It's a lot like diablo. You wander around, get attacked by hordes of enemies, and click on them or point vaguely in their direction and pew-pew at them. Oh, and they all come back when you log off. As it goes on there are more and more grindy MMORPG elements - grinding for parts, grinding for special gear, grinding for faction approval. And the result is... meh. Some games you finish and it's emotional. This one, I finished and various faction-grind missions were left undone, and I thought "well, no need to bother with those, then". So why bother? Well, if you like diablo, and you really like a challenge, you could try turning the difficulty all the way up and seeing if it's a challenge? It might or might not be, IDK. Alternatively, the attraction is abnegation. You're tired, you're stressed, and you don't want anything difficult. You just want to take your brain out and pewpew at hordes of enemies for a while. In that case, this game has you covered.
I'm 120 hours in and don't seem close to finished, so you get a lot of game for your money. I'm also a pathfinder tabletop veteran, which helps. This game is designed around a specific Pathfinder Adventure Path about establishing a barony/kingdom, and to replicate that it consists of two things: 1) wandering around fighting monsters and looting stuff, like Baldurs Gate or many other RPGS, and 2) managing your barony. Both parts seem pretty important to the overall experience. The wandering around and fighting parts are competently executed using a slightly simplified subset of the Pathfinder (first edition) tabletop rules. These rules are not very intuitive and not very well explained (not that there's a lot that could be explained, given how complicated the tabletop is), so if you aren't familiar with Pathfinder as a tabletop game this could be a serious problem. However, if you are familiar with them, they basically work as you'd expect them to and the game seems to be a solid implementation, with real-time-but-pause-when-you-like gameplay. The barony-management part is functional, but again it is bad at explaining itself, and some things are remarkably irritating. For example, you set your advisors tasks to do, and the process of setting tasks takes no time, while the tasks themselves do take time and are time critical. But some of the barony activity keeps our main character busy for a fortnight and fast-forwards time for this period, meaning you can't even issue orders while you're doing it. This side of the game seems significantly weaker to me - there ARE tactics to it, but between hidden deadlines and poor explanations it's not really been fun for me and I would rather play a game without it. Overall then it's a narrow niche. You have to like the Baldurs Gate style of RPG, you have to like or at least get on with the Pathfinder ruleset, and you have to like or at least not mind the barony stuff. Within that... yeah, it's solid.
If this game was stable, it would be an evolutionary improvement on NWN 1. Unfortunately, like the first one, is is remarkably unstable. Unlike the first one, it does not seem to have been patched to stability. It crashes a lot, and sometimes crashes so hard it breaks task manager and requires a hard shutdown to clear. Beyond that, it's the usual fare: running around, getting in fights, cursing the AI, turning the AI off, NO turning the AI OFF, wait, why is the AI "off" but still acting? *facepalm*. If you can get past the stability and the AI, it has the classic "rest every fight because why not" syndrome, which doesn't play well with third ed's linear-fighters-quadratic-mages syndrome. The combat is also fluid, in a bad way - there are mobs of rogue-types who will happily run straight past your melee, AoOs be damned, to gank whoever they feel like ganking. But on the bright side, friendly fire is off by default, so you can fireball the ensuing furball until the enemy stop twitching... honestly, is this engaging or fun tactics? There's also the camera, which I found a minor annoyance, but still annoying - it spontaneously zooms in and changes angle a lot, and looking around for doorways is actually a chore at times. I quit in the city of neverwinter without ever getting into the locked off district. It's a shame, because there are bits in here that could have been good. But bits aren't enough. If it didn't crash all the time I'd give it two stars, and if the AI actually turned off when the button says it's off I might go as high as 2.5. I'm also playing Baldurs Gate 1 (enhanced) and Pathfinder Kingmaker at the moment, and both of those make this look like amateur hour.
I played it all the way through and I really regret having done so. First off, it's not really a game, per se. You get a bunch of cutscenes, then eventually you have an "exploration mode" where you can move around the house (or office) and poke a very small number of things (most of which are really boring), then you get to a "TAT" which is a bunch of stupid questions which frequently have no sensible answers. Then repeat. So there's not really any gameplay worthy of the name. So it's an interactive story? Well, kind of. The TAT answers do technically influence which ending you get, but the endings are all really similar (probably a budget thing to avoid having to film any more scenes), and there's no obvious connection between your answers and the endings. So it's not satisfying as an interactive story because you can't deliberately influence anything. But is the story good at least? Are the characters interesting? No. The story is nonsense, the characters are inconsistent to the point of being totally inhuman, and we spent a significant amount of the game hoping the finale would feature all of them dying. Also, the pacing is soooooooooooooooooo sloooooooooooooooowwwww it's agonising. The only reason I can think of to play this game is that you're desperately in need of soft-core porn and don't care about the terrible quality and script, but since this review is on the internet you've got better options.
