Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition

Honestly I wasted my money on this over-hyped game. I like my RPGs, I like my text based cRPGs like Planescape, Pillars of Eternity, ones that enrich the story. But this one felt really hollow. The damage system and modifiers (like you soak someone and lightning does more damage, if you hit them with fire they get "warm" instead of igniting for example.) is brilliant, no question about it. However, the game itself and story specifically is almost too sandbox. I would appreciate if it held your hand for a bit then broke into sandbox but I spent the first chapter thinking "so what am i supposed to be doing exactly..?" logically- clearing the areas around the town, except the enemies are staggeringly difficult early on and can be too challenging depending on what kind of characters you chose. The character design (pick your own class, develop anyway you want) is a great idea, two main characters is cool too. The companions are mediocre at best that join your party. I didn't find them interesting at all. The story is fed to us through dialogs, kind of like planescape or pillars, I love both those games, but this one is dull and not very engaging. Not nearly enough cutscenes either, those can really improve the feel of a game. Without them, the game felt bland and unrewarding. I guess what I'm getting at is they have amazing ideas and as far as sandbox goes you can fill your boots with a beach-worth, but it was just so hard to enjoy and at the premium price (this game cost like $50 even after a year of release, it was ridiculous) I feel like I got ripped off entirely. It felt like a beta, which based on Larian's track record is no surprise as Kingdom's of Amalur: Reckoning felt like an unfinished MMO, a really fun one, but an incomplete game, same with this one. I wish I had a much better answer but my opinion is: it's boring. I'm used to RPGs getting me hooked, but for the first time I actually can't appreciate this one.

Mediocre game riddled with incredibly irritating details, pseudo-RNG that half the time doesn't work properly (i.e. you can see the the game cheat), ridiculous companion interaction and mini games, convoluted UI, occasionally buggy combat and a number of other minor issues. The game has decent voice acting, desperately average story and rather dated visuals that make it look like an upgraded version of Warcraft 3 - it will probably run smoothly on any machine, including older ones. The focus on interaction between items or environment states, allowing you to combine different effects is nice, but gradually becomes rather tedious and tiring (considering the simple end result you usually want, like wiping that group of pesky undead), with the game pushing you strongly to play around this mechanic and punishing you if you try to play it dfiferently. Overall, with a perfect execution and polish it would be a 6-7/10 max game for me; but the host of annoying little details popping up every 5-10 minutes make it a consistently frustrating experience which just isn't worth the effort.

Boy, did this get annoying fast. Character building? There's a lot you can do wrong, and this will cause you problems later on. No "play however you want" here. Non-linear gameplay? Nope. Character/creature level is very much the dominating stat. You can't stray much from the intended path. Don't bother buying equipment - it'll become obsolete fast. The Story? Horribly bland. Just another bunch of uninspired DnD-style clichés haphazardly strung together. Yet another big, baaaad dragon, yet more gods walking around giving unnecessarily cryptic clues, yet another bunch of dumb stones to collect because they're like totalleh magic. Blech. Controls? Argh. The game has no pause function, and because of the forced isometric view you'll have to hunt pixels with your cursor a lot. Trying to click that rat to talk to it? Nope, you clicked on the ground behind it and now your party is walking into that pool of lava like a bunch of idiots. Trying to move into a certain spot in combat? Nope, that was the wrong pixel of ground again - into the poison cloud with you! So. Annoying. Combat? Tedious. Slow. Repetitive. You don't have a lot of options unless you're a mage, and even then it gets old quick. The devs idea of adding elemental surfaces/clouds to the terrain also gets old quickly (and, frankly, wasn't that great to being with), but because they like their idea so much it'll get shoved in your face at every opportunity. For example, be prepared for everybody and their mother having different elemental arrows/bombs to throw at you. I've played many different RPG-style games, this one is unremarkable at best. Tried to get into it once a year or so ago, couldn't. Tried it again now, really tried to like it. Giving up about 20 hours in. I regret buying it. I'm not normally one to write reviews for games I don't like, but in this case I'm just astounded at the ratings this game gets and at the price tag it carries. Both are very, very much too high, in my opinion.

As a long-time player of RPGs, I cannot understand why this game is so highly rated. - I am 24 hours in (!) and barely anything has progressed on the boring "murder mystery" plot point with which the game opens. For a game that touts its combat system so highly, there was hardly any combat in this time, perhaps around a dozen battles. - In a world where every dinky little thing can be picked up, you will be hopelessly sifting through piles of junk in no time, and you're not sure what has any real value. It is excessive and easily the worst game I have played in this regard. - The combat is nothing special. Your characters can do so few actions with their turns, and both your characters and the enemies perform them sluggishly. And while your characters are pratically overflowing little things they can use in combat (see inventory, above), it is rare to feel like you do anything cool or powerful. - Expect to hear a cacophony of accents including Russian, Scottish, Irish, English, US Southern, and more as you walk through a supposedly isolated little town. NPCs banter continuously in 5-second loops. Character dialogs are verbose and goofy. Dialog options are usually binary and sometimes say things so ridiculous that I didn't feel like my characters were really my own, a big problem in an RPG in this style. It just feels off in all of the important areas for this type of game. I'm calling it quits.

I love this kind of old-school RPGs like Baldur’s Gate or new incarnation Pillars of Eternity. I was really excited about this game and I really enjoyed first 20 hours of gameplay. In my initial intoxication I was blind to certain aspect of game and ignored them, despite of they are really bad. Like short action bar, close camera zoom or stupid inventory with incredible amount of completely useful things. I thought it is fine to have tens of quests in your Journal, with NO CLUE where to go, what to do. I though this is “old school” gameplay, this is hard-core gameplay I was looking for. But I was wrong. Problem is this game’s difficulty is actually artificial and purposeless, which makes it SO frustrating after initial “magic” and enthusiasm is gone. This game is not “fair difficult” like Dark Souls or other well-designed game. Once again, its hardness is purposeless and frustrates me a lot. This is torture just for torture, with no real reason or good design behind. I really wonder how many people who rate this game so high finish it with no guidance or instruction. Long story short: first twenty hours – joy. The rest? Pointless agony.