Citadel: Forged With Fire Preview: You’re A Wizard, Everyone!

Citadel: Forged With Fire’s magical sandbox gameplay is able to appeal even to those who don’t necessarily gravitate towards the survival genre.

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Fans of the massive online sandbox-survival RPG genre are no doubt familiar with Citadel: Forged With Fire from developers Blue Isle Studios/Virtual Basement LLC. The game features a magical open-world in which players explore, craft, and build as they try to become masters of the art of magic. Citadel: Forged With Fire has been available in Steam’s Early Access program since 2017, but the game is slated for a full release this upcoming November. TheGamer had a chance to check out the game in its current state, and although Citadel: Forged With Fire has had its fair share of growing pains within Early Access, the magical sandbox gameplay is able to appeal even to those who don’t necessarily gravitate towards the survival genre.

You’re A Wizard, Everyone!

First and foremost, at its core, Citadel: Forged With Fire is a wizarding game, full of magic, spells, and mythical creatures. Players begin as apprentices of the magical arts (though custom physical character attributes are surprisingly limited). There’s really no other classes per se, but players can choose the type of wizard/warlock they want to be. Going all-in on magic is obviously an option, but so is the ability to be a warrior-esque type of wizard, replacing a wand for a magical flaming sword for up close, blunt action. Players are tasked with making their way through a sprawling open-world – and a beautiful one at that. From grandiose mountain ranges to lush, colorful forests, Citadel looks great. Framerate and other visual glitches that haunted gameplay early on in its life never seemed to be an issue during my gameplay.

Upon entering the world, new players can take part in a series of quests that act as the game’s tutorial. However, the quests didn’t really provide anything that couldn’t be experienced and learned through trial and error in the open world, nor were they very stimulating. One of the later quests in the series was actually broken for me, forcing me to abandon it altogether and venture out on my own. It’s assumed that this would be fixed with the game’s 1.0 release, but it speaks to the overall value of skipping the tutorial and diving right in, especially for genre veterans.

Minecraft & Ark(ish)

Citadel: Forged With Fire plays more like a survival-lite than a traditional survival game. There’s no need to keep tabs on traits like hunger, which is a nice feature that opens the up door for more casual players who are less inclined to play games with those more in-depth mechanics. That said, casual players will still have plenty of work cut out for them with the game’s grindy nature.

Crafting and gathering are major components in Citadel: Forged With Fire, extending to everything from crafted spells, to taming monsters, to base building, and even PVP. The number of materials and reagents is staggering, which speaks to the amount of customization options available to players. However, gathering said materials will take up a lot of your time spent with the world of Ignus. Although the grind is still a pretty significant part of Citadel: Forged With Fire, it has seen a decrease since the early days of the game, so it is clear that the development team has taken that player feedback to heart. After all, while it’s understood that gathering and crafting go hand-in-hand with open-world survival games, building ridiculous bases and structures are some of the main things that players are really working towards.

If You Build It, Other Players Will (Hopefully) Come

Building in Citadel: Forged With Fire is solid. The entire system feels intuitive and robust enough to create the fortress of your wildest dreams, provided you have the resources. Be it modest or outlandish, players can also team up with others to create alliances with Citadel’s House system for epic, large-scale PVP battles. Of course, that will all depend on the number of players that are actually playing on the server.

Servers are currently set up to allow for 64-players at a time. Unfortunately, player counts have continued to dwindle during the game’s time spent in Early Access. Throughout my playthrough, there were no PVE servers with more than two players on at a time, while only a handful of PVP servers had double-digit players. This doesn’t bode too well for those interested in the social element of this type of game, but hopefully, the release of the full game will bring back former players, in addition to new ones.

There is no firm release date yet for Citadel: Forged With Fire, but in addition to PC, the game will eventually be making its way to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Stay tuned to TheGamer as we’ll be covering Citadel: Forged With Fire more in-depth following its 1.0 launch.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/citadel-forged-fire-early-access-preview/