So, I'll start with the positives, then address the most glaring problem at the post's end. Tl;dr, fun game made with a lot of love, great multiplayer, active developers fixing issues as fast as they can, not yet but eventually will be worth its asking price with a few updates, AI-usage is going to poison this game's reputation and quality and is something they could and should change as soon as possible.

I'll say outright that this could be a truly great game someday, I enjoyed it immensely. It's satisfying to swing your weapon, to move carefully in combat or sprint through the world, to dodge enemy attacks, I think they absolutely nailed tons of it. Playing on the hardest and easiest difficulties are satisfying on opposite ends of the spectrum, bosses feel appropriately difficult and enemies appropriately deadly on hard, while it's a leisurely walk on easy. I'd feel comfortable playing this with a wide variety of friends of multiple skill levels. The action/combat of it almost feels like it has a universal appeal, though a stamina meter demands it be played more precisely than HackAndSlashy.

I think the visuals are quite strong as well. Character portraits can look awkward, but in terms of spritework, every single player character looks spectacular, every single animation is complex, flat out cool and conveys exactly what it needs to. It feels and looks amazing to swing your weapon in these beautiful smears and arcs and leave dents in the surroundings, or even to harvest materials from the world, watching your character split logs with their axe in unique animations. Each and every monster is striking too, bosses can be actively breathtaking at times, npcs, environments, everything is rendered in gorgeous detail.

I think its biggest claim to fame is its skill trees. As of now, there are three races and three classes for a total of nine different base builds that can all go in drastically different directions. The build-crafting channel in the discord is something to behold, tons of people are sharing wildly varied builds on the same classes. I think there's already some delightful depth here that's only going to get better. Each of the 9 currently existing skill trees all have extremely fun and satisfying nodes and skills to unlock from them, and I found it utterly delightful to make my way through point by point to what I wanted. Respeccing is possible and encouraged, you'll not be wanting on that front either. Add in gear that all have individual stats and set-bonuses that you can mix and match, and something wonderfully satisfying to engage with blossoms. Even if all this isn't your thing, this game has surprisingly easy to navigate menus. With a small team and an early-access game, I wouldn't blame them for having some clumsiness, but I found it to be smoothsailing.

I must commend the multiplayer as well. Whether you want to play with friends or strangers, I found its connection nigh flawless. I did bump into hitbox issues playing with friends on other continents, but it's hard to hold that against them. What I didn't experience were dropped connections, lag, bugs or desync of any kind on allies or enemies, I found it to be a practically perfect multiplayer experience. For the heck of it, I joined a 20+ person public server and had a grand time romping around with strangers, all doing their own things in the world, pursuing my own goals or helping others as I saw fit.

Overall, I liked it a lot, I enjoyed this game immensely and found myself not wanting to stop playing.

With that said, I feel this game is not currently, but will become, what I paid for it. Endgame content is present but rather limited, involving infinite rematches with gear-dropping bosses that scale in difficulty. There's a nice variety of bosses to do this with, but not enough for me to be sinking hours and hours of my time into. To be harsh and hyperbolic, as of now the endgame does feel a bit like playing a bad monster hunter. I feel like I thoroughly exhausted the game's content in about 20 hours or so.If you don't mind repeating content if you get to do it with a new set of skills, the game has a lot of replay value. If I got this game on a steeper sale I might be singing a different tune, but on a personal level, 19 dollars for 19 hours of game isn't quite enough for me with how competitive the medium is, as unfortunate as that statement is.

The game also features an inventory encumbrance, gathering, crafting, and base-building system, which all functions appropriately. Admittedly, none of this is particularly my speed, and I all but exclusively made chests to store my items in and ignored much of what I was able to do in this regard as much as I could. You will need to pause your exploring, fighting, sidequesting and adventuring when your inventory gets full, dumping stuff in chests to craft or store for later, sell them for gold, dismantle unwanted gear so you can turn it into a currency used specifically to upgrade gear-if you don't build the stat that grows Encumbrance, you might find yourself frequently annoyed by these pitstops. You could soldier on of course, but it doesn't feel great to leave the slew of monster materials and geardrops on the floor. There's also a food and drink gear slot you seem to need to fill, which I did immediately balk at, but it was ultimately unintrusive and easy to ignore. Anyway, clearly take this critique with a grain of salt when these systems are not to my tastes. Its still satisfying to obliterate useless gear into something that rewards you later. On that note, this game features an elaborate hub, filled with extremely verbose NPC's that demand you move through their dialogue trees in order to accept essential quests to progress through the game and unlock new areas and enemies. This was also a turn-off for me, as I think an action-heavy multiplayer game like this works best when the story stays out of the fun's way. It is easy to identify which NPC's you need to speak to and to mash through their text if you're utterly disinterested.


Finally, I'll address what is rightfully and rapidly becoming the game's biggest controversy - undisclosed usage of AI-assisted writing. I believe the problems are twofold. One, the writing is actively bad and is making the game worse with how often you're forced to engage with it, and two, the ai-usage is poisoning the well, so to speak. Dialogue in Dimraeth fails to convey narrative, making you slog through huge walls of the most generic fantasy dialogue imaginable. It spends an unbelievable amount of words to waffle about vague concepts such as "the refugee village is struggling," or "the evil mage lies in shadow, seeking power." It doesn't go anywhere, obsessed with building these character relationships that all boil down to everyone having a positive respect for each other. There are no character dynamics, there are no plot twists - and this would be perfectly fine, but instead the game shoves literal walls of texts in front of you everytime you do anything. I have to wonder why the game seems so intent on being read when it didn't bother to be written. In-between fun gameplay it feels like I need to read someone's chatgpt prompt of "speak as a grizzled soldier/shy fae about x topic." There are decent ideas here that fall completely flat, such as parts of the forest intentionally corrupting itself to war with humanity as an environmental punishment, but the game has absolutely no reason to be so wordy with so little of interest to say. There's nothing wrong with generic fantasy, but now, everytime I so much as hear a bland song, I have to wonder if an AI generated it, having to wonder which weak parts of this game are from human hand or just a generated mistake. This story does not have to be perfect or the best anyone has ever made, but it will never be anything but a complete waste of reputation-destroying time if it continues down this direction.

This game makes me really conflicted. If I could give a neutral review that’d be what I’d give because this is 2 thirds of a good rpg. The gameplay is phenomenal and the art direction is also phenomenal however… the writing… the writing is so so bad.

I agree with other reviews that say the dialogue is AI generated. This post isn’t meant to be a AI psa, I personally have mixed feelings on AI, but using AI for writing is really bad and causes a lot of issues. It’s especially obvious when you play the joker persona as the AI has no clue how to tell a joke, the MC is either the corniest guy, says something that means nothing, or is just an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The dialogue also often doesn’t make sense, feels badly translated, and forgets things. The worst of it is how uncharacterized the NPCs are. Also the AI pads the dialogue so much… it’s really bad… every time I’d try to read I’d think to myself “Half this sentence or paragraph could be cut without losing anything.” Eventually I just stopped reading the dialogue, but it left such a bitter taste in my mouth that I couldn’t enjoy the rest of the game which is amazing.

This is so confusing to me because I don’t think anything else in the game is so passionless. I believe the art in the game was made by humans and it’s genuinely fantastic. The character portraits have so much soul (especially the merchant) which makes it more jarring when they speak. The combat and general gameplay is also fantastic and well balanced. So it’s really really odd to me how passionless the dialogue is.

I understand that games like this require an immense amount of words and with a game this large I can understand why writing dialogue for it all feels impossible. But characters and dialogue are the soul of an rpg. I know the devs have said they’re planning to listen to feedback so I just want to say please hire writers. I really have no other feedback everything else about the game is great just please hire writers. I’m begging you I really want to play the amazing game you’ve made without the bitter taste the dialogue leaves me with.

Edit:

I just want to address all the people saying the writing isn’t AI. You guys are technically right I can’t be certain whether the writing isn’t AI or not. I’m also not anti AI I believe AI has its uses but this is not one of them. And more than being AI (in my opinion) the dialogue is just not good.

I’ll give an example of why I think the dialogue is likely AI:

“A finer man you will rarely meet, his heart leaning toward Truth, Beauty and Good. Best to meet others with an open hand, I always say.”

“I believe that too. Trust first, ask questions later, life's easier that way.”

Ok while this whole thing reeks of AI to me I’ll try to explain exactly why the player response feels AI generated. “___ first, ask questions later.” Is a fill in the blank sentence like “It’s not ___, it’s ___.” It also doesn’t understand exactly what the fill in the blank sentence is meant to mean. The sentence is meant to be a cheeky way to imply reckless violence but they aren’t using it for that here. Not to be the grammar police, but It also doesn’t make grammatical sense as when you use trust in this way you have to identify the trustee and trusted. I think the reason it’s written like this is again because of the joker persona I’m playing as, the AI doesn’t how how humor works so it uses the sentence structure of a joke without actually telling a joke. All the joker dialogue is written like this which makes the AI writing really obvious.

Ultimately this is just one example so nothing conclusive. If you still think it’s not AI I don’t blame you I spent the first 5 hours playing convincing myself it wasn’t AI it was just poorly written by a human also (My points above still stand if it’s a human writer though). But the fact they undeniably used AI voiceover in the demo (undisclosed btw) and the fact all the dialogue is written like above makes in undeniable to me personally.

While I do want to love this game, there are some flaws here.

The writing is absolutely atrocious, and after reading some more reviews I see that they used AI for the dialog. Sometimes I'm reading what the NPCs are saying and I'm just in awe of how confusing and alien the conversations are. I would think that the developers would at least try and edit some of the AI text slop so that it actually translates or makes some sense to players, but there are some instances where I can see that it's straight up copy and paste from AI.

The gameplay, class system, and skill point tree are where this game thrives. The gameplay addictive and fun, it feels like you're always working towards something and progressing with your chosen character. If I choose to ignore the text and dialog there is a pretty good solid game here. Combat is fun and challenging, I can feel my skills improving as I take on more and more quests or tasks. I am a little disappointed that the game only released with 3 races and 3 classes. You can tell that the developers intend to add more at some point. This wouldn't be as much of a bummer, but we can see that the developers have already cut corners by using A LOT of AI content.

This brings me to the multiplayer aspect of the game. I think the multiplayer experience sounds fun and engaging, I don't have any friends that play this game, so naturally I opened up my world as a public server. Before hosting my world, I checked my chests and made sure that they were set to a setting called "Private" with a lock icon next to it. I thought this would lock the inventory of the chest, as that would make the most sense to me as a player. ( Private > Chest ) This was not the case sadly, and the codex meant to help new players understand the game didn't have a page for any multiplayer gameplay. Two players entered my world briefly, as I said hello, one player met me out in the world and the other player wasn't anywhere to be found. I played for a bit with one player not thinking much of it, and after they left my party I went back to my base to find that ALL of my progression has been halted because one of these players had stolen all of my inventory. 12 hours played on a character, all gone.

I had to dig online for about 45 minutes to understand what happened here. Why were my chests not locking? Was I even on my original server at this point? I wasn't sure and there weren't a lot of resources online as the game recently released (delayed multiple times by the way). I've reached out to support to see what can be done about losing all this progression and my entire personal inventory but haven't gotten a response yet.

At this point I would not be able to recommend this game in good faith, hopefully things are able to be salvaged, because the game has great core gameplay. My recommendation for developers would be to get some real writers in the studio to help replace the AI slop. They should also fix the codex to include more information on online and multiplayer game modes and settings, so players aren't forced to start over after 10+ hours of gameplay.