This game is not a tactical Dungeons and Dragons adventure. It's best viewed as a non-D&D game with a veneer of D&D paint, using some classic monsters and callbacks (feat names, item names) as well as the Forgotten Realms universe to set up a hack and slash adventure. Mow through monsters as the warrior or rogue or blow them to bits with your infinite-cast sorcerer and have a grand old time saving the world in one of the most generic ways possible. But hey! There's some lore flavor, and enough character to add some depth without being annoying. That being said, the fact that character development is basically the mains telling the other mains their share of the exposition feast might be a turn-off. What will definitely be a turn-off are three things, maybe four. The first: unskippable cutscenes. This gets annoying because they're pretty long, and all checkpoints go back to a cutscene which you must rewatch. Later in the game, reason three makes this worse. The second: If one party member dies, game over! Go back to a checkpoint. Since all checkpoints are cutscenes, reason one makes this annoying, and reason three amplifies it-- really this just bothers me because characters can occasionally die under AI control. The AI is quite competent, but when it fails, it's infuriating. The third: Poor checkpointing. You will almost certainly feel this on the later levels, and you will feel it on all levels if you're a glutton for punishment and choose Hard mode. Later levels will even send you back so far you have to rewatch more than one long, unskippable cutscene. The possible fourth: Repetitive combat makes up the majority of this game. Hack and slash and all that. There are some combos to mix it up, and the defense/riposte is very satisfying, but at the end of the day you have about six choices in combat. After seven levels (of ten), that's bound to get old, especially when you realize that most high level skills are just stronger versions of your low level skills.
