Eden Rising

Pretty rough experience. A decent idea for a game, but very grindy and very slow. Sometimes you use a lot of high level resources to upgrade a weapon and it gets worse.

the concept of the game is pretty amazing and a solid 10/10 for me.
how ever its exectution is pretty bad.
the game is poorly optamized and has some issues that will probabbly never be resolved.
it is however really fun to play but only for a short while so i dont think il ever finish it

While its still buggy, there is lots of fun combat here. The multiplayer is definitely a disappointment, as the game frequently crashes. Good balance of exploration, harvesting and tower defence. Some cool ideas were explored here, but not refined. I am still playing it as the amount of upgrades and weapons offer lots of variety. The TD elements are very clunky and need to be reworked. But its a solid idea with a cool concept. I really hope there is a ED2 where some of these issues are addressed.

Exploration/Gather + Tower Defense and fast travel (unlocked as you go). Good game, combat can feel a bit wonky (wish it was a bit smoother), but overall good game.

Nearing the final tech tiers I figure it is good a time as any to weigh in my thoughts on Eden Rising. This will be wordy but I feel game devs and consumers alike deserve a full response for their hard work/investment.

I picked this game up on sale before the free to play option was launched; my son loves TD games and I am a big fan of progression games of nearly any kind. So with this one hitting enough checks we both purchased a copy so we could play co-op together.

Performance was pretty poor; It didn't seem to matter if i played at high or low setting at 4k or 720p there were lag spikes and frame drops present throughout my entire playthrough so far. I will list my rig at the end of this for reference. This is the single most important aspect that will attract negative attention from the average consumer in my opinion. Performance is a gate that can be welcoming and open or an object that impedes the player base depending on how it's handled.

I noticed right away that the combat left much to be desired in terms of fluidity as well as just about everything else that involved interaction with the game. There seemed to be stuttering or animation locking involved with every action in every area of the game; even gathering seemed slow and unresponsive with or without the use of the glove. A bit annoying but still playable in it's current form so we continued on. I found myself preferring any type of range weapon over any type of melee weapon just to avoid the uncomfortable combat situations that were arising. A game with aoe markers dodging functions and the possibility of fighting more than a few enemies at one time needs to not lock you into combat animations as much as possible. There should be a consequence for trying to pull off a heavy attack on an opponent however it happens with all attacks which just makes me range to end fights before they are even able to hit me. This makes combat very repetitive and unlikable(combat gloves really are an exception here and feel great but don't become effective until near end game). I love the MMO style aoe combat markers and the elemental strength and weakness attributes of the enemies.

The story is barely present in this game. There are essentially lore nodes sprinkled throughtout the map hinting at what once was in this now mob infested/destroyed world. Its hard to care about any of it to be honest as neither you nor your character have any connection to this world at all. I don't like just giving negative feedback without suggestions but this needs a full overhaul in my opinion if the story is at all a goal in development.

Exploration was fun; the environments were colorful and unique in each section and I enjoyed this segment of our play through. The enemies however could use a lot more variety. Falling into that good ole MMO trope of re-skinning the same mob is a pretty negligent decision to make these days. I would suggest making a statement somewhere that says many of these mobs are just placeholders and more are on the way if you haven't already. There were also many mob placement issues with mobs being trapped under ground in nearly every area of the game.

A couple hours in and I really got to take a better look at the progression systems; a decent variety of materials and upgrade paths for weapons, armor, and turrets was starting to tickle that progression bug I have, so, we dug in and got to work. While early on this was fun and seemed to be just the right amount of challenge I started realizing that something felt a bit off in this department. As we neared the end of the tech trees it just felt like nothing had really changed. The progression didn't really feel like progression. In many other gathering crafting games you unlock ways to gather more efficiently or with less effort at a certain point. (and please don't take this as a preference comment; I love grinding, like, really love it) however grinding should always feel like it pays off in games or it's just work for the sake of work. The weapons didn't feel much stronger the turret upgrades are pretty negligible and if you needed healing bulbs, well, have fun running around and picking them up one at a time for hours on end to reach enough to last a session or two.

There are some things happening here that are done well and probably often overlooked; the basic idea of the game is fun for a number of types of gamers. The ability to easily recover your loot if downed by an enemy or a misstep into a chasm is wonderful. Having a stuck function that actually works all the time is great. The art style, while being obviously very opinion oriented, is well executed and uniform. The map is pretty huge and full of variety for a first installment and takes some time to get across while having teleportation access as a welcome time saver.

Now the part of Steam reviews that I honestly wish didn't exist; do I recommend purchasing Eden Rising? Yes... and no... I think this game has great potential and can go more in the direction of an rpg, a souls like game, or even a survival crafting style game. It has a bit of all of these elements but feels unfinished in this regard. The combat, movement, progression systems and story all need some serious tlc. While I am ok with my investment into this product being that I picked it up on sale in early access I would not have been happy if I purchased at the new 25 dollar price tag. On that note I also cant recommend purchasing the crystal weapons pack either. They are just not necessary and to be frank even cosmetically speaking they are not nearly striking enough visually in my opinion. I really hope that the dev team pauses at this current iteration and flesh out what could be a great game. Please don't fall into the mo' content mo' money method that is literally plaguing most all games released these days, for all of our sakes. If more time and effort are put into the amazing game I'm sure you made out to create then people will naturally come to you. (there is no neutral or yes but... rating on steam so I'm unfortunately forced to put a negative review for now)

I personally know just how much work is involved in every asset that is produced for a game and I know that a ton of work and money has gone into this project so far, but, there are some hurdles that have to be overcome for a chance at true success. I wish you luck and will be checking back periodically to see how it's all turning out.

My rig for performance concerns:

Gtx 1080 ti
i7-5930k processor
16gb ram
4k acer predator monitor
Game is stored on a 4tb hd

My son's pc (performance was more a little more stable here overall probably due to the ssd and newer ram, however, the same problems were still present)

2 gtx 970
I5 8600k
16gb ram I believe running at 3200 mhz dont really remember tbh
1080p monitor
game is stored on an 1tb ssd

(apologies for any grammatical/spelling errors present in this review, I am far from a writer and this turned out to be a lot more than I originally intended...)

40+ hours in and: This game is good.

Pros:
- Huge world.
- No brainless combat (you have to learn the moves of each monster if you want to survive).
- Amazing implementation of tower defense (you can even use towers to help you in the open world and it makes a huge difference, especially against bosses).
- You feel like you're getting more powerful as you craft new items.
- Developers have been working hard on making the game better (One year since I bought the game and they are always updating it and every update it gets better).
- Controller support.

Cons:
- Minor bugs

But the bugs don't bother me and it's worth every penny I spent buying.

This game is fun with plenty of gameplay.

God forbid the devs launch a "light" version of the game you can play for 100% free. How dare them give away 12h of gameplay for free! Jump in play with a friend or solo and see if you like the game. If you like the game, then buy it or get on write a negative review about how they locked their game behind a "paywall".

Looking through a lot of the reviews I want to address a few of the argued negative points:

"Free to demo": This game has a fair amount of free content and plenty of unlocks. If you enjoy the game and wish to have some additional things to do you can choose to support the developer and buy the expansion DLC. I see a common thread of people whining about this who have under an hour of play time. You can't complete all the free content in that time. So that makes me wonder a bit.

-Seems weird to complain about free stuff. Especially these days when all free games have some sort of paywall, usually more invasive than this.

Crystal DLC: A nice touch, I did buy them, I've made them and I don't prefer them to the weapons already in the game free. With that said, I'd recommend them only if you want to support the developers a little more.

Controls: The controls remind me of a slightly less responsive Tera (action combat). There's a bit of a learning curve, but not much. It's a typical WASD, Space to jump, control to dodge, left click to attack, right click to power attack. There's nothing super out of the norm here. If I had to take a guess, people are complaining that you can die easily. That's a part of the learning curve and something I enjoy about the game.

"Something about no server space": Cant say much to this, I jumped in with friends right off.

PROS:
-Pretty Robust Crafting, Plenty of Specialization options.
-Bestiary Similar to the Witcher, You can overpower enemies if you want, but knowing their weakness... that is power.
-Group Play, This game can be really fun with friends. Tackling the harder difficulty fights is pretty satisfying.

CONS:
-There's a loading hitch between zones, more noticeable to non-hosts and those using a disk drive instead of SSD.
-Mob's don't re-spawn quicker in a multiplayer game, so you can really hit a pinch point with some crafting items when everyone needs them.

OTHER:
-If you want to way-point something on the map, you can only mark within your current zone. Not anywhere you want, that feels weird.
-I'd like to see a little more description (on the item overviews) on what things like "Corrosion, Radiation, Fire" mean in combat. (Dot?, Confusion?) etc.

.NO.FORMATING.SKILLS.WARNING.
Let's start this review by saying that I got the game in the free weekend after playing along with 2 of my friends. Those two, plus another one that got envy, got the game. So we have a tribe of 4 people now.

The fact that I liked the game came as a surprise to me, mainly because the steam store page have a lot of bad reviews. After experience by myself, I could not simply ignore it. Most, not all, have a very narrow view of what the game is like. I think that happened because the player is expected to find out about the world about itself, and you cannot in any circunstance do that in 30min or one hour. The game has no wiki, or tutorial besides the "click that to do that". All the items are new, monsters have weird shapes and mechanics, the crafting leaves you wandering after items all around the world... I started to actually understand the whole concept of this weird tribal world after 3+hours, and there is still much to learn and to experiment with (8.5h now).

Was that worth it? HELL YES!

See, I like this sort of games. I do not want to get in a exploration game knowing everything like most games do. A lot of things requires creativity and wandering to figure out.

My recommendation to the developer, in order to prevent those "I did not understand the game so it's trash" kind of review, you could start by compiling a wiki and put a link to it ingame. That would make optional to the players to find by themselves or having a guide to help through.

___________________________________________
Quick question-answer:
Is it balanced? Kind of. When more players join it does get more hard and requires you to work as a team. Solo players will dislike the game since it's very demanding at late game. But you will have a blast with team as it is challenging and fun.

How is the tower defence? Very simple as it is right now, at least in my experience. I do it mostly to get new tech and wander in the wild. More could be done in this aspect of the game.

Customization? You can paint your armor and that is it. Only female models in early acess. The armors are very different from one another and the color is a plus. But you should use what the biome requires to, you know, not die.

How is the exploration? It's where it shines, for me. My only complain is the lack of different monster models, but I'm not that far into the game yet, maybe could be more. Elements are already implanted and most monsters change in their biomes. Biomes must be explored to it's fullest to get all the gear. EXPLORE!

How is the character growth? Equipment based. Get a better weapon to be a stronger character. No lvl, no stats, no weird bonuses. It's like... monster hunter/dauntless married with tower defence genre.

Is it pretty? To taste, really. I like it. Everything matches pretty well. My only disgust is living walls.

How is combat? It's fast. The more monsters the more challanging. "Bosses" are a fun thing to do in team. I like the dodge a lot. I never tried to play with heavy armor, so I can't talk about that. There are ranged weapons in one biome, I believe. But never tried it.

I find this game unplayable because it is unoptimized. Regardless of what settings I use, I cannot get the game to play smooth (I use a GTX-1070, and an I6700k at 4.4 GHz) I hope the devs fix this, I would really like to play the game.

18OCT18 EDIT: The devs worked with me for over a month and have solved the issues I was experiencing. Game is very enjoyable, and I would definitely reccomend!

I picked up this game, after loving Sanctum, and Subnautica among others, and seeing elements from both games that really float my goat...

The game has lots of small problems that you'd reasonably expect from an EA game (you can easily run into materials/concepts/etc. before there's any hint as to what to do with 'em, the map is split up into various zones with no obvious way to get between 'em, and no way to know you went into a new one, you can't add a map marker outside your current area with no explanation as to why, when attacking trying to form combo's, there's a lack of feedback [or even incentive, does it strike more? do more damage? who knows?!], etc.).

Honestly though, the game does a lot of other things right (IE: when you fall off a cliff/somewhere unrecoverable, the body gets placed at the edge so you can pull the items off your carcass for example).

The real reason I can't get into this game though? Because right now, it's not really a single player game (and I frankly don't have friends with it, and I don't enjoy the typical "join random server" play). Sure, you can combat the enemies in single player, dodge 'em, etc., no problem.

The problem in single player is the tower defense aspect: Only a few levels in, the waves start coming from multiple directions. You can only be in one place, at one time. The towers really don't do very much at all, no combination of towers will hold a choke point. I've only gotten thought the early levels, and you can place down maybe half a dozen towers total, at this point to cover 3 different paths, and there's no tower combination I've found which can handle even just one stream of enemies though a choke point. Additionally, you need to progress in the tower defense aspect to get better gear (so it becomes chicken or the egg really).

I get that they want to make the game fun for multi-player, but I can't convince anybody to play, if I can't convince 'em it's a fun game on its own/single player...

I hope the devs figure out a way to balance this, as there's potential here... but unless you've got a bunch of friends who have this game, you might as well skip it.

Edit: All the negative reviews have sub 1 hour (except 1) and have their comments locked so no one can point out how they're wrong or try to argue why they disagree. Says alot about how useful those reviews are huh? I'd recommend reading the negative reviews and throwing out 99% of the information in them. Only real truth behind them is there are a decent amount of bugs and the animations aren't great in some spots.


I played this game about 95% solo. I started with a group but I'm the only one who sunk time into like this (24 hours in like 4 days while playing the co op games my friends wanted to actually play.)

I think this game is amazing. It's got vibes from all sorts of stuff going on. Monster Hunter is the one that sticks out to me the most. If you ignore a few dumb downs here and there, it's really similar.

- I'd mention how the combat is jank shit compared to MH but the dev's have already said they were looking into making that better.
- The armor you get comes from different biomes, just like in MH.
- Gotta find items from scavenging plants/ore/monsters just like in MH.
- Different rarities of items can come out of the certain resource clusters.

The tower defense part part is okay. It's not great but it's not bad. It gives you something to do after you're bored with scavenging for resources.

This game might kill itself though. Early Access scares alot of people off, and those it doesn't scare off tend to not stick around for the whole development cycle, espcially if it's slow. I don't know the speed of this development cycle though. Just keep in mind this is actually EA. There are plenty of bugs. Animations get funky. Certain things don't unlock correctly. Some times you die to lag. There's no dedicated servers, which is fine IMO. Other EA issues.

Keep in mind, I played solo and this is meant to be played co op. Also I literally cannot progress any further in the game currently since there's a bug right now with one of the enemy/biome affects. Even with this horrible bug (FIXED), I still recommend this game. Put it on your wishlist and wait for it to smooth itself out a bit more. I expect great things from this game.

While I haven't reviewed many games on Steam, I had to make an exception for Eden Rising: Supremacy. I've bought into plenty of Early Access titles that have made me swear to never believe in the hype again. Thankfully, Eden Rising has bucked the trend and made me believe that developers can produce EA games that are full featured and fun - while still having plenty more in store for those who eagerly await the next patches. Below is the story of the one crucial moment that made me a believer, and even though it's a bit long, I hope it will give people sitting on the fence an idea of what the world has in store for them.

Firstly, I've spent a long time looking for an open world game that will let me get in over my head and suffer the consequences. Eden let my friends and I do just that. I'll paint the picture for you - we've played about 10 hours collectively at this point and we can hardly complete the main objective of the game (sieges) because we keep getting sidetracked by the open world and all of the secrets within. I had scouted a particularly fiesty band of 'mutant' enemies and I managed to convince my friend that we simply HAD to explore. Sure, the mutants would definitely kill us, but we might find a new weapon type or that healing item we'd been hunting for. He agreed to go with me and we sat at the edge of a cliff and stared down a wasteland full of mutant enemies - medusas, gorgons, and creatures that I had never seen before. I sprinted across the landscape, convinced that if I dodged just enough hits and zigged and zagged the right way, I might reach that unknown horizon. The mutant enemies tore me down quickly and my (wise) friend who had been waiting in the wings tried to resurrect me. The enemies spotted him and he barely managed to make it back to a safe hiding place. This continued for awhile until he was finally able to resurrect me. We were both critically low on health and the ranged mutant enemies would undoubtably kill us in a few hits. Still, I pointed out next destination on the horizon. We had made it this far, we had to go on. And so we did. We sprinted, panicked on Discord voice comms, and even used stealth to get to that checkpoint. We had no healing or siege supplies left but we had crossed the forbidden landscape successfully. I was jubilant, but the adventure wasn't complete. We had made it this far - why not take on the biggest enemy we could find?

15 minutes later, the rest of the crew joined us and we spent 30 adrenaline filled minutes fighting a world boss that we weren't at all prepared to take on. The four of us laid down our siege weapons - the boss shredded them within a few attacks. We tried attacking from range and promptly died. We tried attacking from melee and found ourselves bombarded by a spore-based arsenal that crippled our fighters and made us feel like ineffective ants facing an insurmountable enemy. I lost count of the times my allies rezzed me and I saved them. Finally, after 30 minutes of panic, we defeated the world boss.

The joy in that moment was similar to defeating a final boss in other games. Eden didn't prompt me to go on that adventure or kill the boss. The developers gave me an open world and let me dive in - even if I didn't have the armor, weaponry, consumables or understanding of the land that was needed to take on the boss. If you're looking for a game where you can explore, get murdered by gorgons, AND fulfill that tower defense itch - Eden is for you.

Great game, very much enjoying it. Its MUCH larger than I had expected it to be. The combat feels a bit disconnected (floaty) some times (hit box detection I suspect). There are more enemies with different abilities than I had expected.

The usual Dev humor in terms of sign posts and warning markers :) The fast travel towers are a nice touch, and each require three data keys to be constructed.

Anyone who is interested in a hybrid open world, construction, tower defense game should give this one a try.

I'm looking forward to what they add to the game in the future.

Check out the youtube videos for a better feel for the game.

Not solo friendly. There is a solo option but it eventually becomes not viable.
Tower defense aspect is weak. Towers are near useless, as things just run right past them. Even if towers did damage, though, they have an "energy bar" for how many attacks they can do at any given time.
Don't buy this game if you are interested in the tower defense part of it.
Exploration is fun until you run into enemies that are the equivalent of a raid boss with hyper fast attack speed.

Very fun game, have done all towers crafted most gear and done all but one lure. The game looks great plays great, sometimes frames drop and u can get stuck inbetween rocks but it is early access. For $15 worth the money

As it stands right this moment, this game needs some work. It is a very promising start.
But at the moment it's certainly not ready.

The chief issues that presented themselves were some odd framerate stutters, though I blame those on my PC, a fairly janky movement system (Don't put momentum in unless it's very neutered, it makes movement feel uncontrollable), a kind of shakey camera which I partially attribute to the lag, and an extremely cluttered and confusing UI.

The chief issue among these, was the UI.

As it stands, it's very cluttered and a bit hard to process. A lot of things are surrounded by a stylized border, which, while very nicely done, can be quite distracting from the actual content of the given window. I would shrink it slightly, and make it transparent, to give the user a better view of what's going on.
Furthermore, as I mentioned, it's quite cluttered. There are a lot of things going on at once, some of which aren't immediately relevant to what's going on, which can be distracting, and even on a widescreen 2560x1080 monitor, many things blocked a good portion of my view.

Moving onto the actual gameplay, my chief issue was the movement system feeling a little bit out of my control. The dodging system is very solid, and feels good to use, though the impacts from my weapons don't really feel like they solidly connect beyond a damage number. The combat system seems simple enough to not warrant any changes, as it serves it's purpose nicely without getting confusingly complex. Props for that.

Overall it's looking very nice, but needs some polish.

A marvelous blend between Tower Defence and Open World exploration

You defend your Crucibles and slowly build up your gear by collecting resources from the flora and fauna found in the open world

In it's current state as a Early Access game it is 100% worth it's price even with some bugs here and there!

i've already put in quite some time as you can see and this will only increase as it's not in it "Full Release" stage yet and there are still many things planned like more area's to explore, more crucibles to defend, perhaps more weapons to make?

i really recommend this it is one of the few gems among the pile of Early Access Games!

Really fun game but after hours of non stop progression I feel like my damage has not progressed at all. It took ages to fight a gorgon (a big monster dood) and after hours of progression It still ages to fight. (with all sort of upgraded weapons)

Its nice that game is difficult but at least make the upgrades more worth it.

It's a nice combination of tower defense with third person combat in a stylized open world. 2 types of game in one, one is exploring the wild, killing monster and gathering ressources to craft better gear in order to beat the Tower Defence challenges. I've seen something similar in other games, but there's a twist here that makes it unique and enjoyable.