Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

PoE 2 is really nice crpg with few flaws that you can quickly overlook because of the really interesting world and satisfying gameplay. I must admit though, that I had problem getting into this game. I tried to play it for couple of times but I was a bit discouraged because of the rather poor optimalization. Thankfully I was able to ignore these minor issues and I was suprisied how easily I get invested. Although I am not the biggest fan of a pirate theme I wasn't feeling too overwhelmed by it. You quickly realize that there are more themes that are far more interesting like for example a conflict between natives of the archipelago and various factions from all over the world. Colonization is rather obvious theme of this game and there are many quests that let you take one of the sides and realize that there are more things in movement and none are right or wrong. The gameplay is really good but my opinion is biased because of my previous experience with old school rpgs. I do not mind real time with pause and I am also keen on playing in turn based and thankfully both options are viable in poe2. Classes are varied and offer plenty of ways to deal with your enemies. I was really suprised how good the system is and how easily you get into it without much of a fuss. I played on normal and will definitely try higher levels of difficulty just to utilize in full wide variety of tools given to a player. Really recommend for anybody who likes rpgs and people who want to get into this genre

But it really drop the ball near the ending when you have to deal with those terrible factions, and a main storyline that is almost non-existent. I give it three star because the world is fun to explore, but beware that the in game perfomances are terrible even to this day...

Way better than Avowed! Way better than Avowed!

The game has some pretty good parts, mixed in a bland global experience with kills every kind of "personal" involvement in the story. I personally care little about graphics and eye-candy, so I'm not going to review those. There are some improvements in the game system from POE1, albeit the general feeling is that D&D rules of Infinity engine games are still better (and D&D rules aren't that great to begin with, IMHO). I think they tried to put a lot of "things" in the rules trying to do something realistic and ended up doing something that is confusing at best. My opinion is that they should have chosen a working and appreciated ruleset and focused more on making the real game. The plot, which should be the first and last thing that you evaluate in an RPG (if you want to just kill monsters, play Doom), is totally inexistent. You go around doing random quests that take a lot of in-game months, while pressed by an incomprehensible urgency to follow a giant statue that acts for incomprehensible purposes and gives random speeches at times. The miniplots of each subquest line are sometimes good, even I don't see any particular excellence, however the main quest is terrific. When you arrive at the end of the game, hoping to find some sense in this random endeavour, you actually find out that no explanations at all would be still better than those given to you... I'm not gonna spoiler you, but in my opinion the motivations behind the acts of the giant statue are really silly and full of inconsistencies. What's more important, you don't get to play any role in this story except the one of the spectator, which is the most boring thing that I found in an RPG. If after this you still want to spend your time to read a pointless story, I hope at least that you'll enjoy the graphics. :-)

In short: The game itself is good, while the technical side of it is quite mediocre. The game contains a lot of bugs and glitches, which may cause it to be unplayable to some. + Good story + Interesting quests + Quality voice-acting + Fun combat system - Game-breaking memory leak causing insufferable lag on some computers (graphics quality does not affect this) - Glitching User Interface, unable to leave some areas due to icons dissappearing (graphics quality does not affect this) - Lag spikes during animation-intensive scenes - Complicated references and lore that requires knowledge from the first game - Slow development concerning game-breaking bug fixes