I was very pleasantly surprised with this game! It absolutely nails the atmosphere - the music, the sounds, the writing (most of the time), the challenges you face - all of them fit the setting and the plot of the game. Do not expect an action RPG, do not expect high production values. It does what it's supposed to very well, however. The game does get overly verbose at times, especially towards the end. If you are a completionist, like I am, be warned that uncovering all of the story will most likely require multiple playthroughs, Playing as a mage feels a bit underwhelming (scholar is absolutely the way to go). Great title to enjoy at night, with a warm cup of tea on the side, when you need a bit of peace and quiet.
There's too much story for you to just ignore it, and yet too little of it for you to care about it or invest time in it. There are too few mechanics akin to Slay the Spire - treasures you find are uninspired, at best, question marks don't yield many interesting surprisies, the fights take significantly longer than StS and there's too much fighting in general. The game is also significantly worse than multiplayer version of Gwent (which is a fantastic card game, go check it out if you haven't played it yet!). The gameplay is slow-paced - you can't speed up the animations like you could in StS. Coupled with the fact that the main gameplay loop grows stale very quickly resulted in me getting bored of the game after a couple hours.
Apart from the D&D setting the game has very little in common with the originals and everything in common with D:OS. Mechanics might differ slightly, setting is theoretically different, but the game as a whole plays and feels like a bad re-skin of D:OS in almost all of its aspects - and it doesn't do the game any favours, I'm afraid. The combat is boring and takes ages to resolve due to it being turn based. Items are incredibly weak (compared to BG2 especially) - they lack any thought or soul, all of them seem to be randomized and the world is filled with useless junk making looking for new items a chore rather than pleasure. The story so far lacks focus and dialoges are *nothing* alike the originals either - most of them are filled with wacky one-liners and quickly finish. I agree with almost no of the design choices made for this game and have lost any remnants of hope that I will like it. On top of all that Larian seels an unpolished, unfinished game trying to cash in on nostalgia for full price, esentially asking people to be beta testers (the game is very buggy, obviously) and pay for that "privelage". On the flip side, the music is good, although it, too, has little in common with the more epic and bombastic soundtrack of the previous installments.
