Shadow Arena

Like BDO combat but it is taken down to 4 abilities that can do extra damage with correct button timing. If you like Battle royals then this one is pretty good. I had fun with it may you will too.

6 to 10 seconds of being stunned with a kill time of about 3 - 5 seconds makes sense i dont know why they thought that a game like bdo needed a mostly pvp game mode when the pvp in bdo was arguably the least fun part about it

Games trash. You spend half the time on your back from the unbeliveable amount of stun locks. Theres no counter to being stun locked, you literally just lay there and take it till your character just suddenly gets up, and sometimes its 2 seconds sometimes its 4 and sometimes you dont and you just die. The classes are so imbalanced, you only see 3 or 4 running around. The brawler guy can just grab you and throw you then stun lock you then grab you then throw you and its just annoying. They need serious balancing done to the classes, and figure out this stun lock crap. Its not how its suppose to work. There should be counter for everything and should be given a window of time to perform that counter whether small or big, in this, there is no window. If you get hit by an array of stun locks your just stuck there and theres no going back unless you just run away, heal, then try again. Would be an amazing game, it looks and feels great, but everything else just ruins it. 2/10 until they can fix this mess.

****ALSO EVERY SINGLE SOLO MATCH THERE IS TEAMING.
You allow in game chat and stuff during lobby and it literally makes everyone just team up.
Ive even seen it in squads. Its unfair.
Im running around and I attack one person and another comes in and kills me (which is whatevs) but then I watch these two EVEN THREE people run around and kill mobs together. Its completely unfair.
Would be a dope game

To early say its good but it does have some cool graphics and some nice combat
balance sucks and overall its just a br so you know the routine.

Pros:
Beautiful Game.
Servers feel solid, no rubberbanding.
Each hero feels different and rewarding to play when getting combos down.
Map is the perfect size for the number of players in it.
The grace period is really nice. Rewards for kills, and doesn't punish too heavily for losing early on.

Cons:
Doesn't auto-equip gear.
Stunlocking is an issue.
Can be confusing at times because of not being able to see health bars all the time.
The auto-target system feels useless.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing this game. This was the perfect mix of Battle Arena and MOBA. I hope that stunlocking gets addressed as it is a major issue within this game. Sometimes I feel like I can get up quickly from being knocked down, other times I just stay down and get killed while I'm knocked down. My suggestion is to add a counter for every hero. Being allowed to strategically time when your opponent is going to stun and become immune to stuns for a few seconds would be a huge help.
It can also get really confusing in battle by not being able to see health bars constantly as well. Perhaps an option to always allow health bars to be showing.

Thank you for the opportunity to test the game and I look forward to it's release.

i would neither recommend nor discourage others from playing.
I will provide my critiques as well as what i find positive about this game.

My critiques:
The controls are not as intuitive as BDO. One thing that is awkward is that there are some functions where you have to hold down alt while selecting number slots for skills, whereas in my humble opinion it would feel more natural to switch the alt function with the ctrl function. That way thumb can stay at space and little finger can use ctrl more quickly for that function. i am also not sure how i feel about using number slots for skills as opposed to key combos. Number slot fighting has always felt clunky to me.

What I find positive:
That being said, I think there is a lot of potential in this game for those who are heavily pvp focused.
The action is fast paced with some pretty cool effects.
The action commands feel like a hybrid of BDO and Silk Road Online, so if you like either or both of those games, this might be worth a try.

With only 72 minutes of game time so far, this is merely my first impression; so maybe take this with a grain of salt and form your own opinion based on your fighting styles and preferences.

As a non BDO player this game feels great! Amazing graphics, combat is simple and fun, games are quick and action packed, as long as they iron out the bugs and balance some of the classes it is looking very promising!

This game is complete trash.

Graphics and everything are good yes HOWEVER you literally cant do anything in combat. It's whoever spams the fastest wins no matter what.

Someone can walk up to you stun you for a solid minute while you lay on the ground getting spammed and you're dead before you stand up. 0 blocking.

This game is JOKE until the combat system can be fixed.

Not a bad start. Fun concept, I love the idea of the game. It also has some really good potential for gameplay evolution.

Hopefully, the devs will put mouse invert into the game. I'd play more of it at that point. That's really a disappointing miss by any dev team, in any game, regardless of stage of development. Collision points and class balancing could use some work, but that can be tweaked and will evolve based on the metadata from the betas and such. I'd personally also like a bit more complexity of the classes, as in the original BDO. The amount of skill combinations in BDO really makes the combat style enjoyable, and I'd like to see more of that in Shadow Arena.

Still a good start.

Can't recommend getting into the free BETA. It's more like pre-localised ALPHA.

- Doesn't even support English (why is there an English Beta available on Steam??).
- Pearl Abyss company animation at the beginning is upside down.
- Game starts in windowed mode? Can't Alt+Enter to change mode.
- Character selection is beautiful but they're not animated.
- I've played enough games to make my way into a match but I had no idea what the goals were or what my skills do.

I know a bad game when I see it, and this is one of them. Terrible controls & mechanics to the point where it just feels really clunky & unpolished. Even though it's a beta their building blocks comes from BLACK DESERT which is a full fledged game, yet the combat feels thoughtless & stale. A battle royal is the last thing this company needs to release. It's a NO from me.

Shit keeps closing with no error msg, classes are the cripple versions of how they are in BDO but overall it's awesome

remove the longsword out of the game 4 stuns and has super armor with higer dmg how is that even in the game nerf that class is ltierally not fun anymore seeing a bunch of them just 1 combo ppl

It's a great game but you need to improve the GUI for the 1280x720 players, the GUI it's literally covering all the main screen.
Check that pls, resize it or give the option to make it smaller.

I can't keep this review within 'Rules and Guidelines' I really just can't. I thought they couldn't do any worse than Black Desert Online, what with how massive of a dumpster fire that game is. But this one, this one is a dumpster fire with jet fuel in it. No amount of words in this review will convey my loathing of this company and their games.

There are more ants on planet earth than humans, people estimate about 100 trillion of them. Your money would be better spent on bug spray rather than buying anything from this company.

fun concept

some characters are extremely broken
laggers are absolute hell to fight against
a missed stun is basically a missed lethal

overall quite nice, requires balancing or this game won't make it

Horrible and I mean HORRIBLE character balancing, all the freaking games is the Great Sword dude and the Asian in Red like 30/40 of the player base of every game are those characters! LAMEEE!
After jumping in the 2 characters Meta train wagon you start to get a grip but then the game gets boring and frustrating ASAP.
For me, it's a no-no in this current state, lots of improvement.
Another thing I noticed is every time you put the game in FullScreen it just locks the framerate at 30FPS so u need to play in fullscreen windowed mode to play at 60FPS, geez!!!

Writing for public opinion.

Does anyone else want the combat fluidity this game has be ported into BDO?
I mean, it's almost a day and night feeling, the controls are responsive, movement is WAY better, the hud is clean and easily readable, actions are smooth and the framerate doesn't tear even if bellow 60. I am giving a thumbs up just for that and only that.

Anyone?

The classes at the moment are not balanced. Goyen and Gerhard are crazy strong and I personally didn't like the overwhelming presence of NPCs across the map as they are normally aggressive towards you. Orwen feels super weak compared to the other classes, does minimal damage. Haru's shadow step movement speed is super slow and drains stamina as well, I wouldn't even want to use it half the time tbh. The graphics and optimisation is cool, combat is okay, again classes are not balanced so outplay potential is a bit of howya goin. I want to see the community getting together and seeing what can be done to balance and improve this game. A more friendly in game UI would be nice.

Its an interesting twist on the otherwise more modern Battle Royale realm, but in the end it is still just that... Yet another Battle Royale game.
The design team did an amazing job on characters and the world.
The UI team did great, it is coherent and easy.
Balancing between the characters is... Shaky... It seems there is a distinct disadvantage for the ranged characters but that could just be my ineptitude at playing them.

But the reason why I, and so many others, are unsatisfied is solely because of that Battle Royale theme to it. Repetition is hell and there's already far too many games that mimic that genre because of the last 10 years success. But that genre ultimately lends... Nothing new.

Overall, 8/10. Needs a balance check, but otherwise decent.