JFC Owlcat! I really want to like your games, the story and mechanics are great (when they work). At first I was happy that at least this game seemd better optimized than Kingmaker (i.e. no random frame-rate drops). However, even in the "Enhanced Edition" there's still so many bugs: - Whole classes/archetypes that are broken beyond memeability (Blood Kineticist). - Quests that don't complete (Gwerm's Mansion). - Weird animation glitches (mounted combat). You guys really need a team of editors to pair your games down to something you can actually deliver in the timeframe you set yourselves without this year(s) long extended beta/early access phase. Also, fix your GOG patchers so that they don't delete important files needed for the game to run (necessitating a complete reinstall).
This game was made by a team of 7 people, so don't go in expecting something huge. It's a short game with Sekiro-like (not Souls-like!) combat. Parry timing is not as instant as Sekiro and so takes a bit of getting used to. The game has a Nioh-like mission structure including side missions that take place on variations of main mission stages with different objectives. The combat is mechanically generally solid though I did have some issues with the game overall: 1) The "feather crit parry" is really flakey (or poorly explained). Sometimes enemies will just poise through it and hit you anyway. The winged slap variant is better but generally I found it better to ignore this mechanic in favour of the "Step and Jump" (Mikiri) counter that works fine. 2) Even low-level enemies have a bit too much poise. Plague Weapons with the "break Super Armor" ability are OP. 3) Some minor spelling errors (e.g. Geenhouse Key). 4) Enemies clipping into walls during execution animations. 5) Story is told predominantly through loading screens and bits of paper scattered around levels. And FYI there's no voice acting (I personally don't mind this but YMMV). Overall, I really enjoyed it. Want more! Would of liked to see some kind of extra boss rush missions.
A faithful translation of Pathfinder DnD mechanics with interesting story and well-written companions. A few major gripes that prevent me from giving it a higher score. It suffers from a common problem in DnD CRPGs, in that early game (levels 1-4) combat is EXCRUCIATING, due to the sheer volume of combat your characters are expected to engage in and the lack of resources at your disposal. Unless you've min-maxxed your character you'll have low AC, HP and BAB meaning you'll get hit a lot, killed a lot and have trouble hitting anything back. Also at low levels you can put as many points as you can into a skill and max out its associated stat and you'll still fail a check because "dice says no". Get used to F5ing and F8ing a lot. Once you hit level 5 and onwards, you've got some toys to play with and can actually make a mistake without it ending your career and reliably pass a few skill checks. The game starts to open up and becomes actually fun when you can give poor F5 and F8 some well-deserved rest. The other major problem is the poor optimization that results in noticable FPS drops even on high-end hardware, particularly when the game tries to render fire animations for some reason, or when there are a lot of corpses on-screen, or sometimes just randomly for the hell of it. The game looks nice, but not "that" nice.
