I'll always be grateful to how this game was one of the ones brought life back to the crpg genre. Memorable encounters, and having two pcs you have to create and share their special circumstances with one another was interesting to see play out especially when deciding how they interacted with one another. Tactician mode provide a fun challenge as well. It's not a masterpiece like BG3 was but this game was a very important step in getting Larian towards BG3 and strengthening their studio.
So starting off with the often complained about armour mechanics. A lot of people say that the best way to play the game is to go with a all physical or all magical party to nuke one "armour health bar" and then just kill the opponents. I did a split part of physical/magical and honestly it maybe wasn't optimal but it was not a issue at all. Perhaps it was because I had a summoner in my play through and the summons are so strong in this game. Still if you want to have a diverse party of physical and magic types you can do so and still beat this game in tactician mode. Not a fan of the armour mechanics still but its not horrible. Now the round robin initiative order that I truly hate. Initiative works in such a way that you can never have two of your pcs go back to back unless their a minion summon. It makes having initiative gear on more than one character useless. Narrative wise the game's biggest flaw is how they handle PC dialogue where it's all descriptors of what the pc says not actually dialogue such as " *Tell him you've changed your mind.* " The idea was that this was to allow you to role play your own dialogue of what your character would say in that moment rather writing out spoke dialogue. I'm sure there are those that were fans of this but it never clicked for me. Thankfully all the games other abilities and interactions more than cover up those faults. And when Larian went to do BG3 and stuck with the 5e ruleset so no weird armour system or imitative order and went back to doing normal dialogue again.
A lot of the hazards in the dungeons where to get across the area you have to run through these lighting walls or spiked blades them just taking the damage. A few of the areas there were ways to bypass these hazards going around them or activating and only having to go through one of these traps and then a portal bypassing the rest but I started to get annoyed seeing another lighting wall and the stopping to switch my characters gear to lighting resistance items and then running through the walls and healing. I hope for Legend of Amberland III there will be new mechanics added on to deal with these hazards maybe replacing them with traps and adding classes to detect and deal with said traps.
It's a very simple blobber/dungeon crawler but when you get in the flow of combat and dungeon exploration you can just end up sinking so much time. Great game to play when you want to chill and relax.
The entire SSI series of D&D games are great and I have a fondness for my time spent playing the Savage Frontier games. But FURA is the real star of the show with all the custom campaigns you can find online for it capturing something that a lot of other D&D video games forget to copy from the tabletop. Letting dungeon masters home brew and create their own adventures and stories to share.
This game captures the best of the settings and stories you can get from D&D. The combat is the weakest aspect of the game compared to the other infinity engine titles especially Icewind Dale series but is perfectly serviceable and I hand fun even when engaging in combat. There is a issue where click on the environment to get the descriptions on the "?" marked items doesn't display if your zoomed too far out. There is at least one area necessary to get the ? descriptions to display to continue on the quest.
A fun shooter with good level design and it was nice to play with with a bit more charm and colour to it. I just wish there were more weapons in the game.
Great combat encounters and some fun bits of story but overall not great. I'd give the game without mods a 3/5 but with custom campaigns it bumps it up easily. I'd recommend picking up Solasta and skipping its campaign if you also get the Lost Valley DLC and play that one instead.
A great campaign with multiple memorable encounters I still remember the time I cast enlarge on my two front line party members to block off the hall way from the north and south while casting grease in front of the both of them to cause the priest of earth that were trying to hit me on both sides to slip and fall as my front lines butchered them with my ranged attacks in the middle turning that hallway into a meat grinder. I'd rate it five stars if it were not a fact that you need mods like Temple+ to run the game well. But even then you can tell how Troika put love into this game as much as they could. This games tutorial actually has different ending slides depending on if the wizard you rescue is alive or dead at the end of it. The only thing that beats this game is running the actual thing on tabletop.
Going through the adventure and having to make choices as to what factions you can side with was great and captured much of what I love when playing on the tabletop.
