Game Review | The Waylanders – I’m not even angry, just disappointed

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Disappointment is opening the freezer, expecting ice cream, opening the tub, and it being empty. True disappointment is going to the freezer, not expecting ice cream, finding some, and it tasting so bad you wish you hadn’t. The Waylanders is that ice cream.

The Waylanders is an ambitious title that started over on Kickstarter. It’s a real-time-with-pause RPG that promises an epic story, engaging quests, and so many companions you’ll never be alone. However, a game needs more than just an ambitious idea to succeed.

The game is set on an alternate version of Earth, where all the gods are real and live in Ireland. Your player jumps on the first boat they can to go and be the first-ever human to meet the gods, and then… who knows? Next thing you know, your character is fighting strange evil creatures, and that’s that.

The lack of care shown to the story is the single on consistent element throughout the game. The characters were shown a lack of care, and their dialogue is so terribly awful, only accentuated by the bad voice acting. The choices you can make were shown a lack of care and don’t matter one bit and the gameplay was clearly shown no care at all.

I am by no means a gaming snob. There are many things other people will moan about that if I’m being frank, I ignore. My threshold is so high when it comes to bugs that I played Cyberpunk 2077 day one, ON CONSOLE and didn’t even moan… that much…

However, everything and everyone has their limits and man, oh man, did The Waylanders push and shove at mine. If I tell you that a game is unplayably bad, I mean it, and The Waylanders is unplayably bad.

But for the sake of fairness, let’s dig deep into our imaginations and pretend that none of the technical problems were there. Say the game ran smoothly, did was it was supposed to, and in general just worked. Would I recommend it now? No. While The Waylands can technically be fixed up with a lot of hard work and many more hours, the game that’s left would still be a very generic and boring real-time-with-pause RPG that can’t stand up to other, superior, games in the genre.