March 28, 2024

Inspired by the games like Dragon Age: Origins and Baldur’s Gate, Waylanders is an RPG developed by Gato Studio. Featuring tactical real-time combat with the ability to pause, an epic story set in Celtic mythology, it is out now on Steam early access.

Waylanders starts off with you creating your own custom character from a handful of options ranging from your humans, immortals, and even werewolves as well as which class to play. The character creation at this moment is very barebones, so don’t expect to create some crazy unique characters.

First off, the game is gorgeous and I really like the style of visuals that Waylanders is going for. The game looks really colorful and stylish and I dig the character design and the really detailed textures. What I don’t like, however, are the animations, even for an early access title some of the animations are very wonky and seem like unfinished.

The story is going to be set in two different time periods, Celtic and Medieval, but it’s nowhere near complete right now. The early glimpses of the story that you get to experience in the game introduce you to the world and some of the key characters. The dialogue and narrative cohesiveness is all over the place, and it gets downright confusing at times with odd decisions in terms of dialogues and missing cutscenes.

Being an RPG at its core and a party based one at that, Waylanders requires you to use your abilities as well as your team to achieve victory. Even though your party members will attack enemies on their own, you can still manually order them to do stuff in order to gain a tactical advantage. You can even set your party formation, as well as manage your companion’s loadout.

The music is by Inon Zur, and it’s fantastic. It’s the one part of the game that doesn’t suffer from early access woes and I really hope that we get treated to more of the soundtrack down the line.

That’s all I have to say about this game, unfortunately. I really wish I could write more on the various systems and the story, but there’s just not enough content here right now and the stuff that’s already in isn’t that polished. I get it’s an early access title but I really wish the game had a bit of more development time before being released.

I will say this, Waylanders has a lot of potential to be a great RPG experience. The story and lore they are setting up is unique, interesting, and intriguing. The gameplay is also going to be satisfying if they deliver on what they are promising and I already love the visual style.

If you want to get in real early on the experience and support the developers while you’re at it, go ahead and buy this game. There is about 10-12 hours of content in the game with the barebones gameplay mechanics. But if you’re looking for a complete or even a half complete experience, the game is just not ready yet.