Today's the day Enshrouded is released, but I've played it before. The devs had made a demo of Enshrouded available during the last Steam Next Fest. It was a hit. If I recall correctly, it had the most players out of all the demo during Next Fest. I deeply enjoyed the demo at the time, despite only having 8 hours and my partner couldn't share in the experience with me because his computer only had 4GB of Video RAM at the time. The demo demanded 6.
So, onto the review part! Just a disclaimer, I am playing this game on Windows. It is an Early Access game and nVidia lives up to their reputation of not playing particularly nice with Linux. There's no DLSS support at the time of this writing. I didn't want to sour my first time back to this game. I hope to come back to this, with some experience of the game in Linux by then!
The game ran with a better framerate than the demo did. It's noticeable the first time you're greeted by the world at large. I remember getting somewhere around 40-50fps when I stepped outside, to getting 75fps (that's my monitor's refresh rate, so I prefer to keep it around there). Of course, that was with the graphics settings a mix of Balanced and Performance on a GeForce 2060 RTX.
The building system is based on voxels. The floors, walls, etc are based on the voxel grid that already exists in the world. Each voxel "cell" is about 50cm x 50cm x 50cm. Although the game claims one block is 1 meter...but assuming your character is 2 meters tall, which coms out to 4 blocks high. This means you can get some pretty decent granular control over how your build looks. For instance, I've built a hut where the bottom half is made of stone, and the top half is made of wood.
"You could do that in other base building games," you may point out. This is true, but how many base building games let you do this?
=> Screenshot of Enshrouded. The window portion is a mix of wood and stone.
If I wanted to, I could've made just the bottom trim out of stone and the rest out of wood. If I only want to build a portion of the wall but I'm using a preset shape, the game will only take as much as it needs. So a 4 x 4 x 1 meter floor takes 64 "blocks." If I want to add another 2 meters to one side but I'm still using the 4x4 floor shape. As long I overlap half the existing floor, then the game only takes 32 blocks instead of another 64. This works with terrain too. You can modify the terrain using a pickaxe, or using the same build system and remove the voxel. You'll get a square hole this way.
Honestly, this game does sound more and more like Valheim, but with a different base building system! The food, the comfort level system, the rested buff. I also like the visual style of Enshrouded better than Valheim. Strangely enough, it doesn't feel as depressing to me as Valheim does.
I remember reading someone's comment on how this game is like a mix of crafting survival and Dark Souls. I have to disagree on that. This game is not anywhere near as difficult as Dark Souls and the other variants. Yes, the enemies do hit quite hard if you have little to no armor. And yes, the only time I really had my ass handed to me was when I was clearing out a Well (a dungeon of sorts). However, the enemies I've encountered thus far telegraph their moves quite clearly. They also don't try and chain attacks. Not so far anyway. If this game is a Soulslike in terms of combat difficulty, then it has to be way later than where I'm at now.
That or I'm actually good at Soulslike games and never knew it? Doubtful 😛
EDIT: So now that I've had a chance to play this version of Enshrouded, wow. They slowed levelling it seems, and facing down an enemy one level higher can get rough if you're too reckless! I'm leaving my original take on combat up for posterity's sake.
The following aspects are the stuff I found an annoyance. Not enough to turn me away from the game, but it could be enough to make or break the decision for someone else.
This game is pretty and have ran smoothly for a day one early access release. Maybe I got lucky. I know there are those who ran into issues. Framerate being too low despite having a GeForce 30 or 40 series card. There are some hiccups with players being able to join each other in multiplayer, but that was addressed in their first hotfix. There are other bugs, but the devs are working on it.
Again, this game is in early access. There's a whole 'nother post I plan on writing. It'll be ranty and it'll be about the trouble with user-based reviews. Stay tuned!
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