Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

The weapon picks your skills, rage and willpower feed each other, and the Gate of Fates is a path rather than a menu. Here is what is left now that co-op and further updates are off the table.

The weapon is the class

Wolcen advertises itself as a hack-and-slash free from class boundaries, and it is specific about what replaces them: your weapons set the rules for your skill types. There is no class to choose at the start, which sounds like freedom and is really a relocation of the decision. The important choice now happens every time you equip something new.

Because weapons come with their own stances and combos, learning a weapon means learning a rhythm rather than reading a damage number. Swapping a weapon rewrites your available options instead of just changing your stats, which makes it the cheapest way to test a different build before you spend anything permanent on the passive tree.

Rage and willpower are one system

Three resources run the character, and the first two are wired into each other. Rage and Willpower interact through what the game calls the Resource Opposition System, and the transfer runs both ways: spending Willpower converts into Rage over the moments that follow, and spending Rage converts back into Willpower. That is what makes a hybrid build work, because a spell phase pays for the melee phase that comes next and the melee phase refills the spells.

How you refill each one is fixed by what you are holding. Attacking with a staff or catalyst builds Willpower, and attacking with anything else builds Rage, so a mixed loadout is a deliberate rhythm rather than a menu setting. Stamina is the third pool, and it has a second job: it pays for the dodge-roll that keeps you alive, and the same resource can be spent to travel faster.

The Gate of Fates is a path, not a list

Long-term power sits in the Gate of Fates, a rotating passive tree split into 21 sub-class sections. Read it as a route rather than a shopping list, because the passives you skip say as much about the character as the ones you take.

Skills sit on top of that with modifier points earned by levelling the skill. Those points do more than raise damage: they can change a skill's damage type, add a function, attach a buff or a debuff, or rewrite how it works. That turns each skill into a small build inside the larger one, which is why the sensible approach is to settle on a few skills and modify them deeply rather than spread points across everything you find.

The online side was retired, and that is the headline

This is the part that decides whether you should buy the game at all. In 2024 the studio announced that Wolcen would stop receiving development and support, that multiplayer functionality would end, and that the servers would be shut down shortly afterwards. All of that has since happened.

Wolcen remains playable in single-player. The shutdown announcement described an Import Online Character tool intended to convert saved online characters for offline play. Its current operation has not been independently verified here; preserve any existing saves before attempting a transfer.

Achievements survived the transition. The studio says the one achievement that originally depended on another player was reworked to require reviving an NPC companion instead, and that achievements completed online before the shutdown are retained.

What is left to play

What remains is the campaign and its endgame, which is a reasonable amount of game. The story can be played on two settings, with a Story mode and a Normal mode, and the endgame is built to let difficulty climb progressively rather than asking you to pick a wall up front.

On top of the combat sits the Aspects of Apocalypse system, where any character can shapeshift into one of four Celestial incarnations, each carrying four skills and an ultimate. Because it is not tied to a class, it slots into whatever build you have already assembled, and it gives you a dramatic answer to a fight that has stopped going your way.

Should you play it

Yes, with clear eyes, if you want a single-player classless action RPG and you are buying it for the build system rather than for a community. The weapon-driven skill rules, the two-way resource conversion and the Gate of Fates are where its depth sits.

Two things to be honest about first. Multiplayer has been switched off and the studio has ended development and support, so do not buy this to play with friends or to wait for new content. And if you want to see what the studio does next with the same ideas, a direct sequel called Wolcen 2 is planned to enter early access on PC in 2027, with single-player and co-op for up to four players.