Okay so maybe I didn't get the best impression of dnd after playing IWD but this changed everything. The developers did a great job of making this inerpritation of planescape to be as ungenaric as possible. There are no elves, dwarves or haulflings to be found, no dragons (as far as I know) and no 14th certury midevil fantasy garbage. The story in realy good if not necacarily the most origional. The character are diverse and uniqe (the namless one being my favorite). The ar style ozzes dark abstrat fanfasy as aposed to the borderline campy ice win dale and NWK motive. The writing is supirior and stays true to the planescape universe and the intersections of the planes. Despite the praise there are big flaws. I hope you like mods as you'l need em to squash the onslught of GBBs (game breaking bugss) I encountered involving npcs and crashing. Also it's possible to break a stoy mission just by droping a seemingly pointless junk item (literaly called junk) and have to reload. And don't get me started on the stale clusterF combat. It's hard to get your character to attack properly and often get stuck in odd ways. Any way I recomend this for all Dnd... No I recomend this to all RPG fans that perfer stary over repatitous hack and slash.
Why? Why put this of all games on your site. System shock 2, Myst 4 and any other game would have BEEN FINE I played this years ago and found everything from game breaking bugs to bad controls even for the time and on top of all this a story with tons of plot holes. This is the worst tomb raider game ever made period! I recomend this to no one, not even the creepiest of Lara Croft fans.
(note: played steam vrshion) I'm on crash number 8 right know and only level 2 so this is more of a first impression. It seems Arkane studio's ambition to create what is basicly Ultama Under World 3 minus Lord British and the Avatar. The atmosphere still holds up to this day as very few games try to make the player feel alone and despite many NPC the vibe is still present. But unfortunetly I have to adress why I only gave it 3 stars. For starters Theres the FATAL MEMORY ERROR which happens way too often (suposedly a fix called Arx Liberattatis fixes this but I couldn't get it to work). Also the spell system is clunky and impracticle for combat (if not effective at times) some time it will mistake one rune for anouther or fail completely. Melee is better but hasn't aged as well often lacking in physical colishion detection and odd handeling. I can't say much about the story other then your actions dictate what happens rather then dialoge unlike other RPGs. But with that said the main character is thuroly unlikeale as he often refuses to help people at first without any player input. I recomend this to Fans of games like Fallout new vegas, Ultama underworld, Ledgend of Grimrock and mole people.
And fans of both those games and the rest of the divinity series should by this ASAP, even if you hate Diablo, Borderlands, Torchlight and Titan Quest (you know who you are) you should give this a try. From the outset the Conan like high fantasy mixed with deep mist and lighting grabed me and didn't let go. Despite coming out in 2002 the hand drawn style of it's visuals are very easy on the eyes even now 10 years later. As for the gameplay, if uv'e played a one Diablo clone uv'e played them all, except this. The depth in the game far exeeds the rest of the genre, the loot (although more sparce) is quite satisfying, the element (or illushion) of choice even comes into play at times and the robust interactivity with the enviornment makes for some good old puzzle solving which is often absent in Diablo clones. But why 4 stars not 5? Well I've encountered several bugs with the save system as it claims to constantly coruppt (note the game didn't work on my desktop WIN7 but worked on my laptop WINXP, aparently it dosent instal correctly with certain knew graphics cards). Also repairing can ocasualy cause the user interface to disapear causeing a reload. But I've sufferd through worse in terms of rough edges (yes Fallout new vegas, Skyrim, Seven kingdoms 2 and tTwo worlds 2 I mean you) and the good heavely out ways the bad. Also note the score in the this game is to die for as it has a hauntingly calim vibe for it's beutiful out door areas and inviting melodys for dungeons. Unfortunetly the localized voice acting is AWFUL! I sure hope your fluent in En-grisq because thats all the npcs speak. It's a shame there aren't any other language tracks avalable like in the Witcher 2 so one dosen't have to suffer what sounds like a level 35 shamen trying to pertray Piece Blosum from mid summer nights dream after getting kicked in the crouch. Also note there isn't much in the way of mod support or multi player :( which is a shame considering game like and including Diablo often benifit from it. But none the less this game (along with Divinity 2 the dragon knight saga) has introduced me to a new series of wonderful Action RPGs (other games include Beyond divinity and the pending Divinity origional sin).
