The on-boarding experience for this game is horrible. I think the devs got lost in the sauce of recreating a tabletop experience in a turn-based video game format. You have to sit and wait for enemy AI to take their turns, even when you can't see them. This can take up to a couple minutes during the first turns, where nothing is going on and you can't see anything or do anything. I went into my first battle and lost my leader because I could not get my archer to fire back at an enemy archer for 2 turns, no matter what I tried. Nothing in the tutorials or the game UI was explaining to me why I could not shoot back. I tried to find & pick up a warpstone that I could not mark on the map, I could not see physically no matter where I put the camera, and I tried scaling floors of a building to see if it was located higher out of sight but it was taking multiple turns just to cross 1 floor because it involved a jump roll that I kept failing. I couldn't find it. There's way too many numbers and modifiers flying around, characters can barely take more than 3 hits, and - in contrast with all the numbers/variables flying around - there's little reason to do much else than bunch up and focus-fire attacks on enemies. I'm a big fan of turn-based games, I still play Master of Orion 2, I've played most Fire Emblems, I greatly enjoy Larian Studios' games, I can't recommend this experience.
Absolutely cringeworthy 4th-wall-breaking main character dialogue writing referencing Disney/Dreamworks childhood movie characters is what made me bounce off the start to this game. The default audio is jacked up to 100 blowing out your eardrums when firing the game up for the first time - which isn't too unusual a sin for a game, but it's paired with the sin of multiple unskippable logo-movies before you can get to the main menu. The character animations in the cinematic sequence are awkward and not matched up to the audio, and there's glaring visual issues like low-res textures that stick out like a sore thumb. The ledge-grabbing is unecessarily clunky, the jumping is weirdly floaty. I just don't understand how this is an acceptable platforming or stealth game. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time & its sequels did the 3rd person platformer eons ago and much better, and there's any number of stealth games that show how it's done. Not worth a pickup.
Positives: - cool templar swashbuckling - variety of environmental sets to explore - interesting & surprisingly fluid character swapping mechanic - fairly surprising attention to environmental detail Neither good or bad: - storyline, has some neat moments, but utterly predictable - character leveling & powerups are straightforward, just about right to max things out by end of the game - somewhat dated graphics by 2011 standards Negatives: - dialogue writing is uninteresting, repetitive, obvious, and in some parts repulsive (It's a women thing!"). MC is a boring gary sue, sidekick girl is totally-not-lara-croft-stereotypical-dagger-rogue-with-sexy-makeup that feels utterly out of place with the themes & setting the game takes place in, in almost every way possible. All the villains are cartoonish, Roland is the most intriguing character and even his motivations are... mediocre at best - for some reason most of the XP in the game isn't from the most difficult part of the game, the combat, and has to be gotten from finding chests - speaking of the combat, it's frustratingly clunky & janky, most of the mechanics don't work well at all, best strategy winds up being default attack spam and blocking/kiting enemies because nothing else works right, ever, and half the enemies have unavoidable attacks (it would help if the dodging worked at all) - the game tries to learn hard on the combat encounters by constantly spamming them, and because the system isn't good, it sours the whole experience - the game settings are lacking customization options, there's no mouse bindings displayed at all, which contributes to the janky combat problem by being unable to make that smoother and more intuitive - in stark contrast to some fluid combat animations, dialogue scenes are laughably bad - it's obvious the studio chose to cut a lot of corners, the game concept deserves higher quality production
