Loose Strikes and Stiff Ground Movement
The controls feel detached the second your boots touch dirt. Key presses do not register with the crisp snap you expect from an action brawler, and basic attacks drag your model through sluggish swings that leave you stuck in place during recovery animations. When you press a dodge, the evade maneuver rarely cancels an active strike cleanly, so you eat stray hits that you clearly saw coming. That lack of immediate response makes standard ground brawling feel like a chore before you even unlock your wings.
NC built the game on Unreal Engine 5, and the environmental scale is massive, but the actual hit detection fails to match the visual fidelity. Striking a mob often produces delayed audio cues and faint flinch reactions, turning what should be meaty melee skirmishes into floaty stat checks. English interface options and English voice tracks are present right out of the box, which helps during story cues, yet the voice work cannot save the stiff cadence of running, jumping, and trying to land a clean blow on uneven terrain.
Aerial Combat Stripped Down by Macros
Flight is supposed to be the main selling point here. You ascend into open air to clash with targets across three dimensions, but dogfighting strips away any real need for micro spacing or dodge timing. The lock-on camera snaps wildly when enemies dip beneath your wings, and you spend half your time fighting the targeting reticle instead of managing distance. Elevation changes feel slippery rather than sharp.
Instead of reading opponent windups and countering strikes mid-flight, optimal play turns into cycling static skill chains. Many players resort to simple automated macros to loop their skill rotations because actual active timing barely affects your output. Flying around should demand rapid adjustments and spatial awareness. Here, it ends up playing like an old tab-target hotbar game slapped onto a free-floating axis.
Dungeon Clutter and Open-World Bots
Group content has quantity on paper. NC packed in over 200 dungeons across solo runs, five-player party crawls, and ten-player group encounters. Running through instanced bosses highlights how weak the telegraph system feels under pressure, especially when particle effects flood the floor. Telegraphed red circles on the ground do not always match the real strike zones of larger bosses, leading to cheap knockdowns while you appear safely out of range.
Out in the open world, performance dips noticeably whenever dozens of characters crowd around gathering spots. Bot trains swarm resource nodes, leaving regular players starved for materials needed to enter dungeons or brew consumables. Account restriction notices keep going out on Steam, but the botting and crowding still drag frame rates down in populated hubs, turning faction skirmishes in contested zones into stuttering brawls.
Harsh Progression and Broken Markets
The free-to-play model takes its toll once you reach the midgame grind. Crafting weapons demands huge piles of materials and coin, yet failure rates linger even after maxing out trades like blacksmithing, wiping out days of gathered supplies in a single roll. If your high-tier craft fails, your effort simply vanishes. That punitive loop pushes players toward the marketplace, where scalpers buy out scarce goods and drive up prices without adequate system guardrails.
AION 2 holds the number three spot on the US Steam top seller chart, but user reviews hover around a mixed 51 percent for clear reasons. Between expensive pass products in the store and a market flooded with overpriced mats, progression turns into an endurance test. The aerial concept had real potential for intense three-dimensional action, but clumsy combat execution and brutal economic grinds hold it down.
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The sluggish input recovery and sloppy hitboxes make me want to put the controller down immediately. Still, that generous login reward mail at least gives you something to start with. Guess I will file this under wait for major combat patches instead of jumping into the launch mess. Might check back later once they actually fix the melee feel.
tbh this looks like a waste of time lol crafting sounds broken aerial combat is just macros why bother
The crafting failure rates are insane, one bad roll literally deletes days of mined ore and you get nothing back. Then aerial dogfights just turn into people running macros while AFK. Playing on Steam with a controller feels super sluggish and the melee hitboxes ghost constantly.
The sluggish input recovery and sloppy hitboxes make me want to put the controller down immediately. Still, that generous login reward mail at least gives you something to start with. Guess I will file this under wait for major combat patches instead of jumping into the launch mess. Might check back later once they actually fix the melee feel.