Game Review: Enderal Forgotten Stories

Enderal forgotten stories, this is ought to be a wasp nest I’m about to kick because I’ve been putting back this review for months now. For a bit of context, Enderal been on my list of the game to play for years now and since the long announced expansion released back in January I gave it a go and played around 60 hours or so.

I must say it’s a game I tried to like but I couldn’t get into it and I feel quite sad about it because I saw a few let’s plays, Gopher and Zero Period Production to be more precise, and the people praising this mod when release it’s was like a new era of Skyrim modding then I tried to play it around 2 hours in I got bored closed it to never touch it again. That was a few years ago so I gave it another chance with this new expansion tried the new enchanting tree and God forgive me but I think, there wasn’t any game in years that made me feel so forced to play it. I forced myself to play it and to like to play it but I just ended up hating playing it in the end and stopped playing around 60 hours in.

I can’t give a fair assessment of this game but I’ll try and as I said before I tried really hard to like it but I think the game has major flaws and while I don’t want to just complain about it I’m warning you now, I’ll complain a lot during this review because I think that this game managed to lose to Skyrim on nearly every aspect even though it’s based a game built on Skyrim engine.

So I’m repeating myself now, this isn’t going to be a praise to Enderal, but more about me trying to figure out what seriously made me hate this game so much even though everyone seems to like it.  Let’s start now!

STORY

Let’s start by the beginning, the selling point of this game, even though it’s free, is its solid storyline. The storyline is without a doubt great with the great voice-acting the best elements of this game and by any standards will beat out of the park the Storyline of the basic Bethesda game, Fallout new Vegas not included. Indeed the storyline seems to give you a choice, which has consequences but it’s sadly only half true.

I won’t talk much about the story as I would spoil a lot but you are the nobody who wakes up after a rough boat ride and after a series of event it is revealed that you are the prophet and must save everyone with your new found abilities may it be with magic, blade or bow. Your quest to save the world is only beginning as you explore the land of Enderal and challenge your skills. You will meet some colourful, some very stoic character, some faithful some more traitorous but each one has a story to tell. My only gripe with the actual story of the game is the pacing. Having dialogue scenes lasting over 15-20 minutes, get really really boring and fast. Don’t get me wrong I love storyline but sitting listening to everyone talking but having nearly no effect on the monologues they are doing really got me bore of the LEADER very fast, I was hoping he died since one of the first time I met, him because of that. So I think I can resume this complain as some characters talk way too much.

The game of three ending 2 of them from the base game one from the new extension and to be fair the requirement are pretty much end game and all you did before don’t really matter except in the 3rd ending but still. I think it’s an interesting try to make choice matter but I would have like to see actual repercussions for my actions more than x character is dead or this particular fellow that does not matter with the main questline now hate me. But then again, I think that those consequences gave life to this otherwise very DEAD world. I’ll explain what I mean by it in another section but those very few moments made the experience of the story worth it.

COMBAT

Combat can be described as Skyrim but with the polar opposite of Skyrim “broken” system. The scaling is worst than Skyrim and it’s pretty much golden standard of broken already. So I'll explain what I mean by that. Skyrim has the problem that enemies stop scaling after level 35 and that the main character just overpowers everything by then. Enderal has the problem that everything overpowers you at any level and depending on the way you play it can get even worse. And by that, I mean getting one-shotted by enemies lower level than you…

So, I understand Enderal is not a hand holding game that’s fine, you need to eat to replenish your health since there’s now auto regen but making everything a meatbag isn’t really what I call proper scaling. some enemies are just there for you to one shot while others just look at you and destroy you. But I think the line between good and bad scaling is quite simple, can you take any build of the game and pass through it without an absolute amount of insult being shouted.

I played an unusual build for myself, An archer/summoner build, I would summon my minion and then shoot the enemies with arrows. Problem is when my summon start getting scared of the enemy in front of him and keep running away… What use is it? I never understood why but for some summons which was level appropriate just keep running away. And I would end up with a room of enemies on me all of a sudden… So I can say, don’t play an archer summoner in this game it’s actually rage inducing.

My last grip with combat is how something didn’t make sense to me. Why are mages have many time the health pool of a warrior? And no I’m not joking around in the same camp the mage and archer took around 3 arrows to kill the mages took between 5 and 12 arrows. I really don’t get it and that my last frustration about this combat system.

SYSTEMS

So I pretty much critiqued the combat system, but outside of it the rest of the system were quite interesting the shouts were replaced by powers you could unlock by investing points in a talent tree, which is a sight to see by the way as the talent three is an actual location instead of being just a tree.

You have 5 trees, Warrior, Rogue Mage, Alchemist, Enchanting. Each of them has perks that help you a way or another then there are the skills which are linked to this tree like the weapon armour which are levelled up using skill point and learning book. And there are the rests of the skills which are split between crafting and learning. Crafting can be used to level Blacksmithing, Alchemy and Enchanting while learning can be used on lockpicking, speech, and pickpocket. Overall this gave a fresh start to the game and a good gold sink to the game.

Then there are the systems like werewolf potions made with alchemy which alter your transformation with elemental damage and the like as the main gameplay element and of course the enchanting with their summoned spirits which could be summoned at will.

I tried the enchanting and I ended up abandoning it because they would kill themselves all the time by bruising a fallen boulder and diving me a fever debuff every 5 minutes… Which is pretty harsh at the start of the game.

WORLD

I think this is what bothered me the most in the game. In Skyrim you would meet mostly baddies but that not all you would meet. You could see merchants or passerby in the wild in Enderal I think I can count on one hand the number of friendly NPC I met in the wild. They are so rare you don’t even need to bother asking yourself. Are those enemies? Yes, they are because no friendlies are present in the wild. If this was it I would not complain about it as a lot of game does the same thing. But seriously was it really necessary to put a pack of enemies every 5 freaking meters! Like seriously was is the point of a road if you meet enemies on them and no friendly NPC? Is there no guard what so ever in Enderal? Why are half of the zone just abandoned cities or holds?


To be fair if you like exploring and fighting you will be served but to me, this was way too much and got tedious after the few first hours If we talk about the design of the location however now I can give 10 stars for that and easily! The zones were gorgeous but sadly with the like of life in them, they all gave me the same dead feeling.

STABILITY

I don’t usually give the stability of the game its own section but I think with everything that happened during the time I played I thought it was worth mentioning. Do not play this game if your system is a low-mid end and your hate to crash because you WILL crash and not just once.

I had an i7 4th generation with a GTX 960 6GB and I crashed at least twice every game session I played until I change my hardware. I switched to an RTX 2070 8GB and an i7 8th generation and didn’t have any crash since but it’s quite crash-prone the lower your system is.

THE VERDICT

My verdict will be more along the line of trying it for yourself most people like the game but I found it tedious to play and very boring at the time, which is why I stopped playing because what is the point of playing a game if you don't enjoy it after all.

In the end, I still want to give my thanks to the Enderal Team even though I didn’t enjoy it and by the time I founded it very broken, I was still entertained by it for some time. So to SureAI and it’s team my uttermost respect for this tremendous amount of work you delivered freely to the modding community.