Divine Divinity is a really great experience overall despite some flaws that generally doesn't stop you from enjoying the game. STORY is your typical RPG story to save the world from evil type of thing with your typical races like human, elves, dwarves, orcs, imps etc. It contains interesting characters and some generally well placed cheeky humour. QUESTS are generally well done if you read and observe you surrouding without the need to be a detective. Side-quests are 50/50 I'd say some are interesting and others are pretty flat but it's still worth doing them all if you ask me for the extra rewards. The world is basically big maps that will be accessible for pretty much the entire game so while some quests will get resolved on their own if you progress too far you do have a reasonable timeframe to do them. WORLD is well built and fun to explore while you will meet a lot of the same enemies it's not that bad as fights are fast and you got to fill that big world with something after all. GAMEPLAY is like you would expect from an ARPG, however some controls aren't perfect and moving around can be a little funky also aiming a specific target in a group can be a little frustating. ATTRIBUTES and SKILLS are the 2 things that are not really well done in this game, like CONS and INT only offer HP and MP respectively but they offer so little that you don't want to invest much into them since you can enchant your gear with charm and the best ones offer 100 HP or 100 mana later on which is about 17-25 attribute points. So you are stuck investing most of you points in STR and/or DEX in most builds. While skills the more you progress the less skills you'll enjoy using since past a point enemies have so much resitance that it becomes tedious to be able to cast most spells and do well with them. The gameplay is just average with it's problems that you need to understand but it shouldn't spoil the fun, the meat is the story and the world around it with it's witty writing.
While Divine Divinity was a really fun experience but not without flaws, Beyond Divinity is one of those games that I can't really recommend that easily. STORY sounds cool on paper but is very slow for a long time and then right at the end picks up way too fast and then the game is over. The voice acting is pretty bad and some of the dialog feels a little subpar compared to the first game. Also the death knight pretty much participating in every conversations felt really forced sometimes and made wish he would just shut up instead of saying useless things. GAMEPLAY is quite finicky as you have to control 2 characters at the same time and the AI is going to be active on the character you do not control so you're always stuck with an idiot basically. Sometimes the controls were irresponsive when I was switching character and used my shortcut for a potion and it would do it on the one I wasn't using, it kind of led to a lot furstration in fights that were tight. SKILLS are numerous but given how little skill points you get it leads to heavy filtering of what will actually be useful and what isn't. You can refund your skill points at any time with gold so at least there is that. Also you have to pay trainers to unlock skills to be able to put points into them so that was a bit annoying given the distribution of trainers. You also get summoning dolls which sound cool but they are bad and you will just waste a lot of skills points for nothing. WORLD is by acts (there are 4) so you better wrap your quests up or they will stay unresolved when you reach the end of an act, most side-quests weren't that great but I did them for the extra exp but I hardly remember any of them now that I think about it. I know I wrote a lot of negative things about that game but it's not terrible it's simple that I feel like it could've been better, so pick it up if you really like Divinity otherwise you can easily skip to the next one and check online for what happened.
