My Brief Review

[Guest Ontarah]

Visuals: 10/10  This is a beautiful game.  Visuals aren't even something I was looking for in an isometric RPG like this, but they just nailed it.  Every frame looks sculpted. 

 

World-building/lore: 9.5/10  I think Obsidian did a bang-up job creating a very interesting universe with believable and likable races, history, and geography.  There were a few points of silliness.  Fampyrs?  Seriously?   Or, xaurips are clearly kobolds. Just call it what it is. 

 

Characters: 8.5/10  I didn't think there were enough companions though the expansion pack helped with this a lot.  I also felt some of the companions story-lines were very strong compared to others because they progressed in layers and had major tie-in to the main plot (Durance, Eder, Aloth).  Some were much weaker because they felt more like flipping a switch and problem solved (Devil of Caroc, Pallegina, Kana) and thus no more story reason to keep this character with me anymore.

 

Story/Roleplaying: 8.0/10  Solid enough story that wasn't amazing.  I thought the game gave me a lot of opportunity to shape my character's motives and personality which was nice.  However, the choices didn't seem to matter that much.  Only rarely did people seem to react to me that differently based on my choices.

 

Combat: 6.5/10  This was the game's greatest weak point to me.  It has major balance issues with some fights being comically, ludicrously overpowered (Alpine Dragon, Raedric) and others being way too simple or easy (Adra Dragon, final boss) with no apparent rhyme or reason as to why this is the case.  I also completely hated that you couldn't buff before fights.  I understand what they were going for here - trying to reduce buff spamming, but I think this problem was already solved by putting limitations on how much you can rest.  I'm not going to abuse buffs when I will run out of spells if I overuse them.  I'm going to save them for when I really need them. Frequently this would get me stuck in a stupid loop of enemies getting off special attacks that have pretty much 0 casting time (domination, petrify, horror, whatever) before I could cast the appropriate spell to counter.  Durance tries to cast Prayer against treachery.  Fampyrs dominate half of party before he's done.  Reload.  Repeat. Reload. Repeat.  To me it removes any desire to scout ahead.  What's the point of knowing there is a dragon in the next room if I can do 0 to prepare for it?  This basically removed all desire for me to really use spells.  I just turned everybody into standard damage dealers and used intermittent CC and healing.  I did not rely on spells for strategy at all and I did a lot in the Infinity Engine games.  I did think the CC was great, however.  It never stopped being useful even against high level enemies, which was always a nuisance in the Infinity Engine games when fighting dragons or golems or the like.  It's very gratifying to be able to petrify a dragon if I want to.  I also thought the over-dependence on accuracy severely limited what kinds of builds you could have.  Would have liked for chance to hit to be dictated by a greater variety of class based factors so various builds are more versatile.    

 

Overall: 8.5-9/10.  It just needs some fine tuning but overall I enjoyed it more than I got annoyed by it.