Realms of Ancient War

5.5/10

Realms of Ancient War is a pure hack & slash action RPG. It is functional but does not offer the same level of engagement as other popular titles (Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile, Titan Quest ...).

Skill upgrades are pretty straightforward. For example for the wizzard there is only one spamable  spell, you start with 1 point in it and can upgrade it 3 times, so 10 minutes in at level 4 you are set: 90 % of the damage you will do for the rest of the game will come from that spell. The other skills all have cooldowns.

On PC, There is only 4 keys for skills: 1,2, left-click and right-click. You can swap to a second hotbar with tab. The limitation in the number of hotkeys was probably imposed to facilitate publishing this game to consoles.

Gear upgrades straightforward but irrelevant until the last chapters of the game. For the most parts, they would provide a few percents (1 % to 5 %) difference from the character's base stats. The best gear upgrades were available at a merchants seen one time in the campaign and then remained unchallenged by drops until the end of the game.

The main character has the ability to take control of some enemies, this is advertised as one of the main feature of the game in trailers, but for some reason for me it only worked once after many tries. It required my character to be pretty close to the monster in question which was unlikely to happen often with my wizard anyways.

Overall I would not recommend this game unless you feel like hacking/slashing through thousands of monsters without having to think about gear / skills or other character customization that other games in the genre provide.

As a side note I would add the game immediately made me think of Silverfall. I think Silverfall offers a bit more complexity and a more involved story, but I felt that the games were similar when started playing ... Maybe my opinion was set from the beginning since I knew both games were published by Focus Home Interactive. I looked on mobby games and could not find any more links between the two games: Both games were made in France by now dead developers but otherwise I could not find anything linking the two games together.