Citadel: Forged With Fire – Review. It seems like something fresh..

Greetings StopGame.Ru! With you, as always, I, your half-naked sorcerer Animanser. The sabbatical dedicated to the scandalous Call Of Duty is over and it’s time to get back to work. And today I would like to present to you a rather interesting project in an atypical setting and with atypical mechanics.

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Citadel: Forged With Fire – it’s online Sandbox RPG with elements of witchcraft and the ability to engage in battle with other players for territory. As a newly minted student of the magical arts, you will explore the dangerous world of Ignus. Your goal is to create a name for yourself and achieve fame and power among the ruling Houses.

You have complete freedom of action. The player can form his own clan to battle other players for territory, become an infamous hunter of other players, build massive and unique castles, tame powerful beasts to do your bidding, and explore uncharted territories to unravel their rich and intriguing history. The path to power and influence depends only on you.

Doesn’t sound bad yeah? But what is it really like?.

There is no plot, but you hold on!

As in most online sandboxes, the plot is not the first place in the game. In our case, it doesn’t exist at all. But in order to fill out the plot section, I’ll note that there’s quite an interesting setting here. The player will play as a magician in a world typical of fantasy games. On your travels you will meet orcs, zombies, dragons, magic towers with fast travel points, caves, etc.d. There are also camps with enemies scattered around the map who are guarding chests with valuable items, which should motivate the player to clear them. The world itself consists of two biomes, forest and snow. I’ll immediately note that you need to play only in co-op or online mode, since alone in the game: a) it won’t be easy, b: there’s simply nothing to do.

The game has a character editor, but in 2017 it was called a freak generator.

Harry Potter in the world of ARK.

Speaking of gameplay, the first thing I noticed was the relatively fine tuning of the server. When creating your server, you can define an experience modifier, choose PVP or PVE mode, limited weight or not. And what’s most attractive is the presence of the “unlimited resources” mode. On the one hand, this tab completely kills grinding, because you will no longer need to collect resources to make items. You just need to open a recipe after getting a certain LVL and upgrade it with skill points. On the other hand, there is so much grind in the game that to build your castle or craft more or less advanced items, grinding will take the lion’s share of time and you can safely forget about exploring the world.

Like any RPG, Citadel: Forged With Fire has its own progression implemented in the form of character LVLing. With each level, a character can pump up one characteristic, such as “damage, health, mana and weight capacity” and several points in knowledge, thereby opening up new recipes for crafting furniture, workbenches, ammunition, and the like. It is worth paying tribute to the developers, the character receives EXP not only for completing tasks and fighting mobs, but also for crafting things, building and collecting rare resources. The list of recipes is quite impressive, it includes various types of armor, weapons, accessories and a large number of elements related to the construction of your home.

There’s a ton of various junk, https://madcasino-uk.org/login/ so there’s plenty of room to roam.

Construction can safely be called one of the main positive aspects of the game. At the time of writing, I had just begun to build my fortress on a gorgeous lake in a snowy biome, but while traveling, I came across the buildings of other players and they inspired me with their size and appearance. The game has a system of privatization of territory, due to the so-called throne. As soon as the player lays the foundation for his castle, he will need to install a throne, which will privatize all further blocks in any way related to this throne. If you want to rebuild a house not alone, but with your companions, at level 5 the opportunity to create a common house opens up. You just need to add your comrades to the list and each member of this house will be able to make their own changes to the building.

However, you must understand that peaceful construction is only available in PVE mode, and with certain server settings, your throne needs care or over time it will collapse, and your entire building will lose its private status. If you play in PVP mode, you also need to build traps for your building, which will not allow attackers to destroy the throne and capture the castle.

By the evening, after the release, someone managed to build such a colossus.

A separate advantage I would like to note is the absence of survival elements, forcing the player to constantly spend time not on construction and exploration of the world, but on searching for food, water, heat and other nonsense. There is no such thing in the game, so the player is free to do whatever he wants.

Well, the latest features of the game include the ability to fly on a broom and tame wild animals. For the first one, you just need to get level 10 and personal transport, even if it’s not the fastest in your pocket. For the second, we need comrades who will help pacify wild beasts, even dragons, thereby helping to tame them.

Some people create a Quiditch field from the novel of the same name.

But what I couldn’t decide on was the combat system. The system is mostly based on fighting with magic using a wand, staff or magic gloves. However, the player is free to choose a simple melee weapon, which in some cases can be much more effective. The very idea of ​​fighting with magic alone attracts me, taking into account the fact that the visual effect of the skills is made very juicy and bright, but there are also negative aspects.

Firstly, the game has a very strange and meager skill system. By default, the character only owns the school of witchcraft, and to acquire skills from other schools, the player will have to look for magic spheres. You cannot combine spheres with each other, and each of them gives only 4 skills, of which only 2 can be used on weapons. And this is where the difficulties begin.

The character can carry 4 types of weapons, each type of weapon can accommodate only 2 skills out of 4. The skills themselves are usually divided into attacking by area, attacking a specific enemy, buffing skill and support skill. It is impossible to find out what exactly a skill does without putting it in the weapon slot, and if you use spheres, then each attempt to find out the ability of your skill will cost you 1 sphere. Such a system, in addition to the fact that it forces you to waste, albeit not rare, but not infinite spheres, also deprives you of the opportunity to carry out related combinations. To alternate between different skills, you will have to frantically switch between weapons on which certain abilities are assigned.

In addition to problems with combinations, the game has an extremely broken hit box and an overly annoying target. In the first case, opponents will hit you even if you are a couple of meters away, dodging or running away from him. In the second case, opponents will annoyingly pursue you until you take off, hide in a peaceful zone, or go into the water.

If the bear raises its paws, nothing can save you)

There are also problems with the level of opponents. If at the starting points the opponents are more or less balanced in level, then a couple of hundred meters away their level noticeably increases significantly. Thus, preventing you from exploring another biome without spending a lot of time on leveling up. Reading reviews from players who spent more time in the game, some note that it is not possible to complete the final dungeons in solo mode due to the excessively increased difficulty.

Another disadvantage I would like to mention is the semi-empty world. Of course, the game has many camps with enemies, dungeons and chests, but this is all very local. In places where there is no such activity, it’s quite sad. I’m also not happy with the quest system. Games with such a setting allow you to implement many variants of tasks, or at least diversify the banal bring and serve. In Citadel: Forged With Fire, there are only training tasks, which, by the way, can be repeated at each starting point and gain additional experience, and daily tasks such as pick n amount of grass and kill n number of animals.

If I can calculate the distance correctly, then the map in the game is only 4 km.

Poisonous days and romantic nights.

Speaking about the graphical component, I am very happy to note the almost perfect optimization. At ultra settings the game runs at smooth 60 frames at Full HD resolution. The world itself looks very colorful, and does a great job of conveying a fantasy setting. However, in my opinion, the developers went too far with acidic colors, which can hurt the eye in the morning, but the nights in the game are very atmospheric. I’m also pleased with the visual variety of opponents, which, although their mechanics are similar to each other, however, the variety of opponents is quite large. The well-known engine, which appears in almost every review of mine, is responsible for all the beauty of the game.

The sound component, unfortunately, cannot boast of such achievements. The music in the menu is quite epic, no doubt, but in the game itself I did not notice any variety of soundtracks. There are also some problems with sound effects in the game. For example, while wandering around the world, the game can notify the player with fairly loud sounds that mobs are fighting somewhere, even though the opponents themselves will be at a fairly decent distance.

Night shooting is lame.

Not bad, but could be much better.

Perhaps such a long vacation spoiled my gaming taste, or good optimization where you don’t expect to see it clouded my vision, but Citadel: Forged With Fire really pulled me in. And if it weren’t for other games to get familiar with, I would have spent a lot more time in the game. The game has a good picture, optimization, quite a lot of opportunities for arranging your castle and a pleasant setting. Many people complain about various bugs, I haven’t encountered them. If the developers work on the combat system, content and balance, they could end up with a pretty solid game. This game is suitable for those who first of all miss sandboxes and only then for those who want to immerse themselves in the world of fantasy. I recommend this game for you to check out, but whether it will draw you in or not is up to you to decide.

Thank you for your attention, do not use magic outside of games and see you soon.