Pillars of Eternity: Hero Edition

This game is a love letter to Margaret Sanger, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Antony Flew, Anton Szandor LaVey, and Albert Pike. I'm likely missing quite a few worth mentioning but those are the forefathers of ideology being presented on the western world and seeing as the Dyrwood can be boiled down to America in a lot of ways you have to congratulate the creators for being so meta, albeit evil, in their goal to overtake western society's ideology through music, entertainment, movies, television, and video-games among other mediums. I've read the second game is even worse in that goal, so I can't wait to dive in. If you felt my review was overly harsh, I highly recommend you research the above characters in our society and the effect they've truly had on it and then play the game, you will not be disappointed that you're beginning to see a pattern in the way these people work; careful nudging across all mediums until a populace attains the prescribed belief you seek. If you can get past the above I would say it's a 3/5. It's a mechanically good game but suffers from many bug issues, notwithstanding the ever constant degenerative throws at cultural ideologies. (I couldn't and felt the need to ackowledge it) Don't stop trying to learn that which makes you uncomfortable, keep seeing patterns, don't let your growth be stunted by bias. An intelligent population is a dangerous one. Understand this truly and you can see why ours is so inadaquate. Have a great day

Plot sucks. Characters suck. Combat sucks. Rest doesn't matter.

I did not like at all. The battle system is pretty poor. You need to keep pausing the game to set commands for party. Battles are pretty boring, I was waiting for some action. Everything else is great, but battle, pretty lame.

It runs astoundly bad on medium to low spec machines. I would love to play it, but so far it's wasted cash.

The game feels like someone brought the Infinity Engine up to date and tried to make a new epic RPG in the style of good old Baldur's Gate, nut only partially succeeded. The graphics are ok, nothing to write home about, but sufficient nevertheless. The focus lies heavily on dialogs, which the game loves to display endlessly in all kinds of situations. There are no cut-scenes, everything is explained in long, sometimes interesting, sometimes just plain boring dialogs with an average level of quality like you would find it in common medieval fantasy novels. If you love RP-heavy RPGs you will get what you are looking for. The story starts slowly and continues equally slow, but doesn't feel catchy at all. You happen to be a special soul in a classic fantasy world and can speak with other souls - dead or alive - while you try to figure out why. Nothing you haven't heard somewhere else already. Characters are well scripted, but none is really notable. Important dialogs are voice acted well, although only English voice is available and played no matter which language you choose. The (German) translation is mostly fitting, but contains frequent mistakes, sometimes to a point where you have to guess what the person is trying to say. Where the game really fails is the combat system, which is roughly a copy of DnD 4th edition with different names. This could be a good basis, however the devs decided to have two kinds of HP: permanent and temporary. Temporary are healed automatically after each fight, permanent are only healed when resting. This makes most fights either meaningless because you effectively take no damage, or enemies kill you in 2-3 hits and the fight becomes an annoying pain if your chars just drop dead randomly. Traps are basically harmless, because you just heal all damage right away then proceed with looting. This could have been a very good game, sadly the combat system and lengthy dialogs destroy most of the fun. Still a good RPG for those who love them.