Posted on: October 9, 2011
SolanQ
Bestätigter BesitzerSpiele: 458 Rezensionen: 1
Makes a poor first impression, but not a bad game
Basically I can sum up my feelings about this game in one sentence: "If the developers had spent as much time and money on the rest of the game as they did on the soundtrack and game mechanics, this game could have been great instead of merely OK". That doesn't mean it's a bad game, but it does leave a lot to be desired in some specific areas and although the game has been polished (from what I understand it was a mess at launch) there are still some residual bugs and annoyances. The main bugs I encountered included occasionally getting stuck in/on objects, usually while mounted. The lategame cutscenes all didn't play for me, even though the one at the start of the game did. Also when I used one of the ingame trainers to reset my skillpoints, the skillpoints were returned to me without the previously spent points being wiped, effectively creating a major exploit in the game. The other very irritating issue is that the game experiences a lot of short freezes and stutters that are the direct result of the game accessing the harddrive to load objects, textures and npc's at the last minute. On lower end systems with low RAM that's to be expected, but on a high end system it should be scaling up the RAM useage to pre-load more stuff into the memory, but instead of doing that it was constantly sitting at <1gb memory useage. The rest of the performance was as expected, though I noted that this game, like many others, forgot to include an option to enable Vsync ingame, so I had to force it on through my graphics drivers. I didn't experience any crashes or permanent freezes with the game, not even after alt-tabbing in and out a few times. Bugs and performance issues aside, the game underneath is quite playable. I though that most of the game mechanics were well thought-out. The ability to combine identical weapons and armor pieces into a single more powerful version is something I haven't seen before in other games and it was very useful, especially early on in the game when you aren't able to carry as much junk yet. The upgrade stones add a serious damage bonus to your weaponry, but are plentiful enough and easy enough to create through alchemy that you don't have to be afraid of wasting them (which IMHO is how it should be). The alchemy system is very neat, though it may take a bit of trial error to find out how to get the most out of it (that is if you haven't looked it up first), but I actually like that in a game, so this was a big plus to me. Another thing that impressed me was the sheer number of different weapon types and skins that you can find throughout the game, and some of them are very neat. The world itself is also reasonably diverse, at least once you get down south a bit and there tons of sidequests and random dungeons hidden all over the place. Unfortunately the enemy types and npc's aren't quite as diverse - you end up spending a lot of time fighting the same enemies and you'll see more than a few duplicate npc's running around, often even within the same town. The soundtrack accompanying the game is also surprisingly good, it's actually so good in places that I'm wondering if they didn't spend 99% of their budget on the music and that's why the rest of the game's 'presentation' is so poor. The story is pretty mediocre and uninspiring, the cutscenes were made using the ingame engine and don't really do much to flatter it, especially with the clunky animations. The dialogue is downright cringeworthy at times, with an overabundance of archaic terms and a writing style that just doesn't fit the voice-actors who are speaking the lines. The voice-acting itself also isn't very good - it's so bad at times it's almost funny, making you feel like you're watching a parody of the fantasy genre. And in some cases I even noticed the recording quality wasn't very high either, with some character's voices sounding distinctly muffled or hollow and very out of sync with other voice-samples. Summary: The game doesn't give players a very good first impression, with its poor voice-acting, uninspiring storyline and random assortment of lingering bugs and other niggles. However underneath that hides a very playable game, which can be really enjoyable if you're a big fan of the open-world / hack-and-slash RPG genre. I give it 3/5 stars because it's worth playing if you're a fan, but it has too many flaws to give it any more than that.
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