Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition

I think this is worth playing, but just barely. It's charming, but almost not enough. It still looks good graphically. The story is okay, but the execution and lack of in-game direciton can be frustrating. I despise using guides, but I did for this game a few times simply for time's sake. When looking up guides, I discovered that it was not uncommon to completely miss certain parts of the game. Sometimes this requires players to backtrack, as they may be stuck wondering "I know I'm not the right level for this area, but where do I go?" I got my money's worth though. Plenty of hours sunk into this. Looking forward to see how DOS II expands on this experience.

Warm recommendation for this game. Really good and allow to think not just to point and click. You need to analyse what and how to do.

Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition is a modern CRPG with beautiful graphics, colorful environments, an excellent combat system and a humorous and lighthearted mood. The story is not epic, but is very interesting. The English voice acting is, in general, amazing. The soundtrack is excellent. The environments are interactive and littered with details. Puzzles tend to be challenging and fun, although the lack of clues in some instances can be frustrating. The game progression is not linear. Your decisions and dialogue options will alter how you complete quests and affect certain character stats. Combat is turn-based and centers around two types of damage types: Physical and Elemental (magic). Physical damage is divided into 3 categories: Crushing, Slashing and Piercing. Elemental damage is divided into Fire, Water, Air, Earth and Tenebrium. Certain Earth based abilities can cause Poison damage. Attacks can inflict buffs and debuffs. Keeping track of your character’s status can be complicated and this game could benefit from a status bar. I also found targeting imprecise and fidgety, which, at times, caused me to move instead of attacking. One of most distinct features of this game is the use of environmental elements in and out of combat. For example, throwing a poison cloud grenade not only poisons all allies and foes caught in the area of effect but also creates a persistent cloud that can be ignited with, for example, to create an explosion. There is a crafting system, that can be used to create (or enhance) armor, weapons, potions and other items, but I didn’t find it very appealing. The game never provided a coherent explanation on the basics of creating and enhancing items. Also, crafting in lots can also be tedious. Overall, this game provided me with around 90 hours of fun entertainment and I would recommend it to anyone, but specially to those that are new to CRPGs.

So I've put over 40 hours into this game, and from what I can tell, I still have another 20 hours or so of story content to go. I'd really like to play this game through to completion, but with so many other games to play, and with this taking up so much time I decided to put it on hold for a while. Here's what I can say about the game though. It offers a fair amount of player choice in how you can approach various situations and resolve quests. The thing about this game that the developers always seem to be trying to highlight through gameplay is the elemental magic system and how it interacts with the environment. Given various elemental conditions you can freeze, burn, shock and poision enemies and also buff and debuff NPCs. It's a great, really innovative way to approach combat, and the level of player interaction with the environment is really something to see. But I started to feel at times like the developers were a little too proud of themselves with this, as there's certain combat scenarios where you essentially have to use the environment in a certain way in order to resolve the combat, and I found that a little annoying. Also, although I hear the sequel is much better, the storyline in this game fell a little flat for me. There's a lot of corny, wacky humor for one thing, which I'm sure some people will really enjoy, but I personally didn't care for, and then the main plot and setting seem very much like just by the numbers low fantasy tropes, and the story is mostly explained to you rather than you discovering it as you go or really interacting and affecting it. Overall, I think this is a great game and definitely one worth checking out if you're a fan of top-down cRPGs, but after a while, I was getting so tired of battle after battle, and it was taking up so much of my time, that I decided that the story wasn't really worth pursuing all the way to end, although I thoroughly enjoyed the time I did spend playing the game.

I don't give it 5 stars as it is a little slow, and it doesn't grab me well enough to really get into it, but it is decent. I will go back to it in a bit and pick up where I left off. Maybe I am not far enough into it yet? I am in the town near the beginning. I seem to be spending an awful lot of time looking in baskets and whatnot which may account for the slow pacing. I saw reports of a launcher with DRM. My version doesn't have that. Maybe that is a Windows thing? I am running it on Linux.