Isles of Etherion

No updates since April 2024. I has great open-world potential, but the lack of updates makes this a hollow possibility.

this game still needs a lot of work but it has a lot of interesting concepts. hope they finish it.

while I'm sure there are some great ideas here, games this early in development shouldn't be allowed to be listed for sale on steam.
I fear this game will likely never break free of it's "student project" look and feel.

I'd echo some of the other reviews here. There are some nice ideas and they're not badly executed on the whole, but it does feel rather incoherent. I'm happy with open world games and open game structure but I struggled to get into this as nothing drew me in - it felt just like doing stuff for the sake of it. Kudos to the dev for their ambitions, but maybe they were a little too broad and my concern would be that after 5 years of development it's not really clear what it wants to be. However, saying all that, it's important that people try to do something different as the mainstream feels rather stale - I'll keep an eye on this and hope that it keeps getting updated and finds more of an identity.

Great Game so far, enjoing the freedom of destruction the game has to offer when exploring everything, started off and been playing as the fairy race, been a bit too easy if you ask me, could use a difficulty booster option for those who want more of a challenge, something similar to how diablo 3 Difficulty selection and unlocks is maybe with just freely upgrading the entire worlds difficulty?

having a hard time understanding WTF this game is wanting me to do . kinda a cool idea but incredibly hard to decern any actual purpose or understanding of the controls and have 0 explaination for any of it

I like the scope of this game. Given the right attention, this could be an amazing game. I realize it's Early Access and I don't like to bash games in Early Access. I just can't recommend buying this in it's current state. I will be keeping a close eye on this one's development and I hope to see it flourish and I will change my review accordingly. As is, I found it to be confusing and, while the spell system is definitely a high point, it was inconsistent. I don't understand why, when you right click you raise your arm and have an indicator for the spell, but you still have to press a number key to cast the spell, of which you could just press the number key and cast it without right clicking at all. Maybe I overlooked something in the tutorial, I don't know.

Like I said, this game is conceptually great, but it seems to emphasize the "early" in Early Access. That's fine, just know what you're getting into when/if you decide to purchase this game.

For now, this game is:

1: Very raw mechanically, specially inventory, you can't buy, sell or store things quickly, with a shift-click or something, no way yet to optimally split stacks, buy or sell in bulk, so right now, you still have to peck items here and there like a chicken pecking seeds on the ground
2: The scenery is stunning, I never saw a ugly place in my hour and a half of gameplay, even with low graphics settings
3: Loot is diablo-like which some has modifiers, but the are pretty inconsistent, weapons don't have attack damage values so you have no idea which weapon that has no modifier is better
4: AI is laughable right now, they get stuck in corners often, specially in airships, If your character belongs to a winged race, the AI will attempt to hit you with long range attack if you are flying, but if you are far and have the high ground instead, they will try to get close to do melee attacks and get stuck
5: The particle effects are badly optimized, you get frame drops when you prepare or cast magic, this also happens when the enemy cast magic.
6: The graphics, despite the scenery being beautiful, are not so good even on max setting
7: This game does not feel alive, npcs are just mannequins with text boxes dialogues, they don't have schedule, they don't interact with each other, and when they DO MOVE, they don't have dialogue
8: This game should not have quests, only intuitive scenarios and situations, which leads to the final game objective, because this defeats the whole point of the game, which is freedom

lots-O-fun was til bugs , now wonder why i wasted money. why was it sold like this , Oh I know,, Greed.

I did request a refund for this game because I felt like it isn't completely fleshed out for it to be worth it for me personally. That being said, it has huge promise and is definitely the type of game that would scratch the itch I've been having for a long long time; so much so that I'm regretting doing the refund. The dev from what I have seen in different forums is very responsive seems to really care about our feedback. I'll probably re-purchase this just to show my support for this game.

dont buy it if you expect to play a game.
its not early access its barely beta, feels more like alpha.

im keeping an eye on this one, cause i like some directions that i think are there.

I think this game has so much potential! The only thing I wish it had was controller support. Great job on this game my man solid talent.

Kind of great in a janky way. Fun moment to moment gameplay

Loving the game and the path it seems to be taking. I've been looking for a game similar to this one for quite some time and this seems to be it.

Some things I've noticed as an early access player: Sound bugs, especially for the spell tornado never turning off. Coloring and hair model bugs, gnomes don't seem to even have hair at times. Some spell combos are a little too strong where others seem to be lacking to a point where they can't be used examples being; one example being boulder and tornado combo hitting things for 23,000 when other spells barely break 200 at my current level. Weapons or effects not appearing, fairy wings not showing up at random and then flying around like a super hero or my hammer not being there despite rolling through animation.

actually ignore the negative reviews, this game is quite good, try it yourself, for 1 person dev team i think it has promise, ive only played like 45 mins, but if you read what it tells you ingame you will realise it gives hints on what to do with your surroundings

The negative reviews for IoE seem to ignore the clear statement from the developer in the game description.

'If Isles of Etherion looks interesting to you, but you're used to playing games at their finished state, please consider adding it to your Wishlist. If you would like to contribute to the polishing/improvement of IoE and see your constructive feedback and brilliant ideas help make it into a game that we could all be proud of, please consider joining us in Early Access!"

It's not finished. It's not close to finished.

It -is- entertaining. I've never died to an angry chicken and then been spawn-camped by said angry chicken before. Or had a rock fall out of the sky and casually murder me. Or get completely owned by a group of irritated pixies. But now I have and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm looking forward to the direction this game takes and the myriad ways I can get unalived creatively.

This is barely an alpha.

Some of the concepts are nice, theres something drastically wrong with the graphics though.
take a look https://ibb.co/VWX0qdm

i could see the concepts from this being taken by someone else and turned into another game, i'm not sure if this dev is going to be able to make this happen considering this is how they've launched in early access.

It's maybe a $3 game right now.
everything is extremely jank and not well made, i'd wait a year or two and see if its still being developed.

This game definitely has a lot of potential. I love the destruction and the sound effects in general. However, it most definitely is an early access game. There is a lot of jank and requires a lot of development time. But, still I would strongly recommend to buy this game.

I think it's promising, but it feels too early for Early Access.

Graphically the game looks pretty good. There's a large variety of enemies, lots of weapons and gear, and various islands that have some semblance of different biomes.

Combat is... Dreadful? Is that the word I'm looking for? I think it is. There doesn't seem to be any AI for the enemies other than approaching you and attacking. It is a very mindless hack 'n slash style combat, and after just a few levels you'll likely have good enough gear to take very little damage if any from combat. So you'll just mow through enemies without much reason to vary any of your attacks or spells. You'll get a lot of loot, and good luck figuring out what's an upgrade/downgrade because the game doesn't exactly help you out there.

I did enjoy the magic, even though I only found what appeared to be a handful of the spells that will be available. Combining spells is probably the only reason I kept playing. Being able to light a tornado on fire is rather enjoyable.

There are quests, but the questing system was all but broken for me. I would occasionally have a point directing me towards a quest, and back to the quest giver. More often than not it just referred me to a quest that I'd already finished without telling me anything useful.

Traversal is slow. Painfully slow. The world is pretty big. I got a longstrider spell that allowed me to go faster, for about 2 seconds. Thanks, I guess? You can fly on a whim, but even that isn't exactly a fast method to get around the world. Even then unless you've got an active quest pointing you back to a town you might just choose to kill yourself as a faster way to get there.

Overall I enjoyed it, but I don't expect to be back for more time on the Isles of Etherion for awhile.

Not in it's current state for the price. THere are some cool things trying to be implemented here, but if you simply choose Demon and fly above every enemy, they can't fight back. Stand at the front of the enemy airship and cast your tornado and watch it defeat the entire army. It's not a bad game, but I don't think 17$ worth