Wayfinder Echoes Early Access Review – A Beacon of Light

Back in August of last year, Airship Syndicate launched their newest title, Wayfinder, into early access. We at Lords of Gaming were able to test the game before launch and offer our impressions on the experience. However, when launch came around, it was not a smooth ride for anyone. In October, I offered my thoughts on the experience unaffected by the queues, and infinite loading screens after various fixes throughout September. Sine then, there have been some notable content releases such as The Reaver King, and Call of the Void. The game has gone through some very impactful changes recently that warranted another look.

In May, Airship Syndicate announced that they would be fundamentally changing Wayfinder from an MMORPG, to a single player ARPG in the vein of Diablo. The game would no longer be about matchmade activities with other players, public events, seasonal content, and lots of grinding for its crafting system. Instead, it would be a very curated experience that would focus on the single player journey and narrative, with constant loot drops, a new armor system, talent trees and many other revamped systems.

The update was called Echoes, and turned the game into something that has shocked me more than I could have imagined, and even in its early access state as of right now, it offers way more than most games in its price range.

Cut From the Gloom

Wayfinder takes place in the world of Evenor. Where the Gloom, a strange and mysterious force that caused a cataclysm across the world. The cataclysm dissolved many cities and entire regions that were not sheltered by a Beacon, like Skylight. In Skylight, a group of guardians called Wayfinders were called to defend the beacon and but were lost to the Gloom that began to infest this beacon. That is, until one day a character named Omen was able to find and rescue these Wayfinders by recalling their memories with the Gloom dagger, that acts as a tool to guide the Wayfinders through the Gloom infested areas.

From here, you choose from one of three Wayfinders to escape the Beacon and return to Skylight. There you discover that a year has passed since the cataclysm, and you are tasked with reclaiming what was lost.

The story of Wayfinder, especially in the Echoes update is very expansive, and interesting. Omen guides you to and from various locations, offering tons of backstory and lore, even when exploring dungeons and reaching endgame areas. For example, after defeating “The First”, a character who both looks and talks like Omen but is corrupted by the Gloom, The First will re-appear as a memory similar to the Wayfinders’ in later moments of the story to offer help. But Omen does not trust her, and she becomes furious at you for accepting The First’s help out of fear for losing you to the Gloom again. While not a wholly original idea, it was simple, and effective.

There are also some fully cinematic moments near the end of the current story that left me amazed by the feel and deftness in tone. These moments left me audibly saying under my breath “please don’t end”, as I finished the final quest. As it became less and less focused on simple voice overs and meetings with characters, and more about epic moments, the game left me eagerly anticipating what is to come during its early access period.

But the story wasn’t the only thing that was interesting, the open world zones and dungeons were equally impressive and fun to explore.

Into the Wild Green and Blue Yonder

In Wayfinder, there are two open world zones that worry less about scale, and more about scope. The first is the Highlands, which is a very layered though somewhat straightforward starting zone. Rolling hills of grass, waterfalls, rivers, castle walls and a small section dedicated to a part of Skylight that fell to the Shrikes, one of the many enemy factions in the game. Moving from a steampunk city section with bandits wandering the streets, to a cavern filled with giant worms, and then finding castle ruins filled with goblins gives off a unique sense of wonder. The diversity in enemies and their unique placements throughout the Highlands feels less natural, as if you are wandering into claimed territory that was lost to the Gloom initially. Frostmarch, the second open world area has a much larger scale and scope in comparison.

Frostmarch, as its name suggests, is a frostier area with frozen lakes and dead trees. But there are some elements to the design that make it stand out. Aside from the strongholds and railways, there are giant floating swords either hanging in the sky, or lying across gaps in the environment, making incredible looking bridges that lead to mini-boss fights. I even found a hidden cavern at the end of the aforementioned railway. It all feels very rewarding to not just follow the waypoints on your map but rather take in the environment and its many secrets. Some hidden areas also have guarded chests that give out unique cosmetic items like sprays, weapon charms and dyes for your Wayfinder’s armor.

But something that really stood out to me were the territories the primal Reaver tribes occupy. From arenas, lost strongholds and even long stretches of settlements across ledges and elevated plateaus in the environment that reminded me of Thousand Needles in World of Warcraft before Cataclysm. The boney wind chimes, desecrated trees, totems and camps built inside the skeletons of large creatures give off an eerie sense of danger. This sense is only heightened by the frequent ambushes you are subjected to in these areas.

There are also little touches to each zone. Events like a Gloomshard falling the sky and having to clear the adds it spawns, and world bosses that drop unique loot make the world feel alive. The zones also feature ziplines that offer faster traversal compared to the mounts you can earn, and patrols that offer a little bit more rewards when exploring.

Each zone is very dense and packed with so much to see and find while not feeling overwhelming. There are really no dull moments when wandering around, and when you have seen all there is, Wayfinder does its best to keep you focused on that next objective, whether it is a patrol, world event or story quest.

Gameplay and Wayfinders

The gameplay in Wayfinder is very fun and weighty. It is a blend of free flowing third person hack and slash and gunplay. Take, for example, Niss, the rogue, or Grendel, the Warmaster. With Niss you will be focusing on faster weapons like dual daggers. While Grendel leans towards heavy swords and axes. Each character and weapon type synchronizes together in unique and interesting ways.

Niss is able to dash forward with a shadow clone that dashes after her dealing damage to enemies in her path. Therefore, Niss having the dual daggers gives her more freedom to stay nimble. Meanwhile Grendel can leap forward and stomp on enemies to break their defenses, which creates opportunities to deal massive amounts of damage to vulnerable enemies.

While this sounds like basic character action game design, what makes the gameplay feel unique is a mix of certain systems that every Wayfinder can tap into, like dealing more damage the more they add to the current combo. Most characters, like Grendel for instance, after ten hits deal double the damage and can keep the bonus if you keep hitting enemies. While Niss on the other hand can deal up to triple the damage.

Each enemy also has a stagger meter you can break with heavy strikes and parries. Rifles, such as burst fire, railguns and shotguns on the other hand work in tandem with these systems with the added benefit of staying away from enemies as you take them down. Ranged combat is better designed for Wayfinders like Silo or Venomess who do not have a lot of health or defensive abilities. But that is not all, as each and every weapon, rifle or melee have unique abilities to them.

My favorite for Grendel, for example, is Titan’s Bane. It’s a heavy sword whose special ability is cleaving the earth in front of you causing a rupture of lava, the initial strike deals a lot of damage, and the lava adds even more damage to the mix. While a rifle like the Voidbinder can shoot an anchor to an enemy that weighs them down, allowing you to do a lot more damage to them. These weapons are just two of many, and the customization that goes into them, and the Wayfinders, is expansive.

Deep as the Ocean

There are many layers to the customization in Wayfinder. Outside of the transmogrification system, there are armor sets for each Wayfinder that offer small stat boosts. A Mastery System allows you to unlock passive stat increases by spending Wayfinder Points and resources. Going alongside these systems is a new talent system that has many choices for more stat increases, and accolades that unlock at each Wayfinder rank for more stat boosts, and extra echo slots and spaces for Wayfinders, weapons, and equipment. The best part of this system is that each Wayfinder shares the unlocked rank levels, with different variants of the passives and stat boosts within.

Speaking of which, the echo system has the most depth to it. Every Wayfinder, weapon and accessory has echo slots to them, and the echoes themselves give extra stat bonuses. The ones that drop from bosses also have unique traits. One from The Argent Hand drops an orb of light on an enemy that deals damage to them when activating a weapon ability. Meanwhile, the one from Kolaar the Beastmaster spawn’s spiritual animals with unique buffs when landing critical strikes.

The customization and power fantasy fulfillment in Wayfinder is a core strength. In the beginning of the game, you start by dealing minimal amounts of damage to basic foes, and that remains consistent throughout most of the game. But as you collect more powerful accessories, and weapons, you eventually start to trivialize every boss. From there it becomes more about experimentation, do Niss’s abilities work well with scythes or heavy swords. What about Grendel with a rifle? It is a lot of fun to play around with these options.

Hunts and Expeditions

Outside of experiencing the story, customizing your wayfinders and exploring the open world, there are a significant amount of dungeons to explore. You start with expeditions which are procedurally generated tile sets with a surprising degree of variety in different environments. One of the earliest expeditions you can embark on is in Aurelian and its multiple sectors, and then eventually move onto similarly basic environments like mines. But eventually, you will make it to more interesting places, like the Gloom dungeons. All of which have their own unique layouts and art direction.

What stands out in expeditions is not only the variety in each environment, but the various activities you can do in them. For example, in Aurelian, you can do these events where you have to kill enemies around a floating golden orb to receive a special resource. While other environments like the mines can have you freeing enslaved miners or following a giant mining machine as it creates a path for you. But some events are universal in a sense, like the mysterious Trickster who has you gamble at a chance to receive unique loot, and Loot Goblins, both of which offer their own boss-like echoes as well.

Finally, you unlock various Hunts, which are dedicated boss battles, and the designs are some of the best in the game. While they began fairly standard, with a giant spider and a giant slime with basic and predictable attack patterns, they quickly become much more complex. The First, in particular, is a bullet hell nightmare with a second phase that spawns moving tiles to knock you off the arena. My favorite boss, Aturach the Deathless, not only beelines for attacks, but causes massive areas-of-effect, and summons adds while having a second phase with a companion bear that you have to kill at the same time as him or they revive themselves. He is an exhilarating challenge, and the arena is expansive and well-designed aesthetically.

Beyond the core of the game is a very simple and satisfying endgame.

A Heroic Endgame

After you finish the main quest, you unlock “Mythic Hunts”, which as the name suggests, launches a very hard version of existing hunts. Taking down these bosses not only gives you their unique resource for the awakening system. But they also have a chance to drop higher level versions of weapons, and unique armor sets for each Wayfinder.

The best part about this system is that it allows you to truly challenge your builds for the most damage output and survivability possible. Not to mention there is an endlessly repeatable bounty board that gives you awakening resources and Glory, which is used to buy the highest level of weapons. The bounties also challenge you to add multiple imbuements to the hunt, which fundamentally changes the stage and enemy behavior. For example, adding two shadow imbuements creates spots in the ground that slow you down and summon adds, but the only way to clear those spots out is to stand in them. This adds even more challenge to already challenging content.

This is one area of Wayfinder that I think could use more variety, and better rewards. Each bounty for specific bosses is always the same modifiers, and I would love to see different combinations for even greater amounts of these rewards. More risk, more reward would be a very welcome addition. I would also love to see Mythic Expeditions, as they are longer form content and could issue an even greater challenge than the Hunts. There is also one “Heroic” skin for Niss you can buy with Glory, but I would love to see similar skins for other Wayfinders, like Venomess, or Grendel.

Inconsistent Performance, and a Sleek UI

I played Wayfinder on my custom-built PC consisting of a Ryzen 5 5600G, Radeon 6600, 16 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM and an m.2 NVME SSD, and the game was very inconsistent performance wise. When in expeditions, and hunts, the game runs extremely smooth. But in more open environments like Skylight, the Highlands, and especially Frostmarch, I had to start lowering a lot of settings to get a consistent 60 and above framerate, especially in mini-boss fights and world events. Some of which glitch out, preventing me from finishing them. I also tested the game on Valve’s Steam Deck, and it is very playable even with similar issues.

The UI in Wayfinder is very sleek and smooth to navigate. The character menu is especially simple, and the settings are easy to understand. However, in moments where the game starts having performance issues, if you pause the game, you will still navigate the menus with those performance issues. I also noticed that the FOV and camera distance settings can sometimes reset, which is incredibly annoying to have to go back and fix.

Accessibility

There are no real accessibility settings outside of subtitles and the option to choose your own difficulty. I played on normal and found the challenge to be just right. There is an easier option, and even harder difficulties to choose from. I have not tested these out just yet, but it is worth mentioning in this review as the game is not set to just one difficulty.

Final Thoughts on Wayfinder Echoes

Wayfinder right now is not just “better” than what it was at the beginning. It is a completely different experience that goes all-in on the idea of the single player ARPG experience with a focused narrative and exceptional guiding to and from story beats, dungeons and hunts. The Echoes update is an exceptional pivot, and feels historic as I am unaware of anything of this caliber happening to a game such as Wayfinder.

They took a grindy MMO with underbaked systems that needed constant updates to keep players engaged and changed it into a traditional experience with some of the deepest ARPG systems I have seen in a while. They have even been updating the game to improve and add certain systems. This includes memory echoes, which are still cutscenes in the world that offers some lore on various Wayfinders, and were originally locked to those specific characters. But they changed it to allow any character to watch these memory echoes, so you do not have to keep backtracking to past areas.

They also recently added a server browser system that allows players to hop into other players’ games and have that online feeling experience with random people.

In fact, they are already looking to refine the combat in Wayfinder further in an upcoming update; to make it so you can guide multiple weapon’s swings better. I just hope one of these updates before the end of early access can offer multiple save files so I can start anew on different difficulties to see how things scale. As well as a photo mode so I can show off the striking beauty of the world of Evenor without UI clutter.

As it stands right now, Wayfinder is the easiest recommendation I can give to anyone who is looking for an exceptional third person hack and slash ARPG. You owe it to yourself to pick it up at its current price in early access.

Wayfinder is available now on Steam for $24.99 and will be returning to PlayStation 5 before summer’s end, and on Xbox Series X|S after its early access is finished.

Disclaimer – Airship Syndicate Provided Lords of Gaming Access to Wayfinder during its original launch for coverage.