I am very taken with this excellent game. It's a party-based RPG, top-down view, stylistically similar to Pillars of Eternity or Baldur's Gate, but in a different world. The party is 4, instead of 6, which helps quite a bit with feeling combat can become too micro-managey. PROS: -I love both the world - a genuinely dark and evil world in an RPG, and not in a cartoonish "we eat babies" way (you can kill a baby in this game if you want to though, don't get me wrong) but actually in a very grounded, orderly, rationalized way. It's almost a sort of bureaucratic evil at times, and uncomfortably familiar. Why do we do x evil thing? Well, we all live under the law, which keeps the peace, and you've been convicted by a judge, so here's the punishment. . . -Related to the above, but introducing optional-mouseover pop-ups for lore in dialogue boxes is a great solution to the problem where your character should realistically know what something is, living in the world, but you as the player don't because you are new to the world -Combat and related systems are fun. Character development is very versatile because it progression is skill-use based, but combat experience is divided between all skills, which means interesting hybrids are functional if not perhaps even favored. The magic crafting system is reasonably constrained by lore and available sigils, but makes it easy to customize your spell slingers. -Game seems genuinely reactive to big choices at a regular interval, which is not always the case in choice and consequence RPGs. CONS: -I do sometimes feel like there's a bit much of running back and forth for certain quests (did I really need to report to Graven Ashe again at every step of taking Stalwart?). -Some zones have excessive unnecessary combat (cough oldwalls) -I think I"m getting good length value out of the game for the quality of the experience - I'm 20 hours in and not that far - but I hear the end comes abruptly, before you are ready for it.
There's not much else to say. This is one of the greatest RPGs ever created. If it's not the pinnacle of the genre, it's in the top 3. If you haven't played BGII and the expansion through three or four times (at a minimum), I strongly recommend doing so.
