2006 or so was a bit of a weird time for games. Game writing hadn't truly come into its own yet. Not too many professional writers were lining up to pen video game stories, and even then, it would be years before writers truly codified the skills & style needed specifically for video games. Even today, a lot of professional writers have trouble transitioning to writing for games, when they decide to enter the industry. I say this primarily because, well, the story is bad. The writing is garbage. There aren't characters so much as props, and instead of a narrative you're presented with a series of tropes haphazardly strung together. It's a good plot/premise, though. Mechanically speaking, the game is buggy and unpolished. Graphical bugs, pathfinding issues, input bugs, quest bugs... You're going to encounter A LOT OF BUGS. But! The game is very much playable and... Kind of enjoyable, actually? Graphically, the game is a knockout. It's an early attempt at cellshading that works incredibly well. There's a lot of great looking assets here, from environments to mobs. The weapons are a bit hockey (glowy WoW-esque weapons), the armors are pretty cool, the character customization is a bit light but still distinct (with some interesting species choices to choose from). Combat... Feels off. Like they were trying to be both Neverwinter Nights and Diablo at the same time, but failing to nail down what made either of those successful. The result is a sort of dumbed down version of KOTOR. It's fairly easy to exploit, too. One gripe is your companions do love to die, which necessitates putting points in Resurrect (and INT, enough to actually have the power to revive them) or fast traveling back to a city. You can't really do anything else to bring them back to life. Anyways, I'm having fun with this game. It's a shame the dev shutdown, because this would be a fun IP to revive. It's neither Diablo nor Arcanum, but it's worth playing if you like cRPGs and aRPGs.
