lorwolf

Lorwolf Early Access opened up last week, and a bunch of us from WD chat are trying it out. I’m enjoying it because it’s a group activity, and because I can click on things and watch numbers go up, but I don’t think it’s actually a good game.

Gameplay: There’s a story campaign, but the writing is (thus far) not compelling, and the battle system is barebones. Battles are turn-based and automatic (you can’t control your characters). Each wolf has a passive, a basic attack, and a limit break that they activate when they’ve taken sufficient damage. That’s all. You can’t customize or upgrade your abilities. You can’t breed for rare abilities, or crossbreed to get strategic combinations; each race (wolf, coywolf, foxwolf) has their own fixed set.

There’s also a bunch of generic idle game activities that seem largely disconnected from the whole “wolfpack” concept. There’s fishing, cooking (why are wild wolves cooking fish?), and farming (why are wild wolves tilling the soil and planting wheat??). There’s “hunting,” which is actually a bulletin board quest system that gets you crafting mats and trinkets. There’s mining and crafting (I was initially excited to see that you can use copper to craft weapons and armor for your wolves, but it’s solely cosmetic. Disappointing. However, I do like the image of my poor wolf pushing a minecart all day, possibly with no wheels because they fell off).

Everything seems disjointed and half-baked. I keep telling myself not to be too harsh because it’s Early Access, but that’s the state of the game right now. By contrast, Wolvden has a cohesive game design as a wolf pack simulator: hunters bring back food for the pack, scouts explore the surrounding territories, herbalists cure the sick, pupsitters look after pups. Flight Rising has a lot of varied activities (all the trading post stuff), but they’re invested with character and charm, and they make sense lore-wise—e.g., Pinkerton giving away Crim’s stuff, or Arlo working on archaeological digs following the events of Dustcarve Dig. Lorwolf has none of that. Here’s a pickaxe (how is my wolf using the pickaxe??). Go mine some copper.

Aesthetics: The marking/genetic system feels like a mashup of Wolvden and Flight Rising’s systems, but it gets the worst of both worlds.

Each wolf has colors for base, accent, under, and top, and accent/under/top have different marking patterns (so, for instance, you could have blue timber accent and black cozen unders). Unlike Wolvden, you can’t select how marks are ordered or adjust their opacity. Unlike Flight Rising (which has a huge variety of genes with different accent colors and patterns), all the marks are completely flat color with no accents. It’s not great. For instance, merle is one of my favorite marks on WD, but I generally put it at mid opacity and layer it under other marks. LW merle is just flat and unappealing by comparison.

(This may improve over time. FR genes were not exactly popping on release. Gembond was practically the only tert. Gross.)

On the plus side, I have to say my tutorial pups are easily the best tutorial pups I’ve ever gotten. My WD pups were boring potatoes (RIP Talon and Ashward). My FR pups were disaster colorbombs because Razanei and Chibundu have such a wide range. On LW, you can pick both progens’ colors, so you can ensure all their pups come out great.

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Pictured: Pack founders Kazivar and Chendol, and their pups Fimbulvetr and Caspian