It's got the ARPG basics down very well. The loot balancing and class system are awesome and lots of fun. But for a game that's so often compared to Diablo 3, it's worse in most ways. Graphic design (monsters, characters, settings) is bad, the UI is janky and doesn't feel good, performance is infamously poor. Both act 1 and 2 are searing bright yellow except when you go into caves. Just sand sand sand maps over and over. Game audio might as well not exist, the soundscape is very subdued and what is there sounds like cheap stock music. Oftentimes when the next location on the world map is south, the game maps will go north instead and they aren't being randomly generated.
This remaster deserves 5 stars, but it requires a pointless bethesda account to download the fanmade content. It's pretty sad that they put a few hundred MB of data behind a wall when modern games are 10-200GB.
Supposedly this is a game where you can do all kinds of different things, and all builds are viable. In reality there's only two options, sneaky hacker or rambo. Sneaky Hacker mode is where you have a few similar skills that might as well be 3 different colors of DOOM keys, and it's ruined by relying on the godawful stealth mechanics. Rambo mode is ruined by the bad shooter mechanics; early game enemies have way too much HP, deal way too much damage, and you'll use 25% of your entire ammo cache anytime you fight someone. Ammo and HP pickups are far too scarce for a game balanced like this. It seems like the only fun way to play is to look up cheese strategies and rely heavily on quicksaves.
It's probably 3 dungeon floors too long but I had so much fun the entire way, i didn't care. This game does almost everything great; combat, worldbuilding, music, loot, questing, graphics. Exploration is a single giant 10-floor dungeon sort of like the old Wizardry games. But very modernized. Combat is real time with pause, except it's designed like a MOBA instead of D&D. Every encounter in this system is fun. No you don't have to read 20 minutes of text or fight a combat every 10 steps. Those bad reviews are exaggerating. There's about 10 combats PER FLOOR, and about 1/3 as much text as Pillars of Eternity.
Good - Includes all continents from future TES games, which will probably take 30 years to develop the next time they attempt it - Spell customization lets you break the game as far as your creativity will allow - Fun unique dungeons, which is the entire game - Music and immersion - Fully open world rpg, in 1994! Bad - Kind of crashy - The wilderness area between towns is a digital wasteland with zero content
If you've played 6 7 8 already and want more, you won't be disappointed.
This is not a good game for many reasons, but there was enough promise to get a sequel and we’ve all seen how it’s done very well since then. Lower your expectations for this one.
Has a bit of a bad reputation but it’s fine. Even with less content, it’s still 30 hours instead of 60 and that’s enough for an rpg.
