Everlast: Undying Tale Early Access Review – Rough Beginnings

The MMORPG genre nowadays is one of the riskier genres for publishers. The audience is relatively small, but highly dedicated and loyal to the games they already play. On the other hand, the massive scope of these games and their server infrastructure makes them among the most expensive games to maintain. It’s increasingly difficult for new titles to gain a foothold in the highly competitive scene of MMOs, but there have been some interesting ideas in the indie environment that offer similar gameplay loops but on a smaller multiplayer scale or even as single-player titles.

Everlast: Undying Tale, developed and published by InSpades, is an MMO-Lite action RPG recently published into Early Access. The game offers a handcrafted open world with fantasy quests and narrative design, playable as a single-player game or in dedicated servers for up to 100 players. As an MMO fan with less and less free time, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of single-player games with MMO-style gameplay, so I was very hopeful going into Everlast‘s Early Access.

I started on a single-player world, made my character, was impressed by the rather simple but decent customization of character creation, and started the game. The intro cinematic and the lore dump seemed a bit too long, but they hinted at a well-crafted world and story. We start as an ordinary person, staying in our friend’s estate and helping around the farm. After a couple of introductory quests, an undead horde descends upon the region. We try our best to fight them off to buy some time for others to escape, but we fall in battle.

We are then resurrected by a mysterious figure, offering us a second chance but implying that we will be afflicted by a curse. We need to consume the essence of living beings to stave off the curse, and we should avoid getting in water. It’s very vampire-coded, but we don’t go around biting people. We find the items required for our sustenance by killing enemies or gathering a variety of resources, and the same resources fuel our magical capabilities. We go back to the living world, find our way to the nearest town, ask around for survivors of the attack, and prepare to go back to look for our now-missing friend.

I loved the opening narrative and the world-building of Everlast. It offers a strong and immersive hook, introduces us to the undead struggles and magical nature of the world, and opens up the world for us to explore and progress in. The world looks vibrant and beautiful, the art style fits really well with the overall vibe, and the UI was clear and intuitive. If I had played only this section of the game as a demo, I would be very excited for its future. But there was a lot more to experience in Everlast‘s Early Access, and unfortunately it didn’t live up to the expectations set by the opening hour of the game.

Everlast is described as an MMO-Lite Action RPG, so I am going to judge it by that description. Starting with the MMO part, Everlast plays more like a sandbox MMO, with skill-based progression that is reminiscent of RuneScape. There are about a dozen gathering and crafting skills, and a handful of combat skills that we can work on to get better gear and improve our character’s abilities. In the beginning, the crafting did seem interesting. The focused-crafting mechanic introduces some simple but challenging minigames to make higher-quality items, which makes the gameplay more engaging. However, at least in the current state of Early Access, there is a noticeable lack of depth in this core part of the sandbox MMO experience.

I spent most of my time gathering and crafting, and I wasn’t incentivised enough to go out and explore. The world is not too big, but it still has a lot to offer, and I felt a little disappointed that I didn’t even need to leave the starting town for the first 10 hours of my playtime. The crafting trees also don’t seem too exciting. Getting a better weapon or armor is just an increase in numbers, and I wish there were more engaging and exciting upgrades along the way.

The “Lite” part of the MMO-lite was the thing I was looking forward to the most. While there are small dedicated servers, and I joined one for a little bit, I wanted to see how the game felt as a solo experience. The questing and crafting gameplay was decent, but the place where Everlast lacks some polish in its single-player option is the world events. We can find these world events all over the map and can start them for some experience and rewards. However, they seemed to be balanced around a larger population of players at first. The first event I found asked me to cut 100 wood logs, which is not a fun grind as a solo player. The event was obviously intended for more than one player, as the quest description explained that I would get full rewards if I contributed a lower number of wood logs. But I realized the hard way that I could finish the event with about 34 logs delivered. It turns out the events are balanced for solo players, just not represented in the descriptions as of yet.

I was more willing to take on the events after finding out about the hidden number balance for solo players. I needed a rebuilding project as part of a quest that required a lot of resources to start, so I got to grinding. After an hour of gathering and crafting, and paying almost all of my remaining gold, the rebuilding was about to begin. Another world event: we need to run a short distance, pick up a toolbox, and deliver it to the site. 75 times. In 15 minutes. And this time, the number was not balanced for a solo player. After about 10 minutes, I started to realize this was most likely impossible to accomplish on my own, but I kept pushing. After 15 minutes of some of the most boring tasks I have ever had to accomplish in a game or even in a mundane office job, the timer ran out with only one delivery remaining. I lost all my gold and resources and failed to finish the project by a few seconds. That was a huge blow to my motivation to keep playing the game. These are issues that can be solved easily during Early Access, but it was a huge bummer to me personally.

Now let’s talk about the action in Everlast. The combat is just fine. Which is way below the bar for a game described as an action RPG. Combat is slow, predictable, and not as responsive as I would’ve hoped. It’s not horrible; there is a decent amount of enemy variety, dodging and aiming, and a few abilities to use during the fight, but it gets repetitive very quickly. There’s also not enough playstyle variety to really justify the RPG tag. You can play melee, ranged, or as a mage, and that’s about it. There are some extra spells and abilities as you level up, but again, I expected a lot more from a game that is advertised as an action RPG.

The first hour of Everlast: Undying Tale was really promising, but it started to go downhill from there. This is an Early Access release, so some of the lack of polish can be forgiven, but there are some core gameplay mechanics that seem lackluster in the long run. I hope the developers are able to pull off the quality shown in the opening, but it still needs a lot of work to be a worthwhile experience.

Nima reviewed Everlast: Undying Tale in Early Access on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game that was available at the time of writing and will not be changed.