This is a very hard game to review, because in my opinion it has some aspects that warrant a 5-star review (and those dominate my overall impression), but also some things that could easily warrant a 2-star review. Let's start with the good: The game has amazing writing and character development, I don't think I've ever liked a video game character as much as I liked Bea. My love for this character meant I needed, I think, to sacrifice some character development on the other ones which is a shame, but well worth it. The graphics are incredible as well, they're simple but very charming and never grow old during the game (which is pretty long, at least in my playthrough). When you're out and about in town you can run into secrets or people hanging out in some pretty strange places, and in this way the game encourages exploration. In short, before moving on to what I didn't like about the game, it's a fantastic and immersive story. You need a little patience, especially in the beginning, but once you get a bit further in it's a very rewarding experience. OK, on to the problems. First of all I think anyone going in to this should expect sort of a visual novel rather than a game. The choices one can make are often almost identical and I don't think they impact the story at all. There are no puzzles (well, almost) to solve or anything particularly challenging apart from some optional elements. The first part is extremely slowly paced and I think about half the game I could swear that this was gonna be 2/5 because very little was happening. Sure I got to know the characters a bit and I did start liking them very early on, but there's little to no story for a good 1/2 or even 2/3 of the game in my opinion. The last part however, once the story gets going, is packed. So pacing is a huge issue in my opinion, to the point that it's almost game breaking. All this said, play it! It's got some very significant faults, but all-in-all it will be an unforgettable experience.
I really wanted to like this game, the theme is amazing the graphics are great. Despite requiring a GeForce-card the game ran very smoothly with the integrated graphics cirquit on my Macbook Pro. I had expected some problems but experienced none whatsoever. The cities look pretty realistic and the dialogue is interesting. Here are my main two problems: - Combat is super messy. The ranged combat is fun and I wish there was more of it, but when I played I was stuck with a crossbow (which has a really long reload time and being attacked cancels the reload) and a sword. The sword fighting system is pretty sophisticated, similar to the new game For Honor where you have to attack and parry from different sides depending on where the attacker is coming from (parry is automatic by default though, thank god). The way you direct your attack is to pull the mouse up/down/left/right when attacking - but apart from attacking it also moves your screen and this is what makes it messy. Basically to fight well you need to constantly be moving your view around which also makes it much harder to follow your opponent and know where to attack. It's also pretty difficult to actually pull off in practice. For this reason I really wish the view would stay still while you were attacking. - No scaling of difficulty. My first mission in the game was to hunt down a number of bandits, I was given 100 monetary units (dinars I think?) to hire five men. Apart from that I had like 200 in starting cash. To hire ONE man cost 200, another one 100, another two 1000+. Where on earth do I find these stacks of cash? OK, so I failed that mission but still had a party. We engaged a small group of bandits and lost. From what I can tell there's no difference between early game and late game combat, in either case you'll be mercilessly thrown into battle on horse back trying to do the weird combat maneuvers at lighting speed.
