For £17 is a bit steep for a short game but definitely worth around £12, at £5 it's a steal. It's a very fun game, not that hard if you take your time, it's only problem is it's very short, though that's it's charm. It feels like the base game got cut short in development and ended up a short boss rush, a good example of this being the grapple hook which is used once then never again. Thankfully the devs took into account complaints from the fans of the game, and added a free DLC update, which adds 3 more masterfully crafted bosses with new mechanics and weapons that further enhance the gameplay style. I can honestly say the game isn't that hard, it's just challenging. If I'd say dark souls is around an 8/10 in difficulty, this would be a 6. Every boss move is heavily telegraphed with plenty of visual indicators, so the problem in difficulty in this game isn't reflexes, it's recognizing the boss patterns and reacting appropriately. The key to this game is keeping up bloodthirst, with the amount of healing they give you in the first playthrough it's possible to ignore 90% of boss mechanics and just keep dpsing. The core play style is to dodge away from the boss' attack, charge in, combo attacks rinse and repeat. It's worth noting perfect dodging which means hitting boss attacks with your i-frames restores stamina faster. Then the different playstyles come into effect which is as close to a difficulty slider that the game needs. There is counter which builds up shields, increasing fault tolerance with counter itself building up so much shield it's essentially a very long i-frame. Then there's windslash most about building up mobility, dealing passive damage then going in for a large dmg spike. Lastly berserk slash which simply increases dmg, increasing the better you play. The DLC added weapons of which three are thematic weapons to three playstyles and one extra hammer, but they can be used in any style and thus add further variation to the playstyles.
I couldn't get into this game at all, there seems to be no tutorial, or I'm cancelling the tutorial when I'm trying to continue it, in which case the controls of this game are severely unintuitive. Added to this the game crashes if you try to tab out. This game seems to have a lot of depth to it, but I'll never get there because it's way too hard to get into. I spent so much time reading into the various tabs, I barely played much of the game, I think at least. There's a lot of tabs I keep running through in game, most of them are useless for me at this stage, and I can't figure out what is useful to me. 50 turns in and I still don't have a decent economy going or much useful research. The game starts you off with more resources than you need, which ultimately leads to me having no idea how to build an economy in this game. The game looked like it would be streamlined based on the gifs, but it seems far more stricter on the turns. Outside resources weren't much help, I found one beginners guide which didn't help much, a gameplay video where the guy playing it was confused as I am, and the discord that didn't really have much help either. Ultimately I wouldn't recommend buying this game as it's way too unintuitive and too big of a time sink to find out whether the game good or not.
I bought this game, thinking since it was essentially the big recommendation for the GOG sale and boy did I regret it. Firstly the game is really buggy and constantly crashes, can't tab out or it will crash, and there are constant graphics glitches which then cause the game to crash. For example items spawned after every battle glitch out and all items then are on one square, then its a coin flip whether the game crashes, and this is on every battle. This game is really unfun for a number of reasons. It draws from tactical rpgs, which usually have more than one character, you only have one which is way too little for the number of enemies the game is throwing at you. The difficulty is way too high with you only having 20 hp vs enemies with the lowest hp being around 6 which is two hits to kill from most attack skills and more often than not enemies have around 20 hp themselves. Added to that is some mobs have armour so 8 dmg from a skills that loses 1 dmg per hit, will become 4 then 3. Most status skills are useless, they do less than pure damage skills will and you dont have the time to wait to use them out because enemies will quickly do large amounts of damage to you. Most pure dmg skills have accuracy modifiers so if you miss on the first hit, you will be quickly surrounded and die. The game is way too grindy for very little payoff, grinding for about 10 missions if you're lucky will maybe give +10% dmg which is tiny or +4 hp to 20 base hp. The skills you can grab either seem to be randomly generated, so you get a choice of 2 from however many, this means you can't build a good build to try things out. added to this there are only 4 skill slots, 1 melee, 1 ranged, 1 buff and 1 special so there's no good way to combo a large amount of these skills, which are useless anyway since only one or two are decent. There's way more I could complain about in this game, but space is running out. I think it suffers from lack of play testers who aren't the dev.
Rather than the masterpieces of art Planescape and BG are, this one feel more like the kind of adventure you have when you sit around a table with a DM and your friends, minus the friends in single player mode. Overall a fun game, at least beamdog learnt from the FUBAR with their added OCs in BG and didn't add any to this. For future reference you can get the original edition of IWD. To do this you go to the game in your shelf and left click on it. Above the big blue gog galaxy download button there are three dropdown tabs, system, language and more. Go into more and there will be an item called SERIAL KEYS, click on this and you will be shown a link. Copy and paste this to a new tab and you can use this code to add the original version of BG1, BG2 and icewind dale to your owned games.
The crappy and useless beam dog mods downgrade this masterpiece. Everything added other than their npcs can be done with free online mods which work better. Their NPCs stick out like a sore thumb and are just generally badly written. I only bought this because gog removed the old original page, you can still get the original game added to your account, credit to VADIM_USOVYCH. To do this you go to the game in your shelf and left click on it. Above the big blue gog galaxy download button there are three dropdown tabs, system, language and more. Go into more and there will be an item called SERIAL KEYS, click on this and you will be shown a link. Copy and paste this to a new tab and you can use this code to add the original version of BG1, BG2 and icewind dale to your owned games.
The crappy and useless beam dog mods downgrade this masterpiece. Everything added other than their npcs can be done with free online mods which work better. Their NPCs stick out like a sore thumb and are just generally badly written. I only bought this because gog removed the old original page, you can still get the original game added to your account, credit to VADIM_USOVYCH. To do this you go to the game in your shelf and left click on it. Above the big blue gog galaxy download button there are three dropdown tabs, system, language and more. Go into more and there will be an item called SERIAL KEYS, click on this and you will be shown a link. Copy and paste this to a new tab and you can use this code to add the original version of BG1, BG2 and icewind dale to your owned games.
I didn't really understand all the down votes until I got the DLC, thinking I was just donating a few quid rather than buying a DLC. Thing is, there is barely any use to the pets so far. I woulda rather have had the boosts be permanent rather than temporary, feels like I didn't get anything at all in the end, no combat pets and the buffs are temporary and I haven't found these so called in game treats. But oh well, I'll just treat it as a donation to animal charity, still wouldn't recommend buying it as a DLC, maybe adopt a zoo animal and get some pictures or something.
I like many of the reviewers below was looking forward to this game that claimed to be a sequel to Planescape: Torment, luckily I didn't put any money into it. Planescape:Torment is a masterpiece and I recommend people to play it, this game is just a cash grab marketing on people's nostalgia for planescape. There are so many things wrong with this game it's hard to begin to describe it. One of the main problems with this game is all the various bugs, one of the very first quests doesnt work for example so you know how much time they went through the whole thing. Another is the clunky and boring turn based game system, that ultimately isn't fun or challenging, if they wanted to make a point based click adventure, they should have done that. I think a large part of the terrible game system if half the choice they they went back on the previous RTwP system and went for turn based combat, which is fun if you base a game around it, but this game is narrative based and thus the combat is boring as heck. Then the worst bit for me is the story, it comes off as both boring and an inferior attempt to copy planescape. The companion writers seems to subscribe of the school of weird, where the weirder something is the more interesting it is, sadly this is not true and pretty much every companion is a bore, none of them are cool, none of them you enjoy getting into the party. A good example of the opposite of this is FFVII, where I feel bad taking someone out of the party because I enjoy every character. Ultimately the game is boring, feels massively unpolished and the story is a wall of text, which while I enjoy reading in games, it really wasn't interesting enough for me to bother with more than once. The game also doesn't have any replay ability especially with the area of it being so small, unlike the prequel, where every route, evil good, lawful chaotic etc. is so much more interesting.
worth getting if you already own tavern keeper and enjoy it, but doesn't fix the extremely grindy late game. Zombies farms can't automate farming, neither the tavern cooking or home cooking stations allow for automation or even basic queuing function for ranked items, so the several hundreds of individual food items needed for tavern events have to be crafted individually, while the cooking stations can only queue one item and you have to come back after they're done to queue another. Marble crafting also remains tedious.
Sadly as many other gamers have pointed out this game is an unfinished mess, including the DLC. The first 20-40 hours are somewhat playable even if someone repetitive and grindy, but clearly the endgame is unfinished. Firstly the obligatory dungeon exploration is as advertised, clearly tacked on by the devs who found their content was lacking, the dungeon is not fun and presents no real challenge, and once it's done, it's done, there is no replay-ability to it. In addition to this the endgame crafting gets to the point where automation is impossible, your zombie farms always lose an amount of seeds which makes you have to constantly have to keep farming things manually. Ultimately once your items have ranks the game has no ability to automate crafting whether it's the marble crafting for your graveyard or cooking for the tavern events. The DLC does make the game far more playable, but this game is not worth playing.
