Enshrouded surprised me, in a big way!
I jumped into this game expecting a Conan Exile clone or even something similar to Valheim. But those games can’t even come close to the level of depth and freshness of Enshrouded.
You may have already seen reviews and videos comparing Enshrouded to those existing survival games but let me tell you, they are way off. Enshrouded is something else entirely.
If you’re a fan of survival/build games and wondering whether you should try out Enshrouded, here’s my answer:
Enshrouded is definitely worth playing and it’s the best survival game you’ll ever play. Here’s why.
Not Just Another Survival Game
Enshrouded is classified as a survival action-role-playing game. But in my experience, it felt much bigger and more ambitious than that.
The game has RPG skill trees, gear crafting, a class-less character build system, immersive exploration, and an impressive building system that’s quite similar to Minecraft.
Enshrouded entered early access on Steam in January 2024 and it surprised everyone, including me. For an early access game, Enshrouded was well-polished and played without any issues. And the game is expected to hit Xbox and PS5 later in 2024.
I managed to put several hours into the game and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. Here’s my experience with Enshrouded so far.
My Experience
Enshrouded can be played solo or co-op. You can start a local game or create a server to play with other people. A great feature of the game is it allows you to set passwords to your custom servers if you want to just play with friends.
Since I mostly play solo, I started a local game.
The character creator is very basic and has limited options. Hopefully, it will get better as the game nears the final release. But these limited options didn’t bother me much anyway since it had the perfect look for my Gandalf-themed wizard character.
The beginning of Enshrouded felt a bit like Elden Ring. After a small cut scene, it drops you off into the world and it’s up to you to figure things out.
The game has a well-structured tutorial to guide you through the first steps but you can also ignore all that and go at it on your own.
At first, the combat felt a bit too basic. But as I progressed through the game, I was able to equip many different styles of weapons, which also unlocked cool new skills.
The class-less system in Enshrouded allows you to switch between different weapons on the fly but if you want to be OP, you should focus on creating a specific build.
From the beginning, I knew I was going to be a mage/wizard so I put more skill points into range and alchemy-related slots.
Enshrouded has a massive skill tree but you can’t unlock them all. So it’s important to plan ahead on how to spend those skill points. Thankfully, you can reset those points to respec anytime you want, for a price of course.
I’m getting off-topic. Let’s get back on track.
So, I followed the tutorial until I figured out how the build system works and how to unlock things. I put together a simple base and then decided to explore the game on my own.
Exploration Is Rewarding
I love games that let you explore on your own terms without having to follow a strict path. And Enshrouded lets you do just that. And that’s one of the reasons why I fell in love with this game.
In Enshrouded, loot can be found everywhere. Everywhere you go, you will find stuff to gather. There are loot chests with valuable gear and resources. There are boss-level enemies with Epic-tier loot. And so much more.
Being a loot-hoarder by nature, I spent so much time gathering all kinds of loot and storing them in my base.
In this game, there are no boundaries. If there’s a mountain blocking your path, you can just whip out your pick axe and make some steps to climb it. It’s that simple.
The game also gives you a glider to base-jump off of buildings and mountains to glide down like a bird.
And it has a grappling hook that you can hook on to specific places to just grapple around like Batman.
All these things combined make Enshrouded a really fun game to explore and discover cool things.
Classless RPG System Is Impressive
Even though I knew I wanted to play as a wizard, I didn’t know how powerful of a build I could put together. So in the beginning, I decided to try everything out.
I tried playing a sword and shield build, and it was pretty awesome. I was able to parry attacks and even arrows to play as a tank.
And playing with two-handed mace and swords was also fun. But it was not practical against ranged enemies.
Bow build was really effective when taking down enemies from a distance. But when dealing with hordes of enemies, it was pretty much useless.
And that made me realize how strong the mage/wizard build really is in Enshrouded.
There are two main weapons for Wizards in this game and those are staffs and wands. Wands have unlimited ammo and you can just shoot magic bullets until the wand breaks to take down enemies from a distance.
The staff is perfect for dealing with hordes of enemies and bosses with their powerful spells. And that makes this build the most OP mode in Enshrouded.
Of course, you can also mix and match these classes to create cool custom builds as well. At one point, I was playing with a wand for ranged combat and a sword and shield for close-quarter combat. And it felt pretty badass.
Build & Crafting Is Immersive
Full disclosure, I’m not very creative when it comes to building houses and structures in games. But I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the building system in Enshrouded.
There are multiple layers of building materials in this game and you can use them depending on the size of the house or fortress you’re building.
There are different sizes of chunks for building the structures and lots of different materials to choose from to craft buildings with cool decorative designs and let your imagination run wild.
Or you can even build small hobbit houses by mining caves into mountains. The choice is yours!
Story and Leveling Could Use A Boost
The story is basically non-existent in Enshrouded. You have to put the story together using a few animated cutscenes and tutorials. But that’s expected from a survival game.
I also felt like the leveling of my characters was a bit slow. The game just doesn’t reward enough XP for different activities and the only viable way to level up is to kill enemies and mine rocks.
Instead, the game should reward more XP across all of its activities to make gameplay feel more rewarding and worth my time.
Performance Could Use More Turning
The only issue I had with the game was performance. I played the game on my i7 10th gen, RTX2060 laptop with 32GB RAM, and I was only able to hit around 50FPS with medium settings and DLSS set to performance.
Performance was only manageable on my new PC with RTX 4060 and 32GB RAM and I was able to hit 60FPS with the quality setting and balanced DLSS setting.
I understand a game this size requires more processing power but there’s room to improve, especially if the game aims to look good on consoles.
Rising Player Numbers
Enshrouded early access launched just in the midst of the Palworld success but it still managed to gain a massive amount of players over to the new survival game.
Starting with a peak of 160K players, Enshrouded currently sits at over 60K daily active players. It’s a good sign and surely a great accomplishment for a survival game.
Should You Buy Enshrouded?
I played Skyrim, Conan Exiles, Valheim, and Minecraft, but I enjoyed Enshrouded more than all of those games. Well, not as much as Skyrim, but I felt Enshrouded to be more fun in a different way.
If you’ve enjoyed that kind of games, Enshrouded is worth checking out. Even though it doesn’t have a story, you get to make your own story in this game and explore a huge map on your own terms. You can also do some farming, grinding for loot, go into dungeons, unlock gear, craft gear, level up as you unlock different areas, and hoard loot like a goblin.
I’m already working on a few Enshrouded guides and posts so keep an eye out for more content on this space. In the meantime, give Enshrouded a try.