The Age of Decadence

I have played through this game countless times. It's almost hard to judge the game without playing through at least a couple of times. The story and lore is rich, and the way the game is designed you can do quick playthroughs where you uncover different bits of it all, and even change how the story progresses. I wish I had the patience to discover all of the cool things in Planescape Torment, which I would put as the pinnacle of story-centered RPGs. The way this game works, with fast travel vignettes, makes it easy to feel like you have accomplished a lot in a single play session. Is it a choose-your-own adventure? Maybe, but it's a damn good one. Are you railroaded? Maybe, but this railroad has a multitude of elegantly designed switches that will keep you engaged. The combat is excellent and fun to master and breaks up the rest of the game quite well, if you choose to play a fighter character. If you like RPGs, try this game. If you enjoy replaying RPGs to discover content you missed the first time around, you might love it. The achievements for this game on steam really add to it, and serve as an indicator of how much of the game you have actually experienced. I repurchased the game on steam for this reason. I don't know if these are incorporated into the gog galaxy client; they weren't when I last played.

A good game, which has been praised for the rich plot, meaningful choices, compelling universe. Most of those praises are true, and I will not repeat them. Instead I would mention why I think this game is, in many ways, overrated. The problem is that the game often confuses difficulty with the necessity to pursue a perfect constellation of point distribution, dialogue choices and gear to even have a chance at success. The margin of error is tiny, you often have to plan several levels ahead to succeed, and failure to do so can put you into a situation where even the main questline becomes insurmountably difficult - but you'll only notice this way past the point of no return. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that the game world is not robust. It's a gradually expanding sorta-open world, but it doesn't take too much effort to exhaust available side-quests in a new area. You simply cannot afford mistakes in developing your caracter, because you'll get no chance for some non-crucial xp. No flair skills, or rpg-fluff here: you have to unchain your inner number-cruncher munchkin for merciless metagaming, or you'll keep dying, and the game will even gloat over you for it. The other issue is that the game ensures replayability by simply denying you certain quests. You will encounter those quests, or locations, or characters, but they will require a combination of stats that ensure you will never proceed with them unless they fit into you main character profile. I understand the reasoning behind this, but with the size of the game world, you are constantly running into inaccassible quests. It's not a bad game, but it's very frustrating. There's no "exploring" or "completing" this game. You have to let it kill you nineteen times over to learn its weaknesses, start with a dirty trick to bring it to the ground, and then keep stabbing at its windpipe until it stops moving. And then you will have yanked your first successful playthrough away from its cold, hard fingers.

If you have been searching for a deep, well written CRPG akin to Arcanum/Fallout 1, you are the target audience for this excellent game. I was so impressed by the general tone, this is a moody and bleak setting with manipulative characters and forbidden lore abounding. This game rewards commitment to a playstyle, and I would encourage first timers to commit to the bruiser playstyle to learn the systems and explore the crafting/alchemy systems. The game is short enough to reward different playthroughs with either the Loremaster or Assassin archetypes, which are equally interesting. I wish I had played it sooner, 10/10 for me, and I hope Vince can continue creating great games.

Great world building but not enough possibilities to explore it. The story is too linear. Getting XP for completing factions' quests is the biggest issue as it forces you too choose faction early in the game.

The game is interessting enough, combat is brutal and you live by dice rolls. have not found a battle log so thats a shame. The most annoying part is when you reload a save there is a 50% chance the graphics will start blinking with a black screen. Had it not been for that 4 Stars. Cause 5 Stars is impossible.