I rarely go into games optimistic, and I'm a big fan of PB. I even liked Risen 2 which probably makes me some kind of troglodyte that eats their own turds for sustenance. I tried really hard to like this game, a lot. But however hard I try I just can't bring myself to enjoy it. The only difference in the combat between the hardest and the easiest is whether or not I feel like I am cheating, the enemies still take blows like Rocky and you go down like a spring flower trampled underfoot of a steam tank. It's janky, which I could tolerate if it was skillful but a Mass Effect jog around the enemy is the height of combat technique. I'm used to cheesing in games but I never feel rewarded for defeating an enemy, even the basic enemies that give you 5 xp for besting them can take chunks of health off of you draining vital health items. The Gothic-formula dictates that you should get an upgraded weapon before taking on any enemies, but the stat requirements are absurd. You need to fully commit to a weapon for 8 or so levels before you can use it, ignoring all other flavour, economic, or social skills which is contrary to how you gain quest experience. After a long time I managed to acquire some solid firearms only to learn they were no better than the starting bow. I can't imagine you're supposed to just restart the game if you make a bad build decision 8 hours ago. The combat aspect of this game is like removing your wisdom teeth. The setting however? Spectacular, love it. The factions are well rounded and interesting, the lore is interesting, and the world is delightful when you walk through a medieval village before finding a little piece of asphalt hidden in the dirt. It is "comfy". The writing is mediocre, none of the factions have great appeal which is unusual for PB, and the voice acting is "acceptable" at best. Elex fights you at every step to enjoy it, and eventually I gave up despite my best intentions. I guess I'm excited for Elex 2?
Fairly slow, kind of clunky, gameplay is largely deciding optimal value from deckbuilding and then playing solitaire with minor variation. It's not bad but there are better ways to spend your time, and if you are frothing at the mouth for a card game there's a plethora of options out there with more exciting content.
PoE1 was a great game that had a big bugbear attached to it: it was rather dull. Not much engagement to be found in a game that spends most of it running time establishing itself. The story had a great conclusion but up until that moment it was a decidedly average CRPG. PoE2 however flips that around, the setting is now in its stride so you get away from generic fantasy and into a reality where you inhabit fantasy-Caribbean choosing to side with one of the many trading companies, which are fantasy-Italy, fantasy-Fish, and fantasy-Fish-but-not-western, or just straight up pirates. You sail around in your ship, fighting ogres on the high seas, exploring ancient temples, and find everything from new gods, drunk elves, Lovecraftian horrors, and sudden murder mysteries. The story is engaging up until the conclusion, where I personally feel it could get a lot heavier on the philosophical and metaphysical elements like the first game did but it sort of just ends with no significant twist or turn. The gameplay is adequate, I found that the difficulty wavered between "Quite challenging" and "Enemies melt" but the locales, interactions, and items you find along the way made me want to keep playing. At no point did I want to stop. The game is per Obsidian standard very customisable in difficulty and UI which squashed most complaints I would have about it. The most notable thing to complain about would be that some undead enemies have mind-control abilities that make them exceptionally strong compared to other encounters, and finding scrolls or potions to counter-act their power is at best a chore and at worst impossible as the tooltips to not tell you what type of protection would help; looking at you, lich. Also your companions want to have sex with you almost the instant they see which I find very off-putting. Relationship drama is not my idea of fun. It can be ignored. Overall an excellent CRPG with only the smallest of issues, absolutely satisfying from start to finish.
I'll keep it brief as the debate around the difficulty is ongoing and sources should be easy to find. The game at its early stages is an imbalanced mess that would not pass certification in a serious company, it waivers between unchallenging and impossible, combat often devolves into reloading quicksaves because there is no other way to progress. The game does not offer you any solutions to this and dumps you into the game without the required classes to complete many encounters satisfactorly. The devs seem to think everyone having issues is playing on hard or higher, but in my experience there exists only two kinds of players: those that picked a class that instantly defeated the starting areas and those that didn't and their experience is based almost entirely around this. The game might be true to the vision of the developers, or it might be legitimately broken; hard to tell. Regardless I would only recommend this game to someone who enjoys 'slamming your head against the wall' difficulty or metagaming as standard. I have not played a worse CRPG, and I simply do not have the time or patience to invest frustration into "It gets better later". Review liable to change if the developers decide to add core rules, or at least a medium between "easy" and "normal", for the two are not descriptive of their challenge levels at all.
Main concern: Story. It is generic and still confusing. I like games with lots of conversation, this one suits that criteria, but it is often way too much. Ex.1 At one point halfway into the game you can ask a character "What did you see at the night of the murder?" and it takes them 3 text screens and 5 sentences to say "Here's a cutscene." Ex.2 Early in the game you are introduced to a large central story line and the character that explains this uses the better part of a novel, around 15 full text screens, to say what amounts to "That's the bad guy, you might want to stop him." This game is in DIRE need of an editor to cut the fat. When you go in: go in in the full knowledge you will have to learn speed-reading pretty fast. But aside from some minor bugs, that's about where the negatives ends. Almost all dialogue is beautifully voice-acted by a handful of VAs, even lowly NPCs (and animals) have full narration and flavour text and a lot of good comedy. This can not be understated in its enormity. The combat is amazing, where old RPG classics such as its predecessor of Divinity Divinity or Baldur's gate can get clustered and spammy in combat; D:OS goes for turn based RPG combat and it works brilliantly. The world of a classic RPG with the combat of XCOM. Time to think your decisions through and know how they will affect the following turns is great, and helps when the greatest gimmick of the combat is "Environmental Hazards", fire spells and abilities light people and the ground on fire, and smoke obscures vision, and you can manipulate the battlefield as such with each of the main elements. It's a blast in COOP, though if you're a savvy minmaxer it wont offer much teeth past the first act. For a game advertised as emulating freeform tabletop it does a good job with interactable environments with multiple ways to solve your problems. A generic and slovenly story made up for with great gameplay. Rough around the edges but great fun: an amazing coop game.
