Arcane Odyssey - A Complete Review
tl:dr I outline good and bad things about the game and look towards it’s future. There’s also the gameplay tip or two scattered around.
Arcane Odyssey is a game that leaves much to be desired after beating the main story, but I believe this is a good thing. The game has a solid foundation, and some of the best boating mechanics in any game I’ve played. Most of the games flaws result in the game simply being unfinished. There isn’t really much to do after you hit max level except player pvp and to participate in clans. This is pretty much all community focused, so if you like to play alone then there really isn’t anything left for you in AO until the next big update releases. One of the saddest victims of the game’s rushed release is the cooking and hunger mechanics. They’re useless. Even if you get hungry I hardly ever cooked anything, and instead just ate something in my inventory. I get it’s supposed to be kind of like the BOTW cooking system in the way that food can give you stats and buffs but I’m not even sure if this is implemented yet. The whole system feels useless because unlike in BOTW food is abundant and you don’t need to try to get every little bit you can out of every meal. I’m fine not getting as much hunger restored as I could’ve from a piece of food if it means I don’t have to go out and find a cooking pot and then figure out what to cook.
My second biggest problem is the bosses. A lot of the bosses are just straight unfair, like the final boss (no spoilers here). They move so fast it’s stupid and if you don’t have a friend to take on the boss with you it’s basically a test of patience, running into the arena, doing damage, and then running out to regen. It’s clear the difficulty of pretty much all the bosses in the game is that you can’t hit them, rather than not being able to dodge their attacks.
Dodging, oh dodging, where do I begin. First of all I think I have arthritis from spam double tapping W because it’s the fastest way to move on foot. There really should be an alternative to land transport than just spamming dash, as even if vetex finally lets us fully control all the binds in the game it’ll still be annoying to have to spam a key to move around. Dodging does have an alternative bind, which is shift, the problem being that shift is also used for charging magic. This bind wouldn’t even be so bad if it wasn’t so horribly clunky. Basically if you bind your dodge to shift, you can only charge your magic while you’re standing fully still. This makes binding to shift pretty much impractical as this heavily affects your performance in battles. Maybe I could see someone getting away with this bind after they get their awakening, and their magic meter regens on its own, but I really do hope something is done about the dash bind situation.
This post has been a borderline rant thus far, but I’d like to also point out all the things I love about AO, and the reason I played for 27 hours. Although I think we really need more shipyard items, the ship system overall is awesome. I do think that cannon combat needs to be improved upon, but what we currently have is awesome and is still quite serviceable. I’d say the boating mechanics are probably the best part of this game, sailing around can be a ton of fun. I also really enjoyed the story, I thought it was interesting and I’m excited where It’ll go next. The most underrated feature of AO is the tailoring / clothing system. You can tell Vetex put a lot of effort into making sure you could make any kind of character you wanted. He even silently added extra faces and body items. Also let us use vanity on our weapons too so I don’t have to have a shield always on my back, ty vetex :D.
The exploration in the game is great, my only real gripe being spawnpoints. As far as I know, the camp item does not keep your spawn set after you leave the game, instead bringing you to the current story spawn. This sucks. I think players should be able to set their spawn on any discovered island upon joining, and then that becomes their spawn until they leave. The game could still show the player the recommended spawn for the part of the story they’re in, but it wouldn’t be mandatory. This still gives use to the camp item and fixes most of the problems with the spawn. Exploration in this game is still great though, with so many secrets and stuff to find. I do wish there was more in the upper left part of the map though, because it doesn’t have any islands and is just all ocean.
The bugs. I know this game is new, and I don’t blame Vetex at all for the game having lots of bugs upon release, but they’re still a problem. Some of the bugs I faced included my melee suddenly breaking early in the game requiring me to rejoin, not being able to buy anything from fishing shops specifically, and disguising while entering Ravenna sometimes just not working, causing me to be attacked. Although these have mostly been fixed, it still was a notable part of my playthrough.
I don’t love the combat in AO. This is a bit of a controversial one but I think the combat has serious problems. This kind of ties into my whole point with the bosses too, with the whole challenge of the fight being that the boss gets aimbot and teleports around so you can’t hit them. The player isn’t nearly mobile enough to be able to consistently dodge attacks from these guys, so pretty much all the bosses in the main story rely on you having a large enough healthpool to tank enough hits until you kill the boss. Now to the main pvp, the melee isn’t great. I don’t hate it though, it is a basic “spam m1 until you kill thing” but I think the real problem with weapon combat is just the lack of variety. Most weapons in the game are just reskins of other weapons, so it’d be great to have more variety. I haven’t touched the bows or guns at all, so I don’t have much to say about them. The magic though, it’s hit and miss. The magic combat feels basic, with the only real moves you’ll ever use is explosion and blast, and occasionally jump using your magic. I think the truth is we just need a lot more moves. This would make things a lot more interesting, making magic more unpredictable. I think the ability to better do combos should be added, since right now there’s a pretty decently long cooldown between casting another spell. Of course if combos were added the damage values would have to be nerfed, the cooldown was there for a reason yknow, but comboing could make magic a lot more engaging and fun. Another current problem resulting from the game’s unfinished state are the stat builds, due to some of them being straight up garbage due to lack of features for them. Take my advice, either go mage, conjurer, warrior, or knight. Strength based stat builds are great too, and I’m not saying don’t use them, but compared to the ones I listed they can be incredibly unreliable in some situations, especially due to mastery mechanics.
Arcane Odyssey has an incredibly promising future. With clan building coming in the not-so-distant future, it’ll make AO into a practically endless sandbox. But looking further into the future, once all the kinks are fixed up, we’re going to be looking at one of the best games on roblox, which isn’t a high bar considering I already think AO is one of the best games on roblox. I’m gonna take this conclusion to briefly advertise a clan I plan on starting called nostalgic, and I recommend anyone serious interested in AO join one after completing the main story. It’s clear vetex really cares about this game, and he is one damn good game designer, but I understand that working non-stop on a game for 2 years takes its toll on you overtime. If you actually read through this giant of a post, I sincerely thank you. I’m glad I got to play AO as early as I did, and I’m sure there’ll be a whole new generation of roblox players that’ll get to play AO in a much more completed state. This game was well worth the wait, so thank you vetex, for everything.
