- Combat: The combat was done pretty well. Quite fun and challenging, especially early on- Only having 2-3 heroes was an interesting feature that made it so you'd often have to take risks in order to win. - Balancing and bugs: If you activated a story item from the wrong side, enemies would spawn on top of your chars, kill them in their first turn and cause game to freeze (probably because char was scripted to say something) The game also had similar issues with getting stuck on your hero's turn if he was downed by damage at the start of his turn. I generally like "Iron man" mode in games but, due to bugs, It would have been literally impossible for me with this one. The worst bug I ran into (and the reason I'm giving this 2 instead of 3 stars) was in the arena, where you have to play 5 encounters without being able to save. After every round the game had like a 30% chance to simply freeze up and not take controller input anymore, meaning I would have to load up a save and redo all 5 rounds of combat (rounds taking about 5-20 minutes each). I probably spent about 5 hours just hoping the game wouldn't freeze on round 4, again. Needless to say I nearly quit the game then and there. - Plot and writing: The writing generally is on a VERY YA-novel-level. Flat, clichéd charaters in a generic dystopian world. All of them trying to be the darkest, broodiest and edgies of them all. Well, except for Diggs. - Diggs An amalgam of every bad 90s era action movie trope of the sassy black sidekick. You know, the one who says "Shiiiiet" a lot. In an allstar cast of unlikable assholes, somehow DIggs took the cake and easily wins most annoying (and maybe, kinda, probably racist) playable character. I'm sure the developers didn't intend the character to be this way though. The tone of the rest of the game is actually pretty good about racist stereotypes. But somehow the writers who were going for lovable extroverted sidekick-vibes ended up with the abomination called Diggs.
The story and the initial gameplay really had potential. Story was set-up to be an epic struggle between insane warlords, a mysterious, all-powerfull god-overlord and insignificant old you. It delivered during act 1. Act 2 was decent and I really looked forward to the conclusion. Then Act 3 happened in a blink and you were left with kind of just uncerimoniously murdering everyone, never as much as seeing the mysterious overlord or their armies. I'm probably not going out on a limb to assume that production of this game was rushed and the developers had a larger game in mind than they had the chance to deliver. Even still, I liked it for what it was and some of the characters were memorable, gameplay was engaging and I could have definitely played another 50 hours without getting bored of it. The Bastard's Wound DLC was worth it, if only for the companion quests. The new DLC area was pretty bugged and I couldn't finish the main questline; at least not without replaying the whole thing again, which I very much didn't do because it was rather boring (as of March 2023)
So, the DLC was kind of bad. The "puzzles" were simply an annoyance and the story I already forgot about again. But for everyone buying this in 2023 I just wanted to give this warning: - SPOILERS If you, like any normal person would, interact with the murals before you reach the lowest level and talk to "Wolf-talon-woman-whatever" it can (and did) trigger a bug where you can't progress the dialogue and the DLC quest remains unsolvable. No Patches as of March 2023.
