I generally enjoy Diablo clone style games and RPGs, having played a decent chunk of Diablo 2 back in the day and more recently games like Torchlight, Path of Exile, Warhammer Chaosbane, also a bunch of older isometric RPGs like Icewind Dale that I keep replaying over the years and such, so I love older RPGs. This time I was disappointed. I usually pick a ranged class, a mage or a hunter, but do not shy from melees either with a tanky knight at times, and I always feel excited to sink my teeth in and explore the new skill trees and experiment with my builds and strengthen my character. This time around I felt like trying out a rogue class expecting poison and traps, blinks out of combat, throwing daggers and chemical grenades, disengaging and maybe circles of spinning knives on short cooldown. 4 hours in and I am level 11, jaded and bored, and still waiting to find a skill I can unlock that will rejuvenate my interest in continuing my playthrough. The leveling up system is both simple and confusing. Restrictive, with a myriad of uninteresting skills you have to keep investing in to unlock the next tier that might be more interesting, when you are allowed to unlock tier 2 skills a few hours later when you hit the required level 20 or 40 and 10 mastery points in the appropriate tier 1 skill tree so you can linear move on to tier 2 or stabby stabby simple stab, now your stab tier 2 marks opponents for damages at 10 marks or something. There is a rage system that allows you to choose extra effects on your next ability usage from the ability enchantments you HAVE INVESTED POINTS TO. For example you have a stab that throws poison splinters around on hit, you can invest points on its secondary actives for a rage effect of it throwing 3 extra splinters when used with 1/3 of your rage, or for the splinters to travel 1 meter further, or for the splinters to pass through enemies and not stop at 1 enemy hit. All of those actives should have been passives to enchant the skill from its bare bones form. Meanwhile the passives are equally lackluster, 10 damage bonus to the first hit after turning invisible, your NPC companion attacks heal you for 0.9 percent of your max hp. Because none of the skill trees seemed good, I started investing my companion’s levels to a passive aura that increased the chance of me finding magic item drops, which seemed good at first giving a 5% or 10% chance increase at tier 2 only for it to decrease diminishing returns later on, you inspec a whole level so your magic gear chance goes from 12% to 15%. Got an epic an epic gear drop, it scales with my level so epic gear level 7 at the time, the stats are slightly better than blue rarity gear. Then you get to the user interface and I just don’t want to play anymore. Because the game had this washed out, desaturated hues that made all details get lost in a graysh smudge (even with the HD texture pack installed) I tried upping the saturation from the options menu. I failed miserably, couldn’t adjust the bar with my controlled, no matter how I tried to move the saturation bar to the side with the arrow buttons, the controller pads, the tab altering triggers, while holding the choice button or not, nothing worked and I kept accidentally moving down to another option or changing tab. The item comparison is also a mess and the stat change preview lies to you so you are better off trying to figure yourself if that 400 gold worth item that gives passive +5% bonus to all resistances, main bonus poison res 14, armor 23 is better than rare item worth 600 gold with flat 14 poison and armor res and 1 ability point bonus to the character stat that gives 0.5 armor bonus is superior to the previous as the game indicates with gold value and a green stat increase in your armor stat if equiped. Long story short the leveling up feels meaningless and unfun, restrictive and unintuitive with endless navigation between characters and tabs to invest xp points in underwhelming check trees.
