Well. Being that PoEII is the second game I played and write feedback for, that alone says that I am (was, at least) quite impressed by this game
Good stuff:
- graphics are outright the best I've seen in isometric RPGs. I love BG style, hate 3D with all my heart and the moment I saw the first village in PoEII I was "wow-ed". Brilliant. Feels alive, looks great, made me fell in love with this game outright.
- character creation. Not only classes, but multis. And more - kits! Great diversity, great options.
- NPCs. Fully voiced (very important to me), interesting, diverse.
- overall feel of the game
- DLC content is nice and difficulty-wise far better than core game
- weapons. Nothing is hugely OP, and yet nothing is useless.
Not so good:
- combat. While it's not bad per se in early levels, later gets a bit odd.
To explain better:
I started to play this game at "normal" difficulty. Party pretty standard - Eder, Xoti, that mage dude, druid guy and PC Crusader (I always play tanks in RPGs...). My PC gets unkillable at lvl 5-6...
I start over, increase difficulty. Same thing, in some battles my whole party dies, yet Crusader lives on. It takes ages for him to kill anything, but he can't die.
I start over again on PotD. Ok, I can die even with maxed out Deflection build. Great.!
I finally create a custom party (not overly powergamed/min-maxed, just 2 scouts for ranged DPS, PC Crusader, some chanter guy and a 2handed paladin; who ended up being dead most of the time).
The game on PotD becomes a cakewalk. Ended the game w/o using a single healing potion. Food buffs? Only for spider boss...
So...my question to creators - can this game be made a bit "harder" w/o artificial nonsense such as upscaling (what's the point in leveling then). It's a great game, it's just that the difficulty doesn't really cut it.
- ship combat. Dear God.... what I do to avoid this nonsense is avoid it up to level 10-11, then start ramming into enemy ships and leave the AI do do it's job in hand-to-hand combat. Awful implementation, completely unneccecary. Sid Meier's Pirates! was better than this.
- area load times. Now, I uderstand you need SSD disk for it to be faster, but still.......T-down. I ended up avoiding quests with much in-out of building transitions since load times are unbearable.
All that said, PoEII is a *fantastic* game. It does need some ironing thou.