TL;DR - Masterful. This game is going to get crazy praise in year 2023, and yes, the praise is deserved. Within minutes, the game makes the characters feel like real people and not NPCs. The gameplay is fluid, fast and brutal, the music's goes from western to synth to creepy to industrial. I'm pleased to say that there's a hint of Fallout in the soundtrack, as well. The UI and controls are sleeker and faster than even a fully modded X-Com 2 is. I am serious. So yeah, I never once preordered, and I haven't bought a game on release date since Diablo 2 in year 2000, standing in line all night at the game store, jolted up on caffeine, the wait killing me. I bought Miasma Chronicles yesterday on release date, because it's a game I've been waiting for for a LONG time. I thought Encased would hit the mark for me, but it sadly missed by a bit. Miasma Chronicles, on the other hand, hits it dead center.
The controls are not as fluid and smooth as the trailer makes it look. They are too janky and glitchy for a one-hit-kill game like Katana Zero (which has the snappy controls this game lacks). I honestly didn't make it far into the game, but if the core mechanics don't feel good, why would you? If the original Super Mario Brothers didn't have realible (although sluggish) controls, it would have been yet another fast forgotten mediocre platformer. In the same way, Ghostrunner is another, fast forgotten neo noir that is looks slick but doesn't play smooth. Also, personally, I feel I'm pretty over the neon lights look There's a lot more you can do, other than copy the streets of Blade Runner.
Outside of atmosphere, this game does nothing better than the other IE games. This game has a ton of combat against repetitive and tanky enemies, so hopefully you like IE combat and 2nd Edition. Otherwise, Baldur's Gate has more (and better) story and NPCs as well as more varied combat. Torment has (in my opinion) better atmosphere, better world building and even better NPCs yet. Personally, IWD does very for me. Some of the music and portraits I enjoy, as well as some later bossfights.
This is a game that splits the waters. Either you enjoy the micromanaging or you find it tedious. Either you enjoy adapting to the hundred small things that can (and will) go wrong, or you find them distracting from getting to play the actual game. Personally I almost love this game, but having to mod it in order for it to be fun is a pain. The expansion is almost the opposite of what I wanted in the game. TL;DR Not my cup of tea, but there's clearly something here to enjoy for a lot of players.
A few hours into the game now, and really enjoying the humor and the atmosphere. The playthrough still hasn't really begun, but this has the polish of a labour of love - not a cash grab. Even the voice acting ranges from decent to good, and I normally always disable voiceovers in games.
As an oldschool Bioware fan, I gotta say off the bat that I have some axes to grind with this “Enhanced” Edition. The very TL;DR is that EE is mostly worth it for the zoom function and convenient, built-in widescreen. Didn't touch SoD, because it feels like fanfic to me. New items and enemies is neat, though. Basically, EE adds more bugs than BG ever had. The UI can freeze if you kick Haer'Dalis. Unresponsive AI. Farsight leaves enemies blinking in an out of sight. Pathing causing characters to get stuck inside each other, to name some. Even the couple of rushed beta-patches of BG 1 and 2 with game-breaking dialogue bugs had less of these surprises than EE. All the while, instead of patching the bugs, Beamdom have “fixed” Bioware design to make the rules more strict and the game less fun. Bard songs don't stack, rendering them an even more underpowered class than ever. Almost all of the kits are taken from IWD 2 and modder fan sites, and I fail to see what exactly Beamdog are charging for. EE adds companions that modders have outwritten and out-voice acted countless times over the decades, for free. EE adds a widescreen support that modders made decades ago, for free. EE also adds “rebalancing” and tweaking that no one asked for. Extra random encounters with faceless trash mobs are added in, adding no flavor for veterans and unfair ambushes for new players. The NPCs are straight out of fanfiction, acting like parodies of previous BG characters. You can easily find better written AND voiced characters on the Gibberlings Three and Spellhold Studios fan sites. For free. And these NPCs aren't fourth wall-breaking and desperate to be clever instead of just having character. Enchantment spells have been nerfed, because a couple of enemies use these spells. The enemies could have been given their own versions of these spells, but Beamdog opts to just render almost an entire spell school even weaker than before.
