Posted on: March 9, 2017
kpeterson
Verified ownerGames: Reviews: 16
A valiant attempt that just isn't fun
The setting and general atmosphere are excellent. The ideas behind the gameplay are worthwhile. The actual implementation is just too difficult all along the way. In order to accomplish certain tasks or survive certain situations, you need to have enough points assigned to certain skills (whether they be combat skills or non-combat); you have no way of knowing how much skill you will need for a given task until after you've tried it and failed. You spend a lot of time trying and failing things, reloading a save, allocating some points and trying again. Maybe it works the second time, maybe not; sometimes you just don't have enough skill points to get through a plot-critical situation because you didn't know you'd need points for it. The combat in particular is extremely difficult and unforgiving. I've seen a total of three fights that felt suitable in terms of difficulty; all the others have been from 20% to 50% harder than what my characters were capable of doing at that point. For example, playing a mercenary who joins the guard (using default stats and nearly all points in combat skills), when I did the plot-critical mission to take the tower, I ended up with 1 hit point left and 2 nearly undamaged enemies still to kill. I had to exploit a gimmick involving a staircase and alchemy in order to slowly wear them down, 2 to 3 hp per round. In most fights you don't have such gimmicks available and you likely just die. If you focus on talking your way out of fights, you will still run into situations where you can't avoid fighting, and then you are extremely likely to die with no combat skill; if you focus on combat skill you just keep running into harder and harder fights without having your combat skill scaling up appropriately. If you intend to complete this game, expect to have to know all the solutions and all the optimal moves and skill point allocations ahead of time. It is not possible to just play through like a normal game.
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