Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

A solid but difficult game. Enjoyable experience. Downside for me is the lack of communication with pawns. Orders are too limited and magicians seem to heal others completely, but not themselves.

I have owned this title on a different platform for a couple of years, but only recently started a playthroungh in ernest. Once I got used to the playstyle I have found the game to be solid, but with some minor bugs that were never resolved, like one I saw someone else mention about the "Rental" system. A bit of light research online showed me workarounds for the companion hiring system that have worked out pretty well. There are some issues with the AI for your team, where they've gotten me into fights I wasn't ready to take on yet. Overall the game is fun and does require a bit of strategy to avoid getting overrun by enemies in certain areas. I have hamstrung myself a bit by choosing to play as a mage, but having a strong support team lets me cast unabated much of the time. I look forward to progressing further into the story when I continue playing.

I have been pleasantly surprised by this game, def worth the 5 bucks

An action RPG that could rivall the likes of The Witcher, with a semilinear world with secrets hidden at every turn. You take a secondary path and find yourself in a whole dungeon, getting lost and exploring is absolutely the best part of this game. Unfortunately they made so many bafflingly terrible design decisions that make the game an absolute chore to play, The UI is terrible, obviously designed for consoles, you don't get tooltips by hovering your cursor over icons, and in order to navigate menus you have to exit to a previous menu. The RPG elements are minimal, you don't have control on your stats beyond your gear. There's a teleporting system that is so undercooked that is just painful to see, only a couple of natural teleporting sites, the rest you have to put down yourself with crystals, to a maximun of 10 active at any given time, not nearly enough for a map this big. you only have a saying on the skills your main pawn can have, but they cannot have an hybrid class, which forces you into that path if you want such a class on your party. The crafting system is horrendous, you don't have a dedicated menu for crafting, you have to go all the way to the item in your inventory and select the combine option. And there's a lot of redundancy, i.e., in one zone herb A exists, in another zone there's herb B, they are mechanically the same, but the different names just help to bloat your inventory and storage. But the biggest sin by far is the casting, casting spells take a long, very long time, time you spend just sittiing there , with a target in your head that makes all the enemies instantly focus on you because they love to interrupt your casts, playing a caster is un sustainablñeñ, high level spells hit hard, but they are designed to be unrealiable and cumbersome. Like a meteor shower that may or may not hit your enemies. What made me quit was the golems, they have only one weak spot, but you can't lock in on them. This game is wasted potential.

It kind of throws things at you unexpected and some button presses can make you lose the story by accident.