Solasta: Crown of the Magister

It's more like Icewind Dale than Baldur's Gate in it's linearity, but if that doesn't bother you, this tactical RPG is really good and you should give it a try. As long as you're not bothered by weird looking characters, you will enjoy this one.

Expect more Icewind Dale than a Baldur's Gate. Still it is a hell of a party! You crawl 30-40 hours of dungeons with 4 user made characters. However unlike Icewind Dale, the characters are fully voiced and make remarks based on chosen personality traits like Greedy, Altruistic, Cautious etc. The story isn't anything to write home about but it is interesting enough to keep you going through the dungeons, but the character dialogue (made by your characters) is usually cheesy (in a good way) and chuckle worthy. Feels like a homebrew campaign by your friends. Combat is very solid and faithful to the 5th edition rules. Unlike the classics, there is an emphasis on verticality, taking full advantage of 3d battlefields. Higher elevation can give you high ground advantage, AoE spells and effects are fully three dimensional spheres or cubes and so on. The dungeons themselves have a decent amount of variety with different kind of puzzles and settings to not get too stale. Around the 30 hour mark it started to get a bit stale but the game quickly picked up again and threw twists in both gameplay and story. In conclusion: a solid dungeon crawl with not much filler. Witty writing and voiced player characters keep you entertained for this classic D&D adventure.

Solasta could have been a good game with a little more flexibility in its implementation of the 5e rules. I assume they're 5e rules. The last version of AD&D I actively played was 3e. First, the game is full of minor glitches and unfinished ideas. Not everything was implemented or used, but the game warns you of that. Unless Tactical Adventures abandons the game due to financial constraints I think both of these issues will be cleared up. Second, the story is political and not very "grand questish." That was okay with me - my favorite game had you clearing city blocks at random at the beginning. There's a bit of mystery and question to the quest, typical when creatures that are the prime adversary in Solasta are involved. Third, quest choices are limited. There are side quests that become available as your characters level that you can pursue, but they're always a return to an existing area. The order of the main quest is pretty much set. Fourth, the game is limited to level 10. This is far, far too low. I hit level 10 12 hours before I finished the game. Fifth, crafting is meh. It takes too long, too many special ingredients, and you find better gear. Sell the ingredients, keep the gold, buy from the vendors. Sixth, concentration. Between concentration and advantage, spell casters are nerfed - at least compared to what I'm use to.. You'll see forum posts recommending you use a wizard and magic missile exclusively. There's a reason for that - it's the only reliable form of damage because it doesn't suffer from dis/advantage and it doesn't miss. Concentration makes lower level slots worth a lot less. You can't hold bless and wall of fire or conjure elemental or - take your pick. Any buffing spell requires concentration. Wizards can't haste their warrior friend and do anything else. Finally, you will miss. A lot. So will the enemy. You'll sit there and swing at each other. Repeatedly. One word description: frustrating. (Out of space!)

This game is very bare-bones as an RPG, which would be fine if it at least did combat well and stuck to that. Unfortunately, it insists on wasting your time by pretending to be a real RPG, and making you sit through constant dialog sections that barely give you any choices at all and were written by someone who had no idea what they were doing. The dialog is so bad that it almost sounds like it was generated procedurally. Characters often don't sound like they're actually responding to each other. The lines themselves are cliche to the point of absurdity. Your party walks into a burning fort and one character remarks, in total seriousness, "I have a bad feeling about this." It also doesn't help that the dialog comes out of the mouths of character models straight out of Oblivion, with even worse animation. The dialog sections might as well be skippable for all of the consequence they have and the lack of choice the player is given, but they unfortuantely aren't. The rest of the game is a ho-hum D&D turn-based combat system. It might have been tolerable if the developers had stuck to doing that and streamlined the rest of the experience, but any value this game might have had is ruined by it pretending that it has a story.

...it feels more like a simulator for dice junkies than an actual RPG. There is hardly anything in this game apart from combat. The story is really bad and boring. Feels like a 14 y/o wrote the script. The characters are absolutely generic and bland. Dialogues are meaningless, illogical and the voice acting is horrible. Choices often have little context or reasoning behind them and have no impact on the story. Many areas seem empty and soulless. There are very few NPCs you can interact with. The world building doesn't work either, because in the end it is so forgettable and uninteresting that you don't even bother to try and piece it together. The game completely failed to immerse me in any way :/ The GUI is ugly and uninspired. Inventory management is tedious and cumbersome. Spells often have only very basic descriptions. For me, the exact mechanics of many skills were unclear. Disclaimer: I played games like Pathfinder, BG, ToEE etc. as well, but I'm far from an expert on D&D rules. Maybe 5e is partly to blame, but even the combat has its flaws. The complex environment is not as entertaining as expected. I never managed to use any enviromental hazards against opponents. The loot doesn't feel rewarding. Everything is based on a unpredictable D20 roll, which makes the game very "gambly" and its apparent, that the designers lean the rolls in favor of the enemy. Advantage/disadvantage adds to this. You either get a massive bonus or a huge penalty. Reminds me of X-COM, which I didn't like. In combination with the vision system melee combat is inferior. In the end I put the entire party in darkness with stealth activated and sniped with darkvision only. Many ppl talk about bugs and corrupt save files - I've had none so far. Art style, effects and overall graphics are nice. Character models are somewhat ugly, but OK. However, the animations (in cutscenes) are nightmarish again. If you just want a CRPG like PoE, D:OS or Tyranny, better look elsewhere.