An excellent implementation of turn based combat. There is a wealth of options for character class, damage types, status effects, weapon types, environmental hazards, etc., and the way they all interact creates a huge variety of viable tactics. All of the character class options seem pretty well balanced. Some combinations work better together than others, but they are all equally useful and fun on their own. By the end of the game each character will likely gain enough skill points to have at least a fair number of skills in a secondary class, and depending on how specialized they are maybe even a third or fourth. The difficulty was tuned pretty well in my opinion; every time I felt it getting a little easy I would get to a new area with more challenging encounters. The non-combat parts of the game are also enjoyable. Exploration is fun and rewarding, and the puzzles are usually worthwhile. There are a sufficient amount of player decisions to be made, although they don't always affect the story. The story itself is fine; it gets the job done and provides motivation for what you are doing, but it doesn't go too far beyond that. My biggest gripe with this game is that it puts its worst foot forward. After getting a taste of the combat in the tutorial, you are thrown into the first major city for a lot of story and exposition. If you don't stumble into the graveyard, you could potentially spend a couple hours talking to NPCs before you get back into any combat. Fortunately, once you make it through that area the story/combat balance gets a lot better (right up until the very end, where there is a tedious dungeon puzzle in front of the final boss). Overall I would definitely recommend this game if you enjoy turn-based tactical combat and a wide variety of character ability options. It is a very long game, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.
This game just doesn't have a lot going on. It is almost entirely dialog, but none of it does anything to get the player invested in the game. Even the big events of the story that feel like they have the potential to be exiting just lead to more empty conversations with flat characters. Combat doesn't seem to be anything special either, although I can only base that off of the tutorial since in my 2 hours of gameplay I never even got the chance to fire my weapon. For what is supposed to be a 3-4 hour game I would have expected some action to have happened by then. All in all there isn't much to say about this game except that it just wasn't fun.
This game is hard and will take some practice to "git good," but at the end of the day it just feels tedious and repetitive. The levels all feel the same, just with re-skinned enemies. The four weapons and magic types have the same issue; the differences between them are too slight to matter. There is only one attack “combo” you can do, but it devolves into just mashing the attack button in the same three press pattern all the time. That being said, the blocking, dodging, and countering system in this game does feel good, and learning how to defend against the different enemies feels very rewarding. The visuals and music are both very good, and they both play into a cohesive heavy metal theme. The rest of the game just seems to fall short, there are no items to collect, no secrets to find, and no upgrades to choose. The levels are just a lot of flat surfaces to fight on, but never become anything more than that. There are some “traps” that you have to avoid, but all of them are so obvious that they become trivial, especially since they never seem to be placed where combat takes place. There is just not enough variety in any part of this game to keep the player motivated, and despite doing a few things well there isn't enough here to recommend it.
