I mean, it's... ok?
It seems like Spiders tried to bite more than they could chew. There's some excellent world building, with great backstories and motivations for each faction and companion, but it's all rather bogged down by very repetitive missions that require constant back and forth between places. This is a problem both outside (as stunning and gorgeous as the environments are, there are very few enemy kinds, which makes traversing them rather boring after a while) and inside (every building in every city and village is exactly the same). I would like to see a higher-budget sequel (or same budget, but with a more narrow scope and a tighter game-world).
I'd give it 3 stars, but I want to acknowledge the dev's ambition and I'll give it 4.
First, let's get the ugly out of the way:
- the invisible walls are something horrid
- last words of voiceover often cut off abruptly
- a lot of the aspects of the game lack polish, saying it’s “rough around the edges” would be an understatement
- lack of NG+
- levels go up to 99, but for whatever reason, you stop getting points at 46
- warrior-based melee combat is a pain
The good:
I'm gonna start this section with the fact that I don't recall any game bringing tears of joy to my eyes like this one, with the results of the ending and the work that I've done to accomplish it.
The characters and factions have depth and the story interweaving is really quite impressive—especially with a mod that allows you to drag all of your companions around at the same time (sure, it breaks the cinematics a bit and trivialises the combat, but the game is much more than that).
The voiceover is amazing, with some real nice touches, and dialogues borrow from cinematography to change angles for short visual shots, which is known to keep the attention of the viewer.
The world, the setting, the characters all engaged me to make decisions with logic and heart, not to simply mess around and see what happens.
There is a big variety of what the game offers—some detective work, exploration, politics and diplomacy, fun combat (Magic or Technical class).
Many complain the “mage” is underwhelming, but its nature fits extremely well into the world setting.
There are some amazing scenes and atmosphere, which left my mouth agape.
I mentioned mods—definitely a game that needs these to make the experience much, much better and can somehow alleviate the impact of the flaws (like unlocking almost all skills at the start and item editor to simulate NG+).
A real marvel, flawed to be sure, but doing so many things so much better than a lot of the so-called AAA titles, that it should’ve received more love by the audience, because we need more games like this. Games with unique vision and heart.
Nice game. But TOTAL annoying camera movement during fights, Camera is moving in some random way not the way you move your mouse!!!, which results in your death, because you move in (using arrows) in unwanted direction, you don't dodge the blow but stays in its direction.
You need to switch to easy difficulty to play the game. Definitely not worth the full price I both it for cca 15EUR here.
I never abandon games. And I never abandoned an rpg before, but this one? I could not continue it. I played about 12 hours, met all the companions, started to see how the quests were, how the world was- and nah. Not for me.
This game gives you no choices. The world is empty, npcs are far in between, you cannot side with specific morals, you just have to follow the story. Companions are... there. No dialogue, and if there is dialogue it is completely indipendent from what is actually happening (for example, I immediately turned to talk with Siora, once I recruited her, and the only dialogue option was "Why do you never talk about your father?"... I literally just met her, she never talked at all!).
The travelling through the map is just painless. Nothing ever happens, you just walk and walk for hours to get from point A to point B, sometimes in convoluted (useless) ways around the map. There is hardly anything around and a part from an initial joy of looking at the nice landscape... it gets boring and old very quickly.
The combat is also relatively boring, after mastering it, there is little to do.
This is the game, there is little to do, little to say, little to choose. A lot of emptiness.
Companions will lock and wont join your party for their companion quest. It's a bug programmed into the game with no fix available other than skipping through bugged dialogues missing the companion. This happens hours into gameplay. I wanted a refund since I could not find a way to reset the quest to fix it. There should be and there is no excuse for these types of bugs.
一座远离大陆的岛屿，隐隐散发出魔法的力量，遍地都是财富、不为人知的秘密和奇异的生物，当你踏上这里的土地时，一片前所未见的新大陆正等待着你去探索。
