The Bloodline is a solo-developed sandbox RPG that lets player craft their own story in the massive world of Eudros.

The game takes a hands-off approach, letting players choose for themselves what they want to do and how they’ll do it. There are terrifying undead creatures to defeat, delicious meals to cook, different professions to level up, and many quests to complete in this open world adventure.

So, how early is this Early Access? Are the game’s activities fun? Is there really that much freedom? Find out the answer to these questions and more in our preview for The Bloodline.

The Bloodline places a big emphasis on freedom of choice, letting players set their own goals in the massive open world. In reality, this translates more into a lack of guidance as players are thrown into the game with few goals to accomplish.

The game’s objectives mostly consist of fetch quests and goals that are meant to tutorialize the player on some of its systems, like cooking, fishing and mining. There are random events that occur once you explore the overworld, but they are either fights or opportunities to mine for resources.

The freedom that The Bloodline promises is more of an unending monotony, as players will find themselves foraging for mushrooms or chopping down trees without any real goals in mind. The game fails to provide a carrot at the end of the stick, doing a really poor job at showing the player what there is to look forward to.

When it comes to its combat, there are 25 different categories of skills players can choose from, ranging from weapon attacks to different schools of magic like pyromancy and druidism. The amount of skills that the player can acquire is honestly staggering, although there are downsides that come with such a wide selection.

A lot of skills have incredibly niche usage, while others are simply broken and just don’t work like they are supposed to. The initial excitement that comes with seeing just how many skills there are in each school quickly turns into disappointment once you realize that most of them are either too cumbersome to use or are made redundant by other skills.

Even the skills that sound interesting on paper in reality are just reskins or upgrades of already existing abilities. The necromancy school for example has many different flavors of the same purple projectile, just shot in different quantities or shapes.

Combat is reasonably enjoyable, featuring a melee system similar to the one found in the Vermintide series, but the lackluster enemy AI tends to ruin the experience. Enemies often break the environment collision and fly away or simply go unresponsive, just standing there while you attack them, which immediately takes you out of the experience.

The skills that do work are very fun to use, as the game places very few restrictions in the player’s path. Necromancers for example get to summon as many skeletons as their mana pool allows for, which is a step in the right direction.

The Bloodline is often compared to Morrowind and Oblivion, and while it doesn’t necessarily match those games on story quality or content, it does have a good degree of freedom. There are many skills to level up, including things like running and jumping, and with enough time you can become proficient on everything.

Despite its low-poly art style, The Bloodline is a somewhat demanding game, although the jury’s still out on whether that’s because of its scale or poor optimization. The Steam system requirements initially seemed overzealous, to the point where I thought they were a joke before launching the game and watching it stress my computer.

Performance has definitely gotten better with time, with the game now holding a stable frame rate even on epic settings for 90% of my playthrough, although it does tend to stutter when there’s too much action going on.

There are also a few annoying bugs present, like the fact that you constantly get stuck on the overworld geometry while traveling, to the point where the developer lets you teleport freely around the map. Things like that definitely don’t help with the game’s presentation, as it feels like you are playing more of a dev build than an Early Access title.

The Bloodline is a decent incremental game if you want to play an MMORPG without the multiplayer aspect, but its scope feels unreal to tackle as a solo developer. Too much freedom can become a restriction in a way, as the player aimlessly wanders around hoping to bump into content, which rarely happens.

Things like the professions are incredibly boring to level up at the moment, and the combat is hurt by terrible enemy AI and a skill system that definitely needs to be reworked at some point, so it becomes quite difficult to recommend the game.

The Bloodline sets out to do a lot of things, and unfortunately only half-accomplishes most of them, making it the type of Early Access release that I don’t feel comfortable with telling readers to try out just yet. Despite waiting a long time to do this preview, I still find myself wanting to come back to the game later rather than playing it now.

The Bloodline is available on Microsoft Windows (through Steam’s Early Access).