I bought it on sale for $8, and I regret my choice. It might be a decent game, but the controls are poorly refined, the graphics are hard to parse, and they do a lousy job of setting goals and building your understanding of the game, even in the tutorial levels, and even for the very first task. At the end of the tutorial I found myself fighting off waves of the enemies, with no clear idea what my goal was, how many waves would be coming, no training on controlling or gather monsters in the dungeon... After killing off 3 waves with spells, and getting progressively more bored of it, a 4th wave made it to my dungeon heart. It started a repetative announcement that my dungeon heart was under attack and I needed to defend it. I couldnt' tell which heroes were doing what, and they blended into the scenerey with my own workers and soldiers. Where were my defenders? How do I tell them to defend? Do they do it automatically or do they have to be called? All the while 2/5 of the screen is covered by my spell list, and another 2/5 is obscured by a popup explaining the spell I most recently cast (that one with no apparent way to dismiss). Bored, frustrated, all of my defenders dead (I could only tell because I pulled up my army pane it was at 2, 1, and empty)... I just quit. Don't bother unless you want to puzzle it out, and deal with graphics and controls that aren't designed for intelligibility and usability.
This game has a few rough spots but is generally very well made and worth a play through. The replayability isn't great, even though they give you the ability to restart the game with all of your advancement and more powerful bad guys it doesn't really evolve or develop in the 2nd playthrough to keep things challenging or interesting. I'm was also put off during my reincarnation play through since some of the acheivements, which became one of my motivations, just don't seem to register any progress.
I just started playing this yesterday and I'm on my 4th run through. I'm really enjoying it. I'll try to update the review later. It may go up or down as I get deeper into it, but so far it's the best game I've played on GOG since Shadowrun Returns last year.
I specifically wanted a difficult tactical game. This dumps you into the world with no ramp up, and no direction. I had nothing to do but wander around blindly. Most of the placed don't trust you enough to offer work, and there's literally nothing on the map to interact with. I bought into the scrappy band of misfits trying to get started, but I lost every starting character over several fights, then every character I had at that point over the next few. Ultimately I got a caravan guard contract and the 7 people I managed to scrounge up and barely equip, got slaughtered to the man without taking down a single one of the strong and well equiped bandits. You can't hire or equip one person like those bandits for what the 4 day caravan job paid. I didn't enjoy my first run at all. I may try again, because other people seem to like it, but I'm not very hopeful.
I really like Shadowrun Returns. You can tell you're on rails, but it does a great job with the story and texture so it doesn't feel forced. The pacing and balance between combat and plot was well done, so neither became frustrating or tiresome. Dragonfall loses the sense of organic story telling. I feel more like I'm bouncing between checklists, waiting for new items to appear. When you pass something up it sits there waiting for you to run out of other options. The pacing manages to feel like there's both too much combat and too much plot. I grumble when I get into a fight, and groan when exposition starts. I also just don't like the characters. Finally, and the trigger for writing this review, is the MKVI mission. Balance goes right out the window. There are some useful spoilers ahead. I play on Normal difficulty, and have had no trouble to this point in either game. They stacked up the largest fight to date, back to back, several times without breaks. It murdered me the first time, when I played for fun. On my second attempt I went full cheeze on tactics, shaman powers, ran dry on consumables, and went meta on the murder tank, but still got ground down, one character at time, to party wipe on the 4th wave. I can see exactly one way to play it successfully, in spite of the moral quandry pushing for a different approach. You either happen to do it "right", or die repeatedly until you learn the requirements. It reminds me of adventure games where you can't use the axe or lockpicks on the locked door, instead having randomly try the newspaper and coat hanger. That said, I'm not ready to quit. I just can't recommend it, and hope it gets better.
I've only played an hour or so, and I'm moving on to look for something better. The impression is that the game is 60-80% finished. It's rough and glitchy. The details haven't been tightened and the flow is still uneven. It's missing the cohesive, polished feel that you add with testing and care in the last months of development. For example, there's no quest log, waypoints, or clear flow to the tutorial. It doesn't teach important control concepts, and it's easy to get wierd results (my companion pulled out a gun and started shooting me in the melee practice area). The UI is and game design are tedius. Windows cover a small part of the screen, but they lock out the rest of the UI and clicking on other parts of the UI is just ignored, forcing you to click the small close button where a well polished game would either let you use the other elements or at least close the top dialog to get out of your way. They pepper rooms and areas with a half dozen or more small clickable objects. You have to individually open each, deal with one or two items, then find the small close button, etc. It's not bad, just needs refinement. Another example: It's difficult to see what's going on and find your way around. You wind up doing a grid search because there's no guidance to the important points. One of the first quests involves picking mushrooms near the fence. There are mushrooms near the fence, but they're the wrong mushrooms. You have to randomly walk around until you stumble across the right mushrooms, literally covering the entire zone in a search pattern, to find every available mushroom, or you fail the quest. It's the only way. The system and story look promising, and if you can get past the lack of refinement, it might be a good game, but I'll write off my $11 and try something else.
