There's a lot to like about this game. The graphics are good, I've encountered no real bugs, and I've had only one game freeze. The character creation and levelling are fun, and the choices seem almost infinite. I had a lot of fun playing it for about three weeks. Then I realized that I couldn't stand playing it for one more minute, even with my fairly powerful level 50 Sorceror. Not one more minute. The problem is that the quests send you back to the same areas over, and over, and over. Unfortunately, a lot of the time that involves being mobbed by enemies that are at such a low level that you don't even get experience points for the hassle. At a certain point, it just becomes a yawnfest. Also, the faction quests repeat themselves. No, I don't mean every ten quests or so. I mean, immdiately, as in twice in a row. And it's all pretty generic. Go to X, kill Y, gain faction points. It never really feels like much of an accomplishment. And then you have to re-enter and re-clear multi-level dungeons full of low-level, non-experience-giving monsters just to get to your quarry. This one just falls short of the mark. It's a wonderful, mindless trime-waster, but nothing to get too serious about.
Man, there was a huge learning curve the first time I played this game. I never recommend it as a place to start for new gamers. But it's still one of my favourite games of all time, up there with BG 2 SOA and Deus Ex GOTY, and I play it at least once ever couple of years. The graphics are dated but the story, the sheer volume of quest, faction and chracter choices, and the fantastic world to explore are second to none.
I was looking through my older games and came across this one. What a blast I had when this first came out. I played it incessantly. Because you an replay the same character over and over, retaining all the levels from the previous game, I managed to get my character up to a ridiculous level 85. The exploring and combat are all fast-paced, and though the game has commonalities from one iteration to another (obviously the town setting and final boss fight are always the same) the dungeons themselves are randomly selected for each game. Sure, it's a Diablo-like game, but that's a good thing. Truly a good old game.
The first game that actually scared the living daylights out of me and the only one that did it very well, over and over, all through the game I'll have to replay this one of these days, if I can get up the nerve.
I want to love this game and at times I have, but overall it seems as though the ship travel and island exploring is in place to hide tha fact that there is really very little story actually going on. The party members are varied and many, but few of their quests seems to have anything like the dramatic impact of those in BG 2. and most of them have pallid endings that just sort of drop off. Because the game is set in an island world, none of the locations have anything to offer other than a quick "do this, go there, done and dusted." You get off your ship, resupply, explore the one or two locations on the island, many of which are merely scripted and involve skill checks, and then you'reoff again. And by "explore," I mean you see a little cursor beetling around the island -- you don't actually travel through the scenery. Because of this I get no sense of discovery, no interest in my surrondings. There are no wonderful big dungeons to explore, either. All in all the game skims the surface instead of delving deeply, and for this I cannot rate it higher than I have. It could have been so much more...
I absolutely loved this game when it first came out, replayed it immediately, and have come back to it from time to time. Like Divine Divinity and other games of this ilk, the action is fast and furious and the game world fun to explore. At the current price of $1.99 this is a steal that will give you many hours of hack-n-slash bliss.
I'm torn by this game. Yes, it has its roots in the old classics, but with notable differences. Don't believe the comparisons to Baldur's Gate. It just ain't so. First off, I don't remember ever finding the combat in the old Bioware games to be so difficult that I felt I couldn't beat the game, and at level 10 I'm getting to that point; endless mobbing by overpowered enemies just isn't fun after days and days of slogging through it, even on Easy. You can't explore, you can't experience the game world. All there is is endless combat. And you don't even get rewarded for it with experience. That's right; no experience points for all that slogging and fighting. Just stuff. The healing system is needlessly complicated; both Endurance and Health are affected in combat, but you can only heal Endurance, not Health, which seems like a rather arbitrary decision. Why not both? The worst sin for me is that in combat it is impossible to distinguish between your party members. In BG they all had different coloured circles; here they are all green, and so in combat I spend a lot of time trying to work out which character is where. When you're being mobbed by eight or ten enemies and the spell effects are flying thick and fast, that's a critical flaw. Finally, the story line isn't compelling enough to make me want to push ahead through this frustration. BG had me by the end of Candlekeep. Here I have no particular feelings for my character, my companions, or the game world. And that's what happens when you substitute combat for story.
