Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

Probably my favorite game now. I absolutely love the exploring, there's always something to find. It blew my mind when I started the released version to hear the Ymir track, just wow I love that song. It also seems like they hid a lot of story in ea that's in full release and I dig that too. Now eat a shield bash. For Woden!!!

This reminds me of Gothic, Skyrim, etc. Unlike many of the more recent RPGs that only focus on squeezing every last cycle out of your GPU, this one is actually fun to play. Exploring feels rewarding and dialogues are well written. Not sure how many hours it will keep me busy but it is one of the rare cases where I hope they come around and add more content (DLCs) over time.

This is a solid game and, on a 4070Ti super, is running well. They did a great job with the Unity engine and the asthetic work. That said, Unity doesn't hold up great especially when you get out of the tutorial area. The combat is fun but really sort of broken and unbalanced. I've been using summons and I get really goofy stuff. Not fun goofy, like Oblivion, annoying goofy. It started out sort of leaning hard and then got really easy and exploitable pretty quickly. Run away from a mob and after about 200 yards they wonder back to their spawn location. My summon is just frustrating and I give up on wanting to use them. Sometimes they just wonder off and they can barely follow you. The character model is okay but I get annpoyed when they don't make one for each sex and my female toon looks absurd. The story is fun and engaging but is about as by the numbers as you can get and verges on a straight lift of ES rather than inspired by ES. Souls and Scrolls and call it a day. This is a fun game that fans of the ES may or may not enjoy but I think I am done and (not asking for a return or anything I purchased and tried it fair and square) would rather have my 45$ back. Calling this a Skyrim killer is some reactionary infatuation with a new toy because despite the advantages of decades of ES to learn from, this game comes no place remotely close to a ES experience. Avowed was mediocre and I'd rather play that, too. It's a decidedly average game that some Scrolls fans will really enjoy a brief affair with and some, like me, will start craving the real deal after a few hours.

It's buggy, it's janky, performance is questionable in some areas, but good god does this game have heart and soul. Truly lots of passion put into this game. Take the foundation and heart of Oblivion or Skyrim but remove the triple A bloat and polish. The world is dark and gritty, combat is fun and engaging often requiring focus and timed/measured attacks. Magic does feel a little off, but that just might be my low level/lack of spells. Little quests that start off small or benign developing the world and characters around you. Truly, this game is something special.

The game is still development - and this is clearly reflected in the enemy AI and lack of finished world areas. However, even in its (currently) unfinished state there is still a lot of fun to be had, and numerous (almost all) fully voice acted interactions and quests. The characters, side stories, lore etc., gave me a similar feeling to my experiences with Fallout New Vegas... Surprisingly well done! Not just endless fetch quests. There is still a lot of fleshing out to do. The world, while excellent in appearance and scale, still needs more interesting locations, things to find etc., to really get immersed in it. The graphics, and style in general, doesn't scream "unfinished" to me at all - though I suppose some will disagree. I initially encountered numerous bugs, but they must have been fixed quickly as I haven't been able to replicate them since, and the rest of my experience has been largely bug free! There's the potential for flexible combinations of playstyles when building out a character, specialising in crafting and similar. Again, these feel like they're just not quite finished. It's to be expected, it's still in development, but I'll be interested to see how they fine tune it. Playing at 2k resolution with most settings ramped up I tend to get 70-90 FPS depending on the area. I've had the odd, very short-lived, instance of the frame rate suddenly dropping. Other than that, performance has been quite smooth. (My specs: Ryzen 5700X, 16GB DDR4, Radeon 6700XT, M.2 SSD, Win 10) Personally, I'd highly recommend it. I had a great experience even with unfinished elements. Of course, just remember that it is still in development - so expect rough edges!