The building system has also seen numerous improvements, including a first-person camera, full rotation control on decorative furniture, overgrowth editing, building block decay, and more. There are also over 70 new props, from large statues and braziers to room decorations and new building materials.

The world has also seen numerous locations updated, with the Springlands having new enshrouded ruins and a farm location. Players can look forward to improved encounters in Blackmire and the Albaneve Summits (which also got a new Event Honor Hall). Check out some of the patch notes below and full details here.

Changelog for Update #5 v.0.8.0.0

Highlights

Social Features

• Many of you have asked for better ways to communicate with friends and strangers, so for this update we’ve added a range of new social features.

Text Chat

• Enshrouded now supports in-game text chat in multiplayer sessions, no more spelling out your discord name in blocks to make new friends!
• Hosts or server admins can toggle the feature on or off in the server settings as needed. The feature is set as “off” by default on dedicated servers, so make sure to enable it.
• Players can individually select other players and mute their messages.
• Profanity filter settings can be modified through players’ Steam Settings under Friends & Chat > Chat Filtering. They are on by default on all Steam accounts.
• A chat log is available on a new “Social” menu page.

Voice Chat

• Voice chat can now be enabled by hosts or server admins. The feature is set as “off” by default, so make sure to enable it. When enabled, there are two modes available: proximity voice chat or global, server-wide voice chat.
• In the new Social menu page, players can mute other players and adjust their volume. They can also toggle their own microphone on or off. You know who you’ll need it for.
• In the sound settings, players can mute their microphone, use ‘push-to-talk’ or ‘open microphone’. Additionally, they can adjust their microphone input volume.

Social Hub

• As mentioned above, a new tab has been added to the in-game menu called “Social”.
• The Social menu displays all players currently playing in the game world, and players can adjust audio and text settings.
• It is also possible to see everyone’s server permissions and locate their position on the world map. No more endlessly searching for Steve.

Emotes

• A new emote wheel offers emote animations. The wheel is opened by the key or button that was previously mapped to the sitting action (by default, X on keyboard and d-pad down on a controller) which is now integrated into the emote wheel.

Building Improvements

• We continue to be stunned by the creativity of our community, so we thought it would be a good idea to enhance our building tools a bit with some shiny new features.

First-person camera for building

• When using the Construction Hammer, selecting a prop for placement, or equipping one of the new building tools, the camera can now be toggled to 1st person view for an improved building experience, especially in tight spaces. Now you only have yourself to blame for that misplaced chair.

Full rotation control for props

• Props can now be rotated in all axes instead of just the vertical axis. Please note this new functionality is only available for decorative furniture and similar props. Furniture and interactive props like the Flame Altar, beds, benches, chairs, thrones, toilets, and similar can only be rotated around the vertical axis as previously. Building blocks and building shapes can only be rotated by 90° as before.

New tool: Overgrowth editing

• A new building tool has been added to the crafting progression. When equipped, it allows adding and removing various overgrowth materials (such as ivy) to and from building blocks.
• The new overgrowth tool can be crafted at the farmer NPC with materials from the Revelwood area.

New tool: Building block decay

• A new building tool allows adding or removing ruined block visuals at the edges of building walls.
• The new decay tool can be crafted at the collector NPC with materials from the Nomad Highlands.

Food, drinks and potions placement

• A new type of prop consisting of plates, boards, and coasters allows the decorative placement of a vast selection of food, drink, and potion items. Finally, dinner tables can have dinner on them!
• They can be crafted at the farmer NPC when wood planks are unlocked.

New props and materials

• More than 70 new or previously unavailable props are now accessible for crafting and placing into the player base. This is the perfect time to try out the new placement rotation option! Among others, the new props include:
• A set of elegant leather sofas.
• Various large statues.
• A new set of sturdy doors, including a massive vault door.
• New sets of braziers and lamps.
• Numerous home decor props such as baskets, pots, and buckets.
• New types of room decorations such as room dividers and sigils as wall decor.
• Two new building materials are available: a yellow variation of the stained-glass building blocks and a new stone wall terrain material.
• A quest introduces a new trader for vanity items and decorative props while we celebrate the Lunar New Year. The trader will also stay as a permanent villager for the player base if invited by the Flameborn.

Gameplay Improvements

• Skills can now be individually reset in the skill tree.
• Visual parry indications have been added to enemies that didn’t show the parry opportunity before. But we all know some will probably still mess up the timing.
• A visual parry opportunity indicator has been added to enemy projectiles that can be parried.
• A new farming animal can now be tamed in the Kindlewastes. Get ready for the Dune Armadillo and its offspring to become friends on the farm!
• Several bugs and glitches have been addressed for pathfinding and behavioral issues for villagers and farm animals during their daily routine. We will continue to work on improving pathfinding and behavior in upcoming updates as needed.
• Dodge and blink can now be activated earlier during wand attacks to align the availability of defensive moves with the timings of melee weapons.

Gameworld Updates

Several settlements and points of interest have been reworked and expanded significantly. Among others, the following locations have been updated:

• Moth’s Grove
• Saline Quarry
• Netherton
• Fox Chase
• Rookmore
• Fenrig’s Farm
• Morwenna
• Roostnook
• Cloverbrook Farm
• Mistbury Catacombs
• In the Springlands, several new settlements have been added:
• The enshrouded ruins “Midhollow”
• A new farm location, “Wistful Fields”
• Various new camp locations
• Several topology improvements have been added to the Springlands biome.
• The visuals of the Shroud overgrowth material have been updated.
• Many locations in the Blackmire region have improved combat encounters.
• Many locations in the Albaneve Summits have improved combat encounters.
• A new location called “Event Honor Hall” has been added to the Albaneve Summits. The location is added to the world map when visiting the Ancient Spire of this region. It houses the names of the winners of the Halloween Building Contest 2024.

On top of ongoing improvements for combat, performance, the skill tree, building, lighting, and the world, the developer has tons of new content and features on the way. These include new weather events, Hollow Halls in the mountain and water biomes, new weapon types, improved night mechanics, auto collect, and much more.

Many listed items are already in the current patch, so there may be more updates to the roadmap as the months progress. Keen Games is aiming for Spring 2026 for Version 1.0 to coincide with the game’s launch on consoles, Creative Mode and additional features for user-generated content.

Stay tuned for more details in the coming months. You can also check out our early access review for Enshrouded here.

These features, along with quality-of-life options like improved loot UI, server gameplay settings, and server user rights, will be coming to Enshrouded over the next few updates. More features are planned for later in the year, including instanced dungeons, more biomes, world events, and even water.

While there are no solid release dates for when any of these new features will be coming to Enshrouded, the studio has revealed that the first of these updates is slated for release this month. In the meantime, the game will be available at a discount during the Steam Spring Sale, which kicks off today and will go on until March 21.

Enshrouded is available on PC as an early access title, with plans for a PS5 and Xbox Series X/S release later. For more details, check out our review.

There are a few core strings that tie just about every game in the genre together, ranging from aspects like freeform base-building, an emphasis on wilderness survival skills, dealing with things like hunger or thirst, and in some games, even having to get your hands on bespoke equipment to deal with different kinds of weather. With the exception of that last one, Enshrouded includes just about every feature from the genre you can think of, and adds its own unique flavor to this particular style of game.

"While there’s plenty of story to go around in Enshrouded, however, the quest themselves act more like guidelines for exploration."

A fresh playthrough of Enshrouded will be familiar to just about anyone that has even looked at a game like Minecraft. You’re going to be punching several trees and rocks in order to get some material that you can then use to craft proper tools to cut down trees and mine out rocks. Along the way, you’ll also have to figure out what kind of shelter you’ll be making, be it a simple hut made of four walls, a roof and a door, to something more elaborate, like maybe a castle. Typically the driving force behind survival crafting games tend to revolve around this single loop—get better equipment in order to find better raw materials, and along the way, survive against enemies and the elements. Within this simple loop, however, Enshrouded shows you what it’s really about.

In what is ostensibly a rarity for the genre, Enshrouded actually has a story that you can reasonably follow. Along with the use of environmental storytelling, the main plot of Enshrouded is told through an opening cutscene, notes and diaries you might find around the world, and most importantly of all, quests that you can follow. While there’s plenty of story to go around in Enshrouded, however, the quest themselves act more like guidelines for exploration. This is especially obvious with the earlier quests, which act as more of a tutorial, teaching you how you can unlock more crafting options by rescuing NPCs, and giving you hints for where you can go to get your hands on some early crafting materials.

When it comes to its base-building aspects, Enshrouded is a surprisingly stingy game. While base-building materials can be fairly basic and plentiful—especially if you’re using stone or wood—the cost for each individual part of your structure can get rather exorbitant. This means that, even if you devote enough wood and stone to create thousands of building blocks, the cost of a simple wall or even just flooring can easily eat up all of your wood and stone reserves. This is a bit of a shame, since the building mechanics themselves are quite intuitive, and base-building is an important part of the game.

"Enshrouded is a surprisingly stingy game."

Aside from the general survival and crafting trappings, the core feature of Enshrouded is its world, setting, and action-oriented gameplay. The world of Enshrouded is an interesting one—named Embervale, it is a fantasy setting that has come under siege by a mysterious magical force known only as the Shroud. This Shroud essentially acts as a signifier for which zones in the world are going to be more combat oriented, dangerous and inhospitable. Aside from the Shroud itself, there isn’t anything particularly unique about the setting of Enshrouded, and the game tends to lean pretty hard on its high-fantasy setting.

Throughout your time with Enshrouded, you’re going to be encouraged to set out into the wilds in the hunt for rare materials, NPCs to rescue, and bosses to fight. More often than not, this will mean going either into, or through a Shrouded area. This means that sooner rather than later, you’re going to find yourself going toe-to-toe against stronger and more powerful enemies. The combat system in Enshrouded isn’t particularly deep, with the most basic options being attacking or blocking. A player’s moveset does, however, get expanded quite a bit over time thanks to different skills that can be unlocked. An example of one such skill is the ability to essentially one-shot a standard enemy after having stunned them with a flurry of attacks or parrying at the right time.

Moving out of the realm of melee combat does expand combat options by quite a bit; there’s an entire magic system that revolves around what kind of wands and staves you’re able to find or craft, and there’s also the classic bow and arrow if you’re inclined to go for more of a ranger play style. Ultimately, however, the combat in Enshrouded never really gets too fancy, and more often than not, you’re going to be spamming your light attack against enemies, regardless of how deep you get into the game. Enemies also tend to have different weaknesses, both physical (slashing or blunt), and magical (elemental and status effects), and while they can be fun to exploit, outside of some of the game’s tougher enemies, they never really feel necessary.

"The combat in Enshrouded never really gets too fancy"

It is worth noting, however, that the survival mechanics in Enshrouded do tie in quite nicely with the game’s combat. Rather than penalizing you for traveling and hunting on an empty stomach, the game instead provides buffs for eating right. This incentivizes finding and cooking the right kind of food. There are a lot of different types of food in Enshrouded, and experimentation is very much encouraged in this regard.

When it comes to survival crafting games, Enshrouded doesn’t really feel like it needs the Early Access label. While the game could certainly use some extra polish, especially when it comes to its combat and how much building things can end up costing. Otherwise, however, Enshrouded feels like it might be fairly close to completion. This ties in quite well with the studio’s own goal of leaving Early Access after around a year, indicating that the game only lacks content that you would find through post-game updates anyway, including planned new biomes and enemies.

As far as survival crafting games where you start off by punching trees go, Enshrouded is far from the most original one. Its emphasis on purely cooperative gameplay and combat, however, might put it in a closer league with games like Valheim, especially since it already has a fair bit of content, and epic boss fights that players can work towards finding and fighting. While its world feels like a fairly standard high-fantasy setting, the many stories Enshrouded tells through the use of its environments and different lore-related notes you can pick up do a lot to fill in the blanks of what might have been one of the more interesting fantasy worlds out there.

This game was reviewed on PC.

Enshrouded’s early access version offers a “complete experience” in the core gameplay, as per the developer. Players will build a base, save different NPCs, craft better equipment, and then venture to Elixir Wells to destroy Shroud Roots.

As for the future, Keen Games is looking to add more features based on community feedback while expanding the world, adding new biomes, enemies, location types, resources, recipes and higher tiers of equipment and weapons. Additional skills will also open up, and there are plans for new building materials, furniture and decorations.

The current goal is to leave early access within a year, though, as always, it will depend on player feedback. “We firmly believe that by then, we can offer a game worthy of your time and money and will bring you fun for years to come.” Stay tuned for more details on Enshrouded in the coming months.

While Xbox Live’s Games with Gold is having arguably its best month yet come January 2019, offering Celeste, a legitimate game of the year contender for 2018, as one of the free months on offer, Sony are offering for PS Plus… not much that really matches up, to be honest.

The company has taken the wraps off of the January 2019 lineup for PS Plus, and it’s… okay, not too special. PS4 owners get Steep and Portal Knights, neither of which is too remarkably good or bad. PS3 owners get a better deal, with Amplitude (the rhythm game by Harmonix) and Zone of the Enders HD Collection (a remaster of the two mech action games by Hideo Kojima for PS2), while Vita owners get Fallen Legion: Flames of Rebellion, and Super Mutant Alien Assault. I get the feeling they’ve run out of Vita games at this point.

With PS3 and PS Vita PS Plus support coming to an end later in 2019, hopefully Sony can make the final few months for those systems notable. Maybe give away Persona 4 Golden or something. You can check out a video highlighting this month’s lineup for yourself below.

Most immediately, unlike Minecraft, there is some narrative structure to Portal Knights. A cataclysmic event shattered the world into many floating pieces, that are now connected through portals. You are a portal knight who travels through those portals in…well they refrain from giving you a specific quest for doing this, likely to encourage the kind of freeform approach Minecraft channels so effortlessly.

"There is the mining, crafting and what have you, but that’s also there in service of the light RPG elements at play."

As a blocky looking sandbox with building elements, the comparisons are impossible to avoid. However, Portal Knights does more than a few things of its own that both help and hinder the two distinct parts of its design. There is the mining, crafting and what have you, but that’s also there in service of the light RPG elements at play.

Before you begin, you’ll pick from three classes that dictate your style of combat and proficiencies, and design a custom avatar to represent you. You’re quickly dropped into your first world to learn all the usual basics of the crafting games in a freeform tutorial that shows the ropes of creating the basics and how to harvest key materials before trusting you to figure out further recipes on your own.

There are several different varieties of biome in the game that each randomly generate a different environment, giving a lot of visual variety and new things to find on each portal jump. Certain resources can only be found or grown in specific habitats, and it’s worth a cursory look around each floating island for a while before moving on to see every natural resource it has to offer.

"The mobs might if anything, not be quite aggressive enough to match your combat ability."

Within the handful of environments that randomly generate each island, different mobs ranging from blobs of slime to spooky scary skeletons spawn in to ruin your day. The lock on combat system Portal Knights employs to allow you to take them on feels along the lines of 3D Zelda combat, if a little more simplified. The simple, yet satisfying combat loop of maintaining a good range then rolling out of the way is good for what it is, and building experience slowly adds new abilities and perks on top of that.

The mobs might if anything, not be quite aggressive enough to match your combat ability. You’ve got to get in fairly close or directly attack enemies to aggro them, and then they only ever go after you. Rarely did the situation ever call for an immediate potion and even if I did die all that it cost me was some of the money the monsters drop constantly.

The islands are naturally far smaller than any Minecraft world, and seem to be less dependant on specific rules as to where resources are found. This is one of several ways in which Portal Knights unfortunately trips over itself and contradicts its own mechanics. The local wildlife of each biome is totally uninterested in your stuff, just you.

"Considering that with the lack of punishment for death and the nomadic nature of the game, Portal Knights never really fosters that ownership found in purer building games."

Considering that with the lack of punishment for death and the nomadic nature of the game, Portal Knights never really fosters that ownership found in purer building games. It’s far more productive to strip the lands of what you need, pack up any and all crafting tables and move forward. There are occasionally NPCs on the islands to ask fetch quests of you and boost your experience, which will be needed for the boss islands you’ll come across later which actually put some life in the combat, but outside of those the gameplay loop never changes and you’re never really incentivized to put down roots.

You have the ability to set a “home island” and might even return occasionally to previous levels for specific drops or resources, but there is rarely any surprise in doing so. If you do choose to put down roots, the game helps automatically apply pleasing texture to repeated blocks to take some of the effort out of making your castle look nice. The reasons for building any kind of grand structure at all however, as we’ve established, need to be more self-satisfying than normal. The enemy design literally doesn’t demand a home like other genre staples.

The art style has loads of colour and personality, giving even similar environments a unique identity through shading alone. It is basic, sure, but the deliberate style has its charm. The actual character models might be a little too basic, the chibi designs landing somewhere between the generic MySims and maliciously twee World of Final Fantasy, but it luckily doesn’t take too much away. The game controls smooth enough even on a controller, but just like king Minecraft, it comes across as more clunky and natural than a mouse.

"Portal Knights is a solid effort at taking a super freeform genre and always giving the player something concrete to do, but that also places it at odds with itself in some strange ways."

Portal Knights is a solid effort at taking a super freeform genre and always giving the player something concrete to do, but that also places it at odds with itself in some strange ways. Some more aggressive enemies and the need to defend your stuff from them to create that ownership the genre excels at would have gone a long way to fixing it, but as a casual, relaxing little RPG, Portal Knights offers a good time.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 4.

505 Games, the folks behind the Payday games, will be bringing us a brand new IP, which really is not quite like any of the other stuff they have put out. Their new game is called Portal Knights, and its a new sandbox RPG, featuring a single player campaign and full co-operative multiplayer. It also looks a lot like Minecraft and Terraria.

Portal Knights will have three classes- Warrior, Mage, and Ranger, which really won’t be winning the developers any prizes for their creativity, but they do promise that each class will have a full range of customization options available for appearance, abilities, and gear. In addition, the game’s environments will be, as seems to be the rage these days, procedurally generated.

Portal Knights looks pretty interesting- you can check out the announcement trailer, and some screenshots, below. The game is due out on PC via Steam Early Access of February 25. Let us know what you think of the game in the comments section below.

Game Overview:

Sacred 3 features the classic hack and slash game and supports up to 4 players for co-operative online gameplay. Each character in the game have their own sent of skills and abilities which can be upgraded and customized. Online component includes mission stats and online leaderboards.

Sacred 3  is now available for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. The game is developed by Keen Games and published by DeepSilver.

Check out the video walkthrough of Sacred 3 below and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section below.

For video game guides, tips and wikis, check out our gaming portal here.

Deep Silver’s Sacred 3 will be releasing on August 5th in North America but Europe will have already gotten its hands on the game by now. Developed by Keen Games, a launch trailer has been revealed which gives you a hint of what to expect in the game. Hint: Much hacking and much slashing is to be had.

Much in the vein of Diablo, Sacred 3 is an action RPG which will allow up to four players to co-operate together both online and offline. You’ll see some locations from the previous games like Castle Braverock but there is a new visual style, new classes and an overall different tone as you fight together with your friends to succeed but reap the rewards all by your lonesome. Or something like that.

Sacred 3 will be out on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Will you be playing the game when it’s available? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.