some hazards scattered throughout the world in form of lava rivers or some green stuff that drains your stamina, but by far the worst is the almost instakill red shroud stuff, with often no way to get out quickly. respawn points are rare and distances far, which makes dying to something like this especially frustrating.

Bugs: Essential Talents for Group Play (f.e. Nemesis/Arch Nemesis) have been broken for months. There have been content updates in the meantime, but broken essentials dont get fixed? Priorities, people, priorities.
Respawning Dead with no way to respawn again.
Shared Progression not working.

Physics: increase the weight, things might stop yeeting like crazy.

Item Progression: Inconsistent. Get weapons from enemies, but craft armor for the most part. being able to craft weapons would make specializing in certain elements or damage types more useful.

Crafting: often overly complicated. Run to the Smith to get nails and then go to the carpenter to make a chest, and that's a short example. A central "crafting order board" or something alike could mitigate that, making you able to centrally manage production as "leader" of your village. Having your production split over 7 craftspeople as well as multiple machines has you weigh between building an organic village/base or just stuffing everything in one big room for convenience. The first choice will have you walking a lot.


All of these issues have been there since launch, and I do not see any efforts to fix or improve them.

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