elements awoken mod review!
hey gamers! i finally finished my run of the elements awoken mod. i wanted to give an overview of it for anyone interested (this is a bit of a long post). i’m not a huge critic, but i do have a few small things i want to mention that i didn’t like as much.
weapons, armor, and classes
all classes of warrior, ranger, mage, and summoner are supported throughout the entire mod. there are a variety of weapons at every stage that can be used alongside vanilla weapons/any other modded weapons. every character is spawned with a mystic gemstone in their inventory, which can be crafted into a weapon for any of these four classes. this weapon can be upgraded at three other points in the game. there is also a developed throwing class.
armor for specific classes expands a lot once you get into hardmode. there are a lot of donator sets, one of which i used the last three bosses. there were longer breaks between modded armor upgrades, but i found that it was worth the wait, as the modded armor worked better for me than vanilla armor.
i played as a ranger, and my favorite weapons were the thundering recurve, desolation line, and the chaotron impaler! the planetary yoyos were a lot of fun, too.
boss prompts are a sort of debuff that affects your character before you fight several of the bosses added by the mod. they range from spawning a certain type of scorpion, to freezing you in place, to giving you hallucinations (this one writes in chat as well...the amount of false alarm boss spawn messages it gives stressed me out and actually made me nervous for the fight. it’s one of my favorite prompts). they definitely encouraged me to get those fights done.
elements awoken adds 13 bosses; two pre-hardmode, five hardmode, and six post-moon lord. i found them all to be very exciting and well made! a lot of the bosses took me a few tries to get to know the AI, and the final two caused me a lot of pain. i never did even out my kill/death ratio with azana. defeating the bosses was always rewarding. some caused new enemies to spawn, some gave access to new ores, several had me shaking after a hard earned win, and not to be over dramatic but beating the final boss left me lightheaded.
there are two events added in this mod, both of them post-moon lord: the dawn of the void and the radiant rain. i loved both of these, they were engaging and had a ton of unique enemies; i actually decided to give the mod a try after hearing the dawn of void’s theme (all the music in this mod is fantastic, by the way). they both had their own mini boss, the shade wyrm and the radiant master. you can craft some really fun weapons and accessories from materials dropped during the events.
this is really just nitpicking, but here’s a list of some things i had issues with:
-regaroth’s boss prompt activates pretty early. this isn’t even a problematic one, it just makes it rain more often. it starts after beating your first mech boss, but because there are three more bosses between your first mech and regaroth, it would make more sense if it started after all three mech bosses had been defeated.
-the temple keepers and the guardian felt a little easy for the first post-moon lord bosses. maybe it was because i was playing on normal mode, but i took out both of them pretty fast.
-the mini bosses were also easy to take out compared to the events they spawn in. it took me longer to kill an average enemy during the dawn of the void than it took me to kill shade wyrm.
-speaking of events, it would be really nice to be able to summon the radiant rain without needing materials from the event to craft a summon item. sometimes it takes a really long time for rain to start again, and it isn’t guaranteed that the event will occur.
-the instructions on azana’s infection heart could be clearer. i’m still not exactly sure how it works.
-summoner gets a really cool final armor set, it would be nice to see something like this for the other four classes.
-i didn’t read enough into the differences between the empty vessel and the chaosporadic heart to know how to use them so here’s what you do!!: you can use each of them ten times to increase your max life to 700! this is more of my fault, but it would’ve been nice to mention it in the tooltip.
-the wiki has different information than what’s in the game, but of course this is no fault of the developers!
i loved elements awoken! it’s the first full content mod i’ve played, and i spent about 50 hours completing it. i was always looking forward to the next weapon upgrade, the next accessory, the next boss fight. this is a really nice mod for someone looking to play an extensive content mod, besides calamity or thorium. if the hell and high water update gets finished at some point, i will definitely revisit this mod.