Inquisitor

The game has an intriguing begining, with the apocalyptic end of times and looks quite promising, But then comes the first enemy and the combat.My god the combat has got to the lamest, most unegaging desing ever. you spam click on your enemy fo about minute, then move to the next enemy. The fact that this game came ten years after Diablo 2 is mindbogling.

One can see the makers put an tremendous amount of hours in this game writing the dialogues and its overall design is very great, but: This game is way, WAY too hard and even the first enemies you encounter will kill you fast. No fun, no fun at all.

This game has a lot of potential: unique biblical end-of-Medieval-world setting, good story, some good dialogue, swift level advancement, lots of skills, and lots of spells. But I had to stop playing due to an annoying bug that wouldn't let me re-don my armor of choice. You can't beat the game without good armor because once you die the game is over and you have to reload. Other bugs include the right panel shaded in red all of a sudden (don't save when this happens. it is important to save frequently in this game. immediately close game and restart) and several crashes to desktop. If it weren't for these, easily five stars for uniqueness alone

Plot is good. Graphic is what you expect. But crashes to the desktop sometimes and missions get bugs that make immersion stop, so you go to find walkthroughs. I couldn't finish Lotti's one because when the infernal bats appeared to kil, she disappeared completely (bug) and I couldn't finish the mission. Frustrating, buggy, badly finished. Unbelievable.

To be fair, I have only played the first hour or so, but here are my impressions. This game is going to be focused on your conversations and "investigation" into events. It seems most of the effort in this game went into dialogue trees and giving the player the feeling of actually sorting through testimonies and dealing with divergent points of view. Good. Combat is a major let-down and seems to be poorly thought out and horribly implemented. It is not Diablo, but smacks more of the realtime Arcanum (two idiots swinging like crazy until they pass out from stamina loss). The enemies swarm you, using no tactics, and you have no time to use tactics of your own. Your stamina runs out so fast, it makes you wonder why it even exists in the game. Even casting spells requires you to use stamina. A lot of time is spent just waiting (one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand) for your stamina to regen so you can either swing your sword, shoot an arrow, or convert it into mana (yep, you use BOTH when casting, so you convert; wait; convert; wait; and then wait some more). Stupid. Utterly moronic. Then we have the RPG mechanics. Nothing complex here. You get descriptions of what each skill does, but too few points each level (initially) and there just isn't any real "wow" factor to them. They are simple bonuses to your skills and spells that fail to either impress or justify putting points into them. At level 5, with 11 points (all of my skill points up to this level) in melee, I still could not even equip a short sword. Yep. You can't even wield it if you don't have the "skill". Even a 5 year old can swing an axe and figure out which end is sharp. Stupid design decisions all around. Finally, the unimportant crap: graphics and sound. It's no Baldur's Gate. The graphics are functional and convey the setting, but are not a selling point. You won't be listening to the soundtrack or even remember what the themes sound like, and the effects are of the basic quality. They meet the needs, but are not atmospheric and there is NO voice acting. This could be a good thing, though, as most tends to drag things out, but I did like the Baldur's Gate style of recorded "greetings" that were played when initiating dialogue. All this said, I would rather play Fallout or Baldur's Gate again. This game appears to have promise, but is not going to be on par with those other titles. Though they might be older, they had much bigger budgets at the time and it certainly shows. Final Verdict: you should only get this if you've played the Infinity engine (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape) games and want something to tide you over until the world gets back to making decent games.