maxfisher

I picked this up on sale over the holidays and have just gotten around to it over the past couple weeks. I have to say, I feel like this is one of the most unfairly maligned games I've come across in a long time. I'm having loads of fun with it. There's quite a bit of flexibility in the combat and the game nudges you to experiment around with it quite a bit. Flipping between different spell sets on the fly is a lot of fun and you can pretty much constantly be firing off a diverse range of magical attacks.

I actually like the world design and the graphics are quite solid. While there's some open world bloat, the fact that you can basically sprint around at 70 mph makes it manageable to zip between different optional objectives, most of which seem worth the payoff in experience or gear.

The story is somewhat cliche'd, but not terrible. I don't get the complaints about the main character. She's a troubled inner city orphan from present day dropped into a fantasy setting. I think she's actually written pretty well and I don't find her grating. The dialog and voice acting of other characters varies. And the expository dumps via conversation can be a bit much, but you can skip through dialog, so I just have subtitles on and get through it at my reading pace instead of my listening pace. The in-game banter between the main character and her companion can get a bit repetitive, but honestly, that's about the only thing that I've found even mildly annoying.

I'd give the gameplay/combat an A, the world a B and the story a C. I think it's well worth checking out, especially on sale, though I wouldn't have felt ripped off if I'd paid original full price.

RocShemp

Good to read another positive opinion in this thread. This was a game I was looking forward to, until all the terrible reviews scared me away.

OldBoy

I kept this in my home scroll and plan on starting this up tomorrow bc of the max’s post. I liked the demo, so why the fuck not!

Adam Tyner

On sale at Target this week for anyone who’s interested but hasn’t picked it up yet:

RocShemp

It's already that price on .

maxfisher

So if anyone picks this up, here's one tip that I wish I'd known earlier on: you can upgrade the individual stats on your gear. When you start finding new cloaks and necklaces, the game shows you how you can swap out the perks for them, but I don't think it explicitly says you can upgrade the stats for health, defense and the various types of magic. I had thought those were just specific to each piece of gear and couldn't be changed (and had been somewhat confused about what I was supposed to do with all of the random crafting materials that seemed to have pretty limited uses). Then, 50 hours in and finished with the main campaign, I accidentally highlighted one of the stats and saw I could increase its level. Possibly the biggest I'm-a-dumbass aha moment I've had in a game. On the bright side, I had enough resources stockpiled to almost fully level up my primary gear, which provides a huge boost in power.

To add a couple notes to my review above, the world is incredibly, absurdly oversized. It's broken up into five main regions, each of which are broken down into subregions. I finished the main story and there were areas of the map where there were 3 subregions deep that I hadn't even visited. And I spent a lot of time exploring through the main campaign. On the one hand, I'm still enjoying the combat enough that I'll probably end up going through the whole map and visit all of the locations/objectives, but on the other, holy shit does it kind of feel like wasted potential. In the game, all of humanity is left stranded in a single city, so the entirety of the open world is just various monsters, nature and ruins. It's all very pretty, but could've been much more engaging if it were more populated.

Also, as much as I've played it, I keep discovering new quirks to the combat system. It's really very well put together and a blast to play with. For anyone who starts in on it, each of the individual 100+ spells you learn has an optional objective that you can select and complete to make both it and your character more powerful. I would highly recommend tackling these as aggressively as you can, as they force you to change up your play style and learn new approaches to combat.

It's really a bummer that this sold so poorly. There's so much that the game got right that I'm guessing a sequel would've been incredible.