Solasta at it's heart is bascically DND XCOM. It tries to emulate and enforce the ttrpg rules as closely as possible, even when they make no sense. Tactical combat is obviously intended to be the game's strength. But story isn't really all that bad either. Granted, the base game and PoI expansion are almost 100% linear, there's almost no choices that make a difference, and nothing you say in conversations will ever matter (basically). If you come from BG3, you'll wonder how this is role-playing at all, I'd presume. But that's where Solasta is old-school. Just like in older CRPGs, the roleplaying lays within your imagination and how you style your characters. This is well helped by colorful banter that actually does an extremely good job of fleshing out your characters with a minimum of dev work. The Palace of Ice expansion is IMO the strongest point of the whole game, a truly epic and well-written story. The Lost Valley is similarly the obvious low point. A buggy, underworked mess that attempts a kind of sandox faction game and fails wildly.
I low-budget clone of BG1/2, made by a tiny team. Clearly every effort has been made to make the gameplay experience as close to Baldur's Gate as possible, including a lot of negative sides (they've avoided most improvements made to UX since 2000). The story is actually fairly complex and rewarding, with lots of conspiracies and (possible) backstabbing. It also succeeds fairly well in presenting a "morally grey" world. However, the implementation of both the story and setting (i.e. the writing) is very variable and tends to be a bit pedestrian. The choices for your character is usually limited to more or less greedy (which is essentially the game's version of "evil"), but sometimes (rarely) you can do some fun things in conversations. The rpg system (the mechanics of the game) are completely original, but in many ways (of course) designed to emulate the AD&D 2ed of the BG games. For example, magic is completely Vancian. However, unlike 2E, spellcasters (and rogues) truly get the short shrift in this game, and you'll find that melee/ranged usually is preferred. When you get a bit into the system you'll find that it has a lot of nuances however - for example they've (partially) solved the "minmaxing problem" of D&D in a very elegant way - far more elegant than the Pillars games in my opinion. As a small example, the "Physical" stat is strength and constitution together; so it increases both hit points, damage with weapons, etc, and is needed by all characters. So, after putting 56 hours into it and completing the game, I ended up liking it a lot. It's FAR from perfect, but it has a lot of charm. You'd better love BG style gameplay though.
So, on the surface this seemed like a super nice Stalker type game. Sneaking, crafting, I'd have preferred turnbased to realtime combat but oh well. It's atmospheric and fairly well visually designed. However, it very soon became apparent that this is the kind of game that insists on punishing the player at all times. You can only save by sleeping in safe areas, it's super easy to die, and you actually need not only prepare and cook food; but actually plant and farm! The absolutely biggest issue is the camera handling imo. You can only sensibly rotate the camera by holding in the mousewheel and moving the mouse left and right. And there's a lot of manual aiming in this game (to fire a gun, you aim with right mouse and fire with left). So basically you can't control the camera while doing anythin else. There are keys to turn the camera, but it's totally useless. Even though you can click to move, the game has NO pathfinding, so your guy will run run into a wall. In addition, there are so many absurd design decisions all over the place. When you buy a big item from the trader, like an armor, you need to have space in your inventory. You can't put it on while in the trader window, and you can't exit the trader window while having an item in trade. So you need to start selling stuff you don't want to sell. A big part of the game is bashing open hilariously lightweight crates with your crowbar (seriously, you'll send them flying), and if you accidentally hit a friendly with your wild swings, it's instantly game over. Noone cares if you just steal their vital supplies right in fron of them though. Quests are also stupidly broken, dialogue is totally meaningless, and the whole thing of course reeks of typical slavic machismo and misogyny. Avoid, even if you think you like this kind of thing.
Very fun to finally play this after having followed the development for 3 years. It's a brilliant little game, not too short but just right IMO. The graphics are perfect, the animation and action fluid... Music and effects brilliant too. Instant classic!
In the manual, Darklands outlines what it aims to be - medieval Europe as it was perceived at the time. And Gods does it succeed. An amazingly realistic, layered and complex game. Drawbacks are mostly the standards for the era: you have to read up on external sources to understand what you're "supposed" to do, what the goal of the game is and how you should go about to achieve it. It does, of course, require an enormous amount of patience and tolerance for old design. But given all that, and a massive reviewer bias, you have one of the best games of all times.
