Citadel: Forged with Fire - Online sandbox alluded to

Taming dragons, building huge castles, powerful spells working. With these prospects, the online role-playing game wants to lure us to its servers. We felt the title on the tooth for 20 hours.

Swinging wands and burning magical fireworks - you can do that in any classic fantasy-inspired online role-playing game. But what if Magician is the only playable class and you can let off steam in a 36 square kilometer sandbox?

Then it's very likely Citadel: Forged with Fire, which has now been released after two years of Early Access. In Citadel we go from a backup witch to a legendary master wizard.

Alone or in a group, we collect resources, kill enemies and assemble not only equipment, but also impressive accommodations. Anyone who thinks of Ark: Survival Evold or Conan Exiles is right - at least almost.

Although the developers have incorporated a lot of feedback over the two-year early access period, Citadel: Forged with Fire presents itself as surprisingly ill-conceived. At the beginning, we create a character that looks chic, but offers few personalization options. After a handful of tutorial quests in the visually appealing world of Ignus, we are thrown into the action without a thread.

The thread does not appear anywhere in the rest of the game. There is no story, the few quests are daily repeatable, blunt collection tasks without substance. I'm used to even the grind-heavy Free2Play online role-playing game. Especially because there are plenty of foliage, stones and nicely animated water to look at in Citadel, but the walk through the visually appealing world feels more like a sterile visit to the museum.

Until it gets at least a bit more exciting and we are allowed into the air with the mentioned dragons, a lot of the nicely animated water flows down the proverbial river.

Construction magic

The time to our own flying lizard we literally beat dead. Namely, by mining resources such as stone, wood or runic crystals, making objects, weapons and structures, and knocking down the same enemies. For all its visual magic, Ignus is a relatively dead world with little variety in the biotopes. Ignus thrives on player interaction - which is damn difficult to impossible with a maximum of 50 players per server.