Recent reviews by aranth

Unpleasant

Not only are the build possibilities fractally complex, your body parts can be too!

1.0 update: but not the game mechanics, thanks to the new tutorial!

Very satisfying moment-to-moment mechanics, with options for adjusting parts of the difficulty that might not be to your taste - plus the story goes places and really enhances the experience without being too in your face.

also, P H Y S I C S

The writing seems to get better as you get more into the game, and I wanted to like it for the writing - but the mechanics and UI are bad enough to convince me not to return to this game. I've never been a big fan of real-time-with-pause combat, but this is also not a good implementation of it - and it follows the classic formula of including a large number of somewhat inconsequential fights, which I found to be a slog.

The combat is too complex for the unreadable nature of the fights - for example, a monster was immune to the damage type of one of my attacks. Strangely, this does not seem to appear in the combat log, only as a brief pop-up of text. I hover over the monster for more information - the damage type is now listed there as "immune" but only as an icon and I'm not sure what that icon represents. I can't hover over it there because the box disappears when I mouse off of the monster. Now I need to parse through all my attacks until I find the icon in question.

There are far too many types of effects that can be applied to characters. I ran into monsters in one of the early areas that are immune to more types of effects than Divinity: Original Sin 2 even has. This makes it difficult to get a good sense of the nature of these resistances, or an intuitive idea of what would work.

It's rarely clear if an attack or spell will affect just foes or also allies - the wording in the description doesn't seem reliable. However, it's so hard to tell what's going on that I may be misreading effects as my own when they are really my enemies'.

I could see this game being enjoyable for deep-CRPG-mechanics wizards, as I believe sinking enough time into it would be enough to overcome many of these issues. However, partially because things get deep very fast, I found it more frustrating than enjoyable to learn the systems.

I will still try Pillars of Eternity 2, as these all seem like the sorts of problems that could be worked out with experience and hindsight. Hopefully they took a critical eye to their own work, similarly to how they seem to have taken one to older CRPGs in order to come up with some of the improvements found in this game over those.

I think Dragon Age, Divinity: Original Sin, and Torment: Tides of Numenera all are similar enough to this game but better-implemented, and are worth checking out instead if you haven't yet had the pleasure.

*wipes away a single tear* Yes... yes, it's Half-Life :')

Combat system is deep and interesting - a bit rough to pick up for a new player, but viscerally satisfying and legible enough that I was motivated to plow through and learn it. I saw a half-naked guy with a farming scythe rip apart four well-kitted fighters in armor with fancy swords - simultaneously.

Never got into the BioShocks but I love this as "System Shock 3." Also, the only single-player game where I've spent time watching other people play it after beating it.

It's what Diablo 3 should have been, and it's getting better all the time.

Turn-based strategy distilled down into a simple formula that's still very interesting. Well worth the price.

For most games, if the devs make a post about upcoming features, players ask "what about (ridiculous idea that is clearly not part of the feature and is much more complicated and awesome.)" That happens with this game too. The thing that is different is that *these* devs reply and say "yes, that is how it works."

No game has ever sucked me in as thoroughly and quickly as this one.