Story: Taking place in Germany's low fantasy Dungeons and Dragon's Dark Eye, you the custom-generated, player character find yourself framed for murder and are on the run from the conspiracy that entrapped you with a party composed less-than-upstanding citizens. Starting with a paranoid, but battle-hardened dwarf warrior, a playboy mage that oozes of "Sean Connery 2.0" and a stoner, half-elf rogue. Basically your text-book, Chaotic/Neutral Good fantasy anti-heroes. Gameplay: Before I start, fair warning; this RPG is NOT beginner friendly! You're best off switching easy mode on when you're in a frustrating disadvadvantage. Not helped by the game's anti-grinding features that kept Knights of the Old Republic from being a perfect game in my book. Both equipment, items have to be purchased wisely and XP has to be spent carefully, and believe me, your character attributes are very broad like the source material. So my other advice is to manually save often till your confident your characters can adapt to any scenario. Combat is by far the most perfectly-translated Tabletop RPG experience I've ever seen. Combat-system wise it plays like a tactical RPG ala Fire Emblem where you move your characters into position displayed by hexes. But the most standout feature is the environmental interaction. Party members and enemies can slip or get stuck on wet or muddy hexes, hide behind archer barricades or pikes, or knock boxes or other loose objects down as makeshift barricades or time them to drop them on enemies, as well as destroy them when they block your path. Conclusion: A worthy contender to Baldur's Gate and an underratted RPG. If you want a darker-edgier Baldur's Gate experience or an RPG with Witcher-style grit, this is the game for you. If it had an outright more stellar tutorial to jump you in to the game's play style or a reasonable amount of grinding to save you frustration, I'd give it a full five stars.
If it wasn't for a bug that caused a crash I'd have given it a full five star rating. I've only started playing and this review is based on first impressions. Then again, better not to spoil anyway. I can tell this game is a forgotten OG Xbox masterpiece by scifi author Orson Scott Card of Ender's Game fame. It's an epic story of humans gaining "Force Powers" and fighting against hostile genocidal aliens. But unike in most Human on alien violence stories, say Halo there are friendly neighborhood alien homies that happily got humanity's back like bros. So tragic how great art pieces get overlooked because of low advertising budgets or at worst bribed critics.
