Enshrouded

This game is terrible for co-op play. I loved the game on my private server so I rented a dedicated one to have my friends join in. The problem is the server-based progress and the unlocked NPCs. The game is only rewarding if you are all playing together and unlocking things as a group. Otherwise, if you're playing and questing on your own, your server mates miss out. Sorry! Also, the unlocked NPCs are one-per-server. So if you friend decides they want to make a little town but you want to live in a different part of the map, then you have to decide who gets the black smith, farmer, etc, because there is only one spawn of these crafters per server. The game expects you and your friends to play at the same time to unlock things, and all of you agree to make a little town and share your resources. That's so ridiculous, given how beautiful and large the map is. One of my friends inevitably left the server to play on their own because they were missing too much content due to me and another friend having already unlocked survivors/completed quests. Was this designed as a single player game at one point and they just half-assed co-op play? I have no idea why this is designed in such a terrible way. It wouldn't kill them to have duplicate NPCs for different flame shrines. You could just unlock their 'tools' which could make the same thing that the crafter NPCs do and have the NPCs just give quests and add flavor. Why do you have to talk to the black smith to make nails, but you can go to the crafting station to make metal plates?

Review rewritten Sept 12 for clarity. I got this game expecting to enjoy it, and it has many interesting features. However there are a variety of factors that ruin the experience and work against the game's core potential. I've re-ordered the issues I've experienced by category and rewritten the review for ease of reading. 1. The Devs do not respect your time. This is the worst offender. - This is obvious from the very first base you build. Anything much larger than a 3x3x3 cube-cabin will have you mining rocks and chopping wood for HOURS, all just to lay down basic foundations , two floors, and a roof. Drop rates are too low for most resources and the number of hits needed to harvest a node is very high (13 or so at the start) - Mined/Felled resources spew resources everywhere as you mine/fell them and require you to run around mashing the interaction key after in order to pick up every bloody one of them. Combined with the huge number of resources you will need, it's a lot of mashing. It started to hurt my finger at one point. - After you gather the large amounts of resources, you have to wait long periods of real word time to process them. Sometimes all you need a small amount and can just go do a quest while you wait, but often, with items you need in bulk, say for fossil dust, you will set a workstation to make 100 and it will take approx 6-8hr! - Crafting is an awful experience. The game keeps adding dozens of crafting stations as recipes are split all over the place. Then you have NPCs who you need to talk to in order to craft other items. Then those NPCs need random furniture that you get from fetch quests in order to craft some recipes. And then those NPCs craft more crafting stations, each with their own subset of recipes. And each NPC upgrades a different subset of equipment. It's really frustrating to keep track of where everything needs to be made across all these different stations + NPCs. Example, there are many potted plant decorations which you can craft at the farmer, but doing so requires clay pots from the kiln which you have to manually change the recipe for, and there are about 20 different pot types instead of one generic 'clay pot' resource. It's a mess! - Nonstop formulaic fetch quests. NPCs will dump piles of assorted quests on you without prioritizing them. Example: You cannot simply build crafting stations when obtaining new materials. You will need to go to generic fungus-infested village #56 to find an item the NPC wants before you can build a cooking station. There you will find a wordy note saying your cooking station is in another castle, leading you to location #57. There you will once again get told the cooking station is in another castle; You have now had to explore 3 locations before you can build the bloody cookpot! Then you have to farm materials for the cookpot which is a huge chore in some cases, build it, and then find out it only automates cooking basic recipes. The NPC will then immediately send you on another chain of fetch quests in order to build a proper cooking station, which will need a bunch of addons and accessories in order to make any good recipes, each with their own time-wasting fetch quests! Now multiply that by all the NPCs in your base and the game just becomes an endless chore simulator. - They aren't JUST fetch quests. No, most of the time it points you at a random village and you will spend 20 min walking there, then 15-30 min exploring the area to find the objective hiding in a corner somewhere. Since the game devolves into nonstop fetch&search quest chains, even short searches end up wasting a huge amount of time combined. - The game serves you (hundreds of?) unique items, cosmetics, clothing, and decorative items piecemeal, usually individually. And Guess What!? They are all individual 'go search this location' fetch quests! - Few fast travel points lead to enshrouded being quite a running simulator. You have my condolences if you die and have to walk back to retrieve your corpse. - Awful instant death mechanics everywhere, and see above point. I literally died around 12+ times in a 1hr session due to tarpits in one area I was in. The glider controls can be janky, and terrain is really slidey, so you WILL end up in that tar pit. Think that's bad? Try retrieving your corpse from the middle of a tar pit! You can also drown in a puddle if you so much as set a toe in it. There are also patches of red shroud scattered about that are often decorative in nature, and those will murder you if you touch them. - For mages, Farming spell materials is a time-waster. You can mine an entire small amber vein just to make a few dozen fireballs (you go through them fast btw). 2. Navigation is awful - The map is a craggy mess of canyons and land barriers, combine that with low visibility in fog and it's just not a fun time trying to get around. - See lack of fast travel points 3. Bad user experience - Onboarding is awful, you are way too weak at the start and need to do far too much grinding. It does get a bit better as you get access to better equipment, but as a new player the game quickly lost it's shine and became frustrating (wolves and resource grind). One notable problem is the lack of early game AOE when the game quickly starts throwing hoards at you. - NPCs dump absurd amounts of quests and side objectives on you. It's overwhelming and it's not uncommon to finish one objective only to have 3 more dumped on you. It's also very demotivating. - These quests will often send you all over the map including areas which you are not ready for, as the game does not communicate details or priorities. I ended up soloing multiplayer content (hollow halls) to great frustration because it appeared in the main quests section and was made to sound important. - See nonstop fetch quests - Combat jank. Wands have trouble locking onto enemies consistently, or switching targets. Many staff spells will either hit objects near you, or fail to connect with enemies (chain lightning). Weapons often hit only one enemy in the swing arc, or repeatedly hit terrain at your feet instead. 4. Balancing - It often feels like the devs just want you to suffer. Enemy combat can often be souls-like, with careful timing of dodges or parries required, except the game will also try to steamroll you with these same enemies in large numbers. One of the most egregious examples are the dogs or similar enemies, they can easily take out 1/3 or more of your HP in their initial charge, move extremely fast, and can leap several meters towards you. Having a boss/mini-boss enemy act like this is manageable as you can kite, but a pack of wolves will not let you get any breathing room. You can't fight (you die), you can't kite (you run out of stamina (and die)), and you can't block or parry that many nonstop attacks either. It's just bad gameplay! The only good strategies are AOE (Which you lack early game), or cheesily standing on tall objects to snipe them off one by one. - As above, There are a LOT of enemies that attack almost nonstop and can quickly close a 5-meter gap with a leap attack. The game WILL throw multiples at you. - 4/5 early game deaths due to dogs or wolf packs, I could go to areas above my level and kite bosses np, but having a pack of high damage rushers refusing to give you any breathing room is not a fun experience. _ TLDR: The game is grindy and doesn't respect your time in the least, and while the map is somewhat hand made, the sheer repetition of doing endless fetch-quests in bland fungus-ruins is a huge demotivator. Combat suffers from a lot of jank, and masochistic enemy designs leads to frustrating encounters (as with packs of dogs a couple of levels above you). I really wanted to like this game but it is relentlessly padding out gameplay with busywork and general frustration. Solo at least, it is a very poor experience. I recommend playing Palworld / Icarus / Stationeers / Etc instead.

Game is fun. The optimization is the worst thing since 2077s launch. Cant recommend the game until its fixed

**Solo gameplay: 9/10** **Multiplayer gameplay: 2/10** As a solo experience, Enshrouded is exceptional. Its handcrafted world, combat, environmental storytelling, progression systems, and building mechanics are all remarkably enjoyable, with relatively few shortcomings. Where Enshrouded struggles, in my view, is multiplayer. The most significant issue is the shared loot system. When a group clears an area together, the contents of a chest ultimately belong to whichever player opens it. That creates an inherently competitive element within what is otherwise cooperative exploration. Even when players willingly redistribute equipment afterward, the system still introduces an unavoidable layer of filtering: one player sees the loot first, evaluates it, and then decides what gets passed along. For a group of two or three players, this may be less noticeable if everyone eventually specializes into substantially different archetypes—roughly the red, green, and blue branches of the skill system. Early in the game, however, build diversity is limited, meaning multiple players are often competing for the same broadly useful equipment. The second problem is how much progression is tied to the world rather than the individual player. A significant amount of exploration, quest progression, discoveries, and unlocks are shared across the server. This implicitly encourages the group to remain together so that everyone experiences major content at the same time. Unfortunately, that design compounds the loot problem. The game encourages players to explore as a group while simultaneously using a loot system that makes the rewards for that exploration competitive. Independent exploration could otherwise mitigate some of the frustration by allowing players to seek out their own equipment and discoveries, but the emphasis on shared world progression discourages that independence. These systems are not individually disastrous, but together they create a multiplayer experience that often feels at odds with itself: cooperative in combat and progression, yet competitive in reward distribution. I would love to see Keen Games add an option for individualized loot and create a clearer distinction between character progression and world progression. Neither would require abandoning the shared-world structure that makes Enshrouded appealing; they would simply give multiplayer groups more flexibility in how they choose to experience it. Enshrouded already has the foundation of an outstanding multiplayer game. With a few changes to how loot and progression are handled, I could easily see the multiplayer experience approaching the quality of its solo game.