On the hostile planet of Revion Prime, multiple factions have caught wind of the mysterious discovery of a unique crystal. With the power to shift multiple dimensions into one another, the crystal, known as dolmen, has untapped scientific potential, but it also poses danger to reality and the timeline itself. Tasked with traveling down to the planet to extract samples and investigating the incident, players will be thrust into a fight for their lives and close the rift between worlds.
“Dolmen” suffers from too many issues to get any real enjoyment out of it, with unresponsive combat systems, barebones multiplayer, an aggravating energy system and horrible bugs throughout that make for nothing more than a flop.
The narrative in this game takes a back seat for the most part, with a lot of the lore being compressed into readable data pads strewn about the environment. This type of storytelling is typical for the genre, and I don’t necessarily fault the game for this. The voice acting, however, is actually pretty serviceable, though there isn’t much of it.
If you want to learn more about the multiple factions waging an interdimensional war against one another, you’ll certainly have to dig to find it. Many times when I was facing a boss or entering a new area, I wasn’t fully aware of the story implications or why I was doing what I was doing. This would be dismisabble if the gameplay itself was fun, however, this is unfortunately not the case.
Combat feels floaty and lacks any real impact when landing strikes. Fighting enemies feels less like a duel and more a clumsy struggle, with slow clunky animations that take any action out of the encounters. Enemies became more of an annoyance than an interesting aspect of the game and were a chore to deal with. While there are quite a few weapons to craft and choose from, I wasn’t encouraged to try new loadouts because of the stat requirements associated with wielding them, meaning if I leveled up strength instead of skill, I won’t be using any weapons that have a skill requirement.
There is also an energy management system that is involved in a number of things during gameplay. This resource is treated in similar fashion to health and stamina, and can be replenished with batteries. This energy is used to modify the effects of weapons or to toggle to preserve stamina while swinging weapons and dodging. Energy can also be consumed to heal the player, taking out a large chunk of the energy reserves. While interesting on paper, in practice, this system bogs down the gameplay rather than making it more intricate. With energy consumption being the only way to heal, it means oftentimes it isn’t worth expending it on offensive abilities.
By far the most annoying part of the energy system is how unwieldy it is to use batteries. To replenish my energy, I would need to stand still for 3-4 seconds while my character recharged. And I would need to do this at least twice to fully recharge, meaning I would have to leave myself vulnerable to enemies for a long while during this cumbersome animation. There were plenty of times during boss fights and enemy encounters where I would die because I had to sit completely still while trying to get my energy back to heal. I think this system could have been one of the more interesting features of the game if it was simplified in the implementation.
Multiplayer is a feature in the game, although it almost never functioned properly in my experience. Connection issues aside, even if I did get into a game with someone, there were always numerous problems. Player models would pop in and out of existence, meaning I would sometimes have to fight while my teammates or I were completely invisible. Other times, the boss would go invisible or glitch out and not move at all. Also, if you join someone’s game after they have already started the boss fight, you would be locked out of the room and forced to sit and watch them from behind a wall unable to assist. On top of this, sometimes after completing a multiplayer session and returning to my own world, the game would load me underneath the environment, and I would instantly die.
Inviting other people to my world to help me fight a boss was also not worth it because multiplayer takes place within its own instance. This means that if I kill a boss in multiplayer, that boss is still alive in my single player game, and I will need to defeat it again. All of these issues are compounded by the fact that in order to initiate multiplayer, you need to use a rare resource called dolmen fragments, which are dropped alongside nanites when you die. So if you fight a boss and die, then want to try some multiplayer to get stronger or practice on the boss, you can’t because all of your dolmen fragments are now stuck in the boss room –– and now you’ll have to go and kill enemies over and over again until you have enough dolmen fragments to start up the multiplayer.
“Dolmen” feels unfinished at its best and completely broken at its worst. User interfaces are as basic as they come, combat systems are bare bones and the overall design of the game feels like it needs more polish. For the $40 price tag this game ships with, I’d expect the multiplayer to at least function properly and not have the game riddled with bugs and glitches. The world and narrative have a lot of potential but are drowned by generic composition and unbearable gameplay systems. As of now, the game is rough and very hard to recommend to anyone, but if you did want to explore the world of “Dolmen,” wait for a very steep sale.
