Solasta: Crown of the Magister

Linear to a fault. Unlike Fallout that lets you shape the story or Dragon Age that shows the impact of moral choices, this is a paint-by-numbers affair. Your progress through the game is predetermined and almost unalterable. Dialogue is clunky if not baffling. Even the quips your characters utter are puzzling, such as a one who screams “you should have yielded” followed by “I never take prisoners”. I can imagine the monsters asking “well, which is it?” You only reach level 10, making the game less engaging once you hit the level cap. Once experience points don’t matter combat becomes a pointless slog rather than a rewarding challenge. Adventure sites are vast, multi-layered affairs of yawning pits and towering architecture. Puzzles have you navigate vertical mazes of walkways and climbs. Combat requires a new level of tactical awareness, as monsters climb walls or fly to outflank your party. Comparing to past greats like Baldur’s Gate, Solasta’s faults become apparent. Baldur’s Gate had personality. Characters were interesting, the world felt real. In towns you were surrounded by commoners and the bustle of activity. You could leave the main storyline to explore the world. Solasta is the opposite. Cities are pretty but lack soul, with quest-givers and shop-keepers, but there’s no one else. Everyone is oddly awake all day and all night. Saving the world means little with no believable people around to give that goal some meaning. Adding to the artificial feel, enemies of a type are all identical. With one type of enemy warrior, each has the identical haircut and outfit. You’ll rarely want to zoom in to see a battle up close, because there isn’t much worth seeing. I enjoyed Solasta, but I have no desire to play it through again. I know exactly what will happen and when, so there’s no point. I am impressed with the game engine and the possibilities it brings. What’s missing is a team that can take that engine and build a truly great adventure on top of it.

+ combat is fun and varied; the best bit about this game. Between readying actions, dodging, and using advantage/disadvantage to your... advantage this game can feel pretty strategic. Sometimes even awesome, e.g. when you manage to push a difficult adversary to his death at the bottom of a chasm. +- 5e itself is somewhat meh IMO (not a fault of this game, but that's the ruleset it's based on). 'Bounded accuracy' is a divisive addition in 5e, which you might want to look into before buying the game. Despite its advantages, I strongly felt the inherent lack of specialisation and epicness. Also, casters feel pretty neutered; they're still good at making a real difference via crowd control, but between concentration and limited spell slots my other characters were usually more effective by simply killing enemies instead of CC'ing them. - The story is very, very, VERY basic, linear, and uninspired. Without spoilering anything, it's practically no more than a chase after n McGuffins and a climactic end fight. It also has no significant choices for you to make, which makes the whole idea of this being a RPG fall flat on its face. 'Combat simulator' would fit better. - Graphics are serviceable, but ugh. It felt more like a marginally upgraded NWN to me rather than a game that came out in 2021. Despite that, it still managed to frequently cause significant FPS issues. - The quality of voice acting is generally okay, but sometimes really drops into the negatives. - The music is 'ok', nothing memorable at all. All in all, I had fun playing this game, but unlike many other RPGs that I cherish and replay every now and then I don't think the urge to revisit this will hit me anytime soon. I'd recommend to get this when it's at a discount.

I'm an old-school RPGer both tabletop and on PC. I love the classics such as Planescape: Torment (1999) and Baldurs Gate 2 (2000), as well as Dragon Age 1 (while 2 and 3 were utter garbage imho) Lately I've been feeling that the new cRPGs in their attempt to do something new, and to have better graphics, have lost their soul a little. It feels that they're become generic and acquired an artificial quality which is superficial. This game feels like it took a step in the right direction. GAMEPLAY: 10 / 10 enjoying very much DIFFICULTY: 10/10 Chose which one is more fun for you ENGAGEMENT: 7/10 Good immersion, Realistic dialogues which don't feel fake or generic, no dialogues amongst characters, but they all get to react when things happen and each of them has something different to say. There's room for improvement here. STORY: 7/10 I'm still at the beginning, but so far I'm enjoying it well enough. BUGS: 9/10 Only found one which was fixed upon restarting GRAPHICS: 10/10 MUSIC: 10/10 PRICE FOR QUALITY: Buy, it's worth it's money.

I just finished the game, really enjoyed it. The voice acting isn't great and the character animations are pretty bland, but the game play is fun. The only thing keeping me from giving it five stars was the end game battle, won't give away any spoilers. I learned a lot about DnD rules playng this game and I will say it is more fun than BG3, (early access), and Divinity 2. I played the pre-made characters the first time through, will try to create some custom characcters the next time through.

Good adaptation of the d&d rule set. The rpg flair is splendid, the campaigns (both main and dlc) are well paced and written. The crafting system is really cool and the fights, items and character development/creation are (d&d typically) awesome. The highlight of the game ist the campaign editor. That means the game could have endless user-created campaigns and we already have really good user campaigns. Why not five stars? The game has unfortunately two flaws. The biggest thing is the level cap. The level cap is 12 and that means, the game implements only spells up to level 6. But the funny spells begin at level 7 and (of course) the best are 8 and 9. Hopefully we will get an update or dlc that increases the cap. The second is the performance. Sometimes, the performance is really bad and it interrupts the gameflow enormously. The only way to solve the problem is to deactivate the shadows. It is not on every map, so it won't happen often. In conclusion, I can absolutely recommend the game. If you like d&d and rpgs, this game is for you.