Lantern Forge

Incomplete
CAN'T EVEN PUNCH ENEMIES

Play it. It's incomplete, buggy and abandoned but a recommended buy.

sadly i cant recomend this game it is not in full form its very broken and the devs had abbandoned it and wont release the code. i did like it when i got it then all promises broken i cant recomend it.

It is good for about 2 hours... then it loses its magic.

I think when I played this I had left my game on for more than a day, but I believe I actually got about 8 hours of entertainment out of it. It was fun, but you quickly start to see all the unfinished combat, levels, features which make most people want to scream.

Purchased on sale for $1.99 and am sad that the game devs most likely have had to bail due to lack of funding, because the game actually shows promise.

Despite some older negative reviews that you will come across, at the $2 price point you can't go wrong. The game has given me several hours of disjointed fun. Sure, it has pathing issues and an obvious lack of polish, but there is also a lot of Minecraft goodness tucked into a cute little game design all its own. The art style is not bad at all on the characters, monsters and icons.

Maybe if enough people buy the game on sale the devs can afford to return to it? I wouldn't mind seeing that happen.

To counter some of the, IMO, unfair negative reviews, I'll add my two cents.

This is a $10 game. Yes, the devs sort of left us hanging and it hurts since the game is very fun and has a lot of potential to be something more, but the game you do get is very enjoyable and has a lot to do for that $10, and has replay value.

The devs have also been poking around and patching a bit lately and have improved performance (one of my biggest negatives since changing z-levels was painfully long) and added some content.

The characters are fun to play and build, there's several tiers of crafting, lots of gathering and building to do, lots of exploring of procedurelly generated open world/underground to do, several different types of biomes both above and below ground with a nice variety of mobs and content to experience.

For the whopping $10 I think this game is definitely worth it - you can easily play enough hours - and have fun doing so - to make it (more than) worth the cost. I feel some of the negative reviews are way, way, too over the top in criticizing what is a decently feature and content filled game for a low price.

I could definitely come up with a list of other early access games or even released games that cost more money and/or were far more disappointing. Some people just have too much time on their hands to troll and be negative and/or have ridiculous expectations for very low cost indie games.

PS - I have over 46 hours played, mostly before recent patching. The top negative review is by someone with 6 hours played and IMO it's kind of silly for someone to be complaining about a game being incomplete when they haven't played enough to complete what IS there.

I started a mage character. Got to L47. Then the game crashed. I could not reload my save game after that.

I started an archer character. Got to L35. Then the game crashed. I could not reload my save game after that.

I am not starting another character. 35+ hours in the game and nothing to show for it.

But if this sounds like your kind of fun - hey - it's on sale.

This game has enough fun for 30 hours at least. It's a pity the game did not sell very well and the devs need to go to find a full time job, after leaving the game in it's 1.0 version, released.

It's not an abandoned project, it's a game released. True, has a few (rare) bugs here and there, nothing gamebreaking.

Now, working in their free time after job, they just released a new update with optimization, some polish and a little more content. Great work and refreshing honesty.

Build your base, farm a lot of different vegetables and herbs, fight a good bunch of monsters, explore different biomes, go down level after level to find ore and loot dungeons, level your character, choose your path: warrior, ranger or wizard, craft your own weapons and armor and, most important, don't forget to eat and to rest!

A very beautiful survival game that is, in my opinion, a little gem and it gives more for less money. Totally recommended.

EDIT: GAME IS BEING WORKED ON AGAIN

Here's hoping they stick with it and turn it into something awesome. Game's got a lot of potential. But I'm kind of leery. After all, something similar happened with Towns, even down to the game is dead, game is back in dev. And we all know how that ended...(If you dont, you should before you even THINK of buying E. A.)

So for now, the old review stays, with the caveat that I'm reserving judgement. But I'm going to be watching it again, hoping that I can actually recommend it. I want to like Lantern Forge. I really do.

ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW

TL:DR
Same old story: Game with a lot of potential gets abandoned because the devs lost interest or didnt make enough money or something, so they declared their unfinished buggy game "finished" and quit working on it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I bought this game last year. It showed a LOT of potential. It was fun for a bit too. Kind of like Dont Starve, but more RPGish. I dont remember if it was officially Early Access, but it should have been because it was in a "late beta" is playable but kind of bare bones and needs some bug stomping and balancing and the devs promised more content.

So I sat back and waited after playing for a bit and then getting frustrated and annoyed at the incompleteness. Seemed like it was worth waiting for.

Until the Devs declared they didnt get enough sales so the game would no longer be updated because they had to get jobs and couldnt work on it full time.

Then work on it part time? Nope. Its dead now.

They couldnt even be arsed to finish their game, when its mostly complete and just needs some polishing.

Development has stopped - Been inactive for god knows how long now, was looking forward to seeing this game finished but unfortunately all I got from it was a lighter wallet and a lite RPG Hack N Slash.

Same old story. Game had oodles of potential. Indie developer releases it way to early missing lots of features, and then abandones it when they realise they're not going to get rich off it. At least it didn't cost a lot, and it was fun for a few hours, but ultimate a sad sad let down.

I originally gave the game a positive review, but that was when we were promised the rest of the features. They probably could have retained community support by throwing out scraps like recolored new things to craft, or a few new monsters here and there. Instead it we got a "we are walking away from it" forum post by the Devs.

Very fun and cute game, definitely worth the money!
What I am missing is:
Multiplayer - me and my mate love all the crafting/building sandbox games, unfortunatly I had to do this one by my self.
Boss mobs/'hard to get' loot (endgame) - I played as a ranger/hunter and once I got level 50 and all Dragonscale/Shadewood gear with Tome of Enchantments on it all there was left to do was beautify my little town.
Crafting balancing - After a while I was drowning in materials, personally I love doing the farming/gardening aspects of these games, tending to crops and making food/potions etc. Unfortunatly there was very little need for any of it, because at some point you get so many raw meat you never get hungry, I never needed any of the healing/mana potions either, so planting the herbs was pointless aswell.
Also it can feel a little sloggish when walking eventhough I am on very decent computer.

Great game! And hopefully there will be more content in the future for me to sink hours of my life in!

I hate to write a bad review on this because the devs have obviously poured their heart and soul into this game. But to be completely honest, it tries to emulate so many games that it doesn't know what it wants to be. Basically you start in the woods with nothing and have to survive, build things, and explore dungeons. Sounds good on paper, but all parts of it are bare-bones and nothing is really fleshed out.

It doesn't focus on the survival like Don't Starve
It doesn't focus on the sandbox stuff like Minecraft/Terraria
It doesn't focus on the dungeon-crawling like Torchlight/Diablo

It's got incomplete bits of all of those without specializing or expanding any of those and it ends up as kind of a bland, forgettable mess. It gives a bad impression right from the start with the controls. It has "W" moving you towards the cursor...but no full WASD controls, which it SORELY needs. Gathering resources has a pretty crazy range, so you'll find yourself chopping trees/grass/rocks from 10 feet away with the same bland animation, which makes it feel really bad as well.

The survival aspects aren't challenging at all. Night brings monsters, but you can easily craft a bed. Once it's crafted, you just need to right clock and bam...no more night. Food is insanely easy to craft as well. There might as well not even be Hunger and Fatigue meters because they're ridiculously easy to get filled and move on. There's no point in the sandbox stuff because there's no multiplayer and thus no one to ever really see or use what you've built.

And the dungeon crawler stuff is pretty limited to clunky-feeling combat in one of the 'big 3' paths of melee/ranged/magic, where splitting between them just hurts you in the long run.

So in the end, it's really repetitive/grindy and I'd say avoid it, unfortunately.

This game feels unfinished. First the good: The combat is fun (although simple), and the RPG mechanics give it a little extra flavor that other similar games lack. Now, the bad.
- There is only one surface level, so you can't build 2-story houses.
- There's no reason to explore the surface. Anything you find there can be found underground. But the surface is featureless anyway. The only terrain feature is water, and it just acts like another tile type.
- Farming is fairly useless, because you will always have plenty of food from killing enemies.
- There may be 100 levels underground, but when they are all the same, what's the point? I've gotten down to about level 50, and haven't seen much different from the first 10 levels.
- Combat isn't balanced, Mages will kill you a lot quicker than you can close on them.
- Pathing is terrible. You character is constantly getting stuck on corners in the tunnels and on small trees on the surface.
- No WASD movement. (Seriously guys?)
- There's no reason to build a house. Monsters attack at night, but you can use a bed to instantly turn it to day time, so you never really have to face the night.

So, that's my opinion. I hope the game gets better, because it is kind of charming, but right now I simply can't recommend it. This game really should have been labelled as early access.

As someone obsessed with sandbox survival games, I really wanted to like this one. Unfortunately, broken gameplay, poor design decisions, and a buggy client make it really hard for me to recommend Lantern Forge in this stage of development. The game isn't marked as Early Access - it really should be, since very little about its gameplay or aesthetics feel polished enough to be a final released game.

Essentially: Lantern Forge's combat system is crippled by its own controls on top of balance issues, while its survival aspect lacks challenge. The game has limited content to explore, and story-wise, the game provides no plot, no choices, and no sense of urgency to motivate me to keep advancing.

Gameplay Problems:

Movement issues: Controlling your character is awkward at best in both movement schemes. Mouse-based movement, which was the only form of movement available when I first wrote this review, was completely broken due to bad click detection (leading the character to start mining if you clicked anywhere near a rock), bad collision detection (getting stuck on thin trees that the character didn't seem to be anywhere near) and a complete absence of pathfinding (walking into a wall when a door is less than a block away).

The devs later implemented a W-for-forward-movement-based-on-mouse-position movement scheme. Although it's *better*, it's only preferable in the same way that getting the flu is preferable to getting pneumonia, because in exchange for fixing the click detection and pathfinding issues, it hamstrings your ability to move effectively in combat. More on this in the next point.

Combat, Part 1: All combat is click-based. You have to hold down the cursor over an enemy to continue attacking, but due to the poor implementation of click detection, it's trial and error to figure out where you should be clicking to actually hit an enemy, and good luck if the enemy is moving. Now recall that all movement is *also* mouse-based. Because you have to click on the enemy to attack, there's no way to strafe around and get into a better position without interrupting your attack. Playing as an archer or mage? Tough. You're going to start running towards the enemy anyway if you misclick, might as well as put on heavy armor.

Combat, Part 2: Combat Mode and useless hotkeys make your combat skills painful to actually use. This game relies on the Diablo II control scheme, where left-click attacks and right-click uses a single registered skill; while you can register a skill to a hotkey, hitting that hotkey doesn't activate the skill - it just switches your right click. This was tolerable 10 years ago; it feels absurd today. Worse, you have to be in Combat Mode to even activate skills; if you're in Build Mode, which you will be for the majority of the game, right-click performs context-dependent actions on the surrounding landscape instead (building, farming, mining).

In effect, to even use your character's skills instead of bashing enemies, you have to 1. make sure you're wielding a weapon and not just swinging your currently equipped tool, 2. make sure you're in combat mode, and 3. make sure your current right-click skill is actually usable by your equipped weapon type (so no bows for sword skills). This needs to happen every time you run into an enemy.

Combat, Part 3: Enemies are both unbalanced and cheap. All melee enemies in the game rush you as soon as they enter the screen, as long as they have a path to you. The prevalence of mob spawners in this game means that's usually 3-4 enemies at once, and the problem with this is that at the same level as you, each enemy does about 5x the damage you do to it per hit, since all your weapons have absurdly low damage-per-hit (if high attack speed). Your character's regeneration rate is high, but not that high, and the lack of usable AoE skills in this game mean that while you bash ineffectually at one mob, three others are chewing on your face.

(Knights, the ostensible melee class, have only 1 AoE skill which costs 50% of starting mana if you don't have any mana-boosting items. It's also based on your weapon's damage-per-hit... you can see the problem with this.)

The end result of this is that when dungeon-delving, you'll usually be stuck grinding against enemies 5 levels below you because anything higher is too hard, and getting appropriately low-level equipment drops. This gets tedious rapidly, and the problem is this is the entirety of the game.

Design Problems:

1. All progression is grinding. Past the first two tiers of items (copper and iron), I realized there was absolutely nothing new that would be added by digging deeper and hunting for later tiers. No skills to unlock, no bosses, and no new mechanics, besides a numbers boost and even-more-absurdly-overpowered enemies. The game's complete lack of story or even a framing device just makes this worse, because while you *can* build your town and collect all the vendors, there's no reason to.

2. Survival is a cakewalk. Once you have even a small-sized farm set up, the survival aspect of the game becomes trivial, and you can probably feed yourself entirely off wild respawning apple trees. Furthermore, there's zero consequences for dying that I've noticed besides moving to your spawn point, not even an item drop.

Other Issues:

1. Aesthetics and UI are poorly implemented. There's no minimap, with only a (x, y, z) numbers-based position marker indicating where you are, so good luck finding your way back if you get lost deep underground (or you could just die and respawn, but how cheap is that). The crafting window is difficult to navigate for several reasons, and shortcuts for moving items are not indicated in any documentation. There's also no way to remap controls.

2. Bugs. I've crashed to desktop once, and noticed memory leaks in the form of slowdowns after a few hours. Background music seems to be buggy in that the daytime music starts playing at midnight instead of dawn, and every so often, a weapon you're trying to craft will spawn with 0 attack.

I've come back to Lantern Forge twice since I first started, and each time it's disappointed me greatly with how little it's improved on what I'd think are fundamental problems. Although I'd have sincerely enjoyed this game with some fixes, I can't recommend it to anyone at this point in time.

Lantern Forge is a tidy little game about carving a space for yourself in an empty world and then digging deep for good old fashion funsies. The view is traditional isometric like many older CRPGs and you can currently outfit yourself in 4 different class sets.

The start of the game is survival, similar to Minecraft or Terraria, you must gather resources, find a source of food and fend off any wild beasts especially after dark. Once you've got a cozy shelter the next step is digging through layers of the world for fun and profit.

Lantern Forge is what Haven and Hearth would be like if there weren't constant trolls and pk-ers and things had a logical progression.

*Warning, ONLY a first impression. I intend to update later after more game time and info*

While Lantern Forge could certainly benefit from some fine tuning, especially with the UI, there are no gaping flaws or immersion breaking moments in the game. This said it also lacks anything amazing enough to floor you.

The framework of the game is built upon traditional rpg tropes. You have familiar goblins and spider enemies who inhabit familiar procedural generated environments which you'll explore with one of three familiar hero archetypes that all work in a familiar fashion.

One of Lantern Forge's more innovative and stronger experiences comes from your town. The game itself puts you in the role of building it, or rather strongly suggests that you build one. It gives you a lot of room to be creative, allowing you to either making your town a work of art with individual shops, gardens and style or a small functional space to cram everything you need into. At the moment you don't need to worry about protecting your town, its simply there for you to gather and process loot. There are a number of elements that work together well here, from making simple shops, trading with your merchants, farming crops, crafting and just decoration. From your new town, the game allows you to decide if you want to gear up by hunting monsters and selling/buying loot from merchants or by gathering raw mats and crafting it yourself. Both crafting and fighting generate exp to level and improve your load out.

If you're not into it for the creativity or town building the game does offer traditional dungeon crawling. You begin by building stairs down which generates a whole new underground map each level you explore and there’s nothing apparent limiting how many levels down you want to go at any time up to the cap of 90. You do this again and again, every staircase down increases the difficulty and generating a whole new area with better loot and material. Though each level is different they aren't very unique, you'll quickly find that if you've seen one level you've seen them all and it slowly becomes frustrating as each staircase adds one more load screen. Although its a quick load, the number of staircases add up and it gets frustrating until you can get warp stones, after which it's not so bad. Once you get there, if there are any surprises, boss fights, secrete treasures or other gems I've not found or heard of them, its simply another layer and load screen. When you start to level up from the grind you'll have the option of the three traditional classes, melee guy, range guy, or magic guy with a sprinkling of an all encompassing utility option. At first glance it doesn't seem like you'll want to mix builds as each 'class' lines up with one stat and one ability tree making cross classing a likely waste of potential.

The interface is one of the weaker points. It will take time to learn as it's not immediately intuitive and can be frustrating as you adjust to a lack of WASD for movement and a combat/build mode toggle. The game relies strongly on the mouse for most things, the keyboard seeming to be more an after thought, the only keys used besides hotbar is shift which simply holds you in place for ranged attacks. You'll need to slowly figure out how to navigate around obstacle with the mouse as your character sometimes isn't sure if he's walking, using a workbench, or punching something. Once you figure out how to navigate around bushes and bodies it all starts to flow.

Overall I do recommend this game because you're getting a 10$ game, not a 2$ + 'IOU for 8$ worth of content to come' game. It's a collection of a lot of safe ideas mixed together rather well. A very appealing art style, functional mechanics, and 'passable' UI.

If I had any strong suggestions for the game it would be to dress up dungeon crawling a little. Limit my ability to easily move between Z levels, make it feel like an achievement to progress further down and not just another loading screen. Hide stuff in the dungeons, collectables, secrete rooms, rare monsters, most of all you can hide cool stuff I want to put in my town to show off. Make me wonder what's lurking in the darkness, remove my ability to see whats there with better fog of war. Currently its to easy to see dungeons or to see ores by scanning the darkness with my mouse, make it scary and not just risk management to explore.

TL;DR = It's a good game for ten dollars.

Lantern Forge has a solid premise, Minecraft + Diablo. Their are multiple ways to build an effective character, and resources are plenteful enough to not feel like a chore. I didn't encounter any of the bugs people are talking about. I think their running old machines or something.

The only problem I have with the game is it gets boring. Why Decorate my house and build really nice table sets if no one gets to see them? Also it's not very engaging after you figure the whole premise out.

For ten dollars, it's an experince I'm glad I had. In a see of early accses crap, it's nice to see an Indie Dev actually release a FINISHED game!

From what I've played so far, the game is based upon the old FATE game engine which was copied from Diablo's earlier series. It's a mixture of Harvest Moon with FATE and admittedly doesn't feel too good in both areas due to the numerous bugs I've encountered so far. One of the most prominent is the random times your character seems to be blurred out by a white block by equipping certain tools or armor. {For me, it was a copper axe, then copper greaves}. The game lacks any sort of tutorial and is a bit of a deep leap when trying to figure out how to begin unless you watch players on youtube. It does however boast a rich enviroment of building. The other thing that irks me about this game is it feels as if the walls do not properly connect. Also, quite a few items boast no pictures in the inventory or play screen {Bricked Items, Iron Curiass}. This game needs a lot of spit and polish because I would recommend it to anyone because I've decently high standards when it comes to "Role Playing Games". The interesting thing about this game though, if you put up with the bugs, is the ability to build a town center you can teleport to, teleporters you can place underground, and merchant townspeople. The townspeople however do tend to overcharge. You can't sell most items for very much but it's still good to play around with. Not sure about the item refresh rate. I can't say I'd recommend it, at least not until it is a fair bit more stable as it also tends to crash randomly and for no reason. You lose large amounts of items in this fashion.

Excellent crafter-oriented survival RPG. You start out alone and with nothing. You have to build tools from rocks and sticks, to quickly build a shelter before night falls. If you survive the night then it's off to gather raw materials, plant a garden, build work stations to craft clothes, weapons, armor, furnishings, ect. ect.

A wonderfully huge open world sandbox of survival and exploration, above and below ground. Start out with nothing and build the the world to your liking. Highly recommended for play at your own pace crafters and world builders.

Absolutely addictive game. Highly recomend it if you like sandbox rpg type games. Has Minecraft/Terraria feel to it with a deeper rpg equipment system. Controls could use some tuning but with some getting use to they are fine.

My first ( and probably last, for i hate this shit) Steam review.
It simply deserved it.
I didn´t saw the game until today, played around with it since a few hours now and it is already my favorite one of its kind.

It got a few raw edges (little clunky pathfinding, for an example) but it also got a ton of depth (and i only scratched on the surface).
Even the graphics are alot better than they use to be in that kind of games.
I am old enough to remember the first days of computergaming, but still i appreciate that things are looking nice, and here they do. All the stuff got a bunch of details for such a limited graphicengine, i really like the artwork.

If you like this kind of games, or even if you used to, and feel fed up with them since a long time (like i did until this one), give it a try.
The pricing is VERY fair, especially when you have a look on what kind of cheap, unfinished trash get sold here for 20, 30, 40+ euro in the last years. Be it "early access", some poorly reworked 10 years old stuff or whatever they throw at us these days.
Usually you pay those 10 bucks to a big company for a pityful DLC that gives you half an hour of gameplay or a new outfit for your freaking pet.

I wish the devs all the best for this project, not many indie-companies here deserves a little bit success as much as they do.
(and ofc this wish is also selfinterest, for i would like to see how this game developes further)

Edit 2017:
Sadly, the game wasn't successfull enough to feed the devs long enough to bring to its full potential.
I would still recommend it for the humble price it has.
I got many hours of fun with it.