- Jun 30, 2003
- 32,886
- 12,165
- 136
If you're a fan of isometric, D&D RPGs, this might be the game from 2018 that passed you by. Probably the biggest difference between this and any other of the D&D RPGs is the city/kingdom mechanic.
The game starts out with you being a mercenary competing with another merc team (with whom you can predictably join forces with later). You need to take down a baddie, eventually do so, and the story evolves from there. Kinda standard D&D RPG fare so far.
Map movement is neat at first - the token symbolizing your party slides along the map board. This works out well when the board is small. Later in the game though, this becomes a huge annoyance, because traveling from one side of the map to the other means sliding your piece aaaaaallllll the way there, with few exceptions (there is limited ability to teleport).
The city mechanic is also fun and interesting for the most part* - you can develop regions to give you bonuses, get special items from vendors, and so on. *However, there are two major problems. The first is that the city mechanic is not well explained within the game. How do I unlock new advisors? How do I upgrade my village to a town? Why can't I upgrade all my villages to towns? How do I unlock new advisor slots? Speaking of advisor slots, in my particular case, I was missing key characters to act as city advisors for nearly 2 full acts - either they bugged out or legit died before i could recruit them. That set me back a huge amount. By far the worst part of the city mechanic is that if your city fails, it leads to a game over. Which normally doesn't sound like a problem, until you get into the final stages of the game and the problems facing your city become so difficult to solve that your city will invariably be crushed unless you really understood the city mechanic in the first place. What's the solution? If you don't want to see your 90+ hours of gameplay go down the drain, you have the option to make your city invincible, which I did. One review I read cited this option as an indicator of a failed mechanic design. I'm about 50/50 on that assessment. On the one hand, the challenge should ramp up, especially on the harder difficulty settings. At the same time, if you've been able to make it to Act 4-5, you shouldn't be squeaking by with your kingdom about to be crushed by an impending onslaught, either. I literally went from succeeding most of my problems, to having far more than i could solve, and being unable to solve them even with a roll of a 20.
Graphics and sound design are excellent, especially some of the environmental effects like lightning. The boss fight music, in particular, really makes it felt like a big deal.
The party members are all fantastic in my opinion, and there's an absolute metric shitton of voice acting. They even have conversations during resting, which adds a lot of flavor to each character.
Combat is standard D&D RPG. Diseases, curses, polymorphs, elemental damages, the whole shebang. Finding and disabling traps is always clutch (did the first level of BG2 teach you nothing?
). Some spells take resources, which was new to me. I was super annoyed to find out I couldn't resurrect a party member because I didn't have any diamonds. And even protections like stoneskin require diamond dust (pricey early on, but later you're richer than scrooge mcduck and shouldn't have issues affording it).
There is a huge range of itemization, which is both good and bad. If you're a fighter wanting to specialize, you may not find your weapon of choice at the start, or have to forego that new shiny item because all your bonus feats don't apply to it. In general, my characters were not wanting for good gear regardless of their class.
There are a few difficulty spikes that I think are not quite unfair, but at the very least poorly introduced
1) Right at the outset, you can encounter swarms. Swarms can only be damaged by AOE. Your fighters have too low BAB to hit them with a torch, and you may or may not have a spellcaster to cast offensive spells at the swarms in the first place. Using fire bombs would work if your frontline characters could survive long enough. But because you're level 2, good luck. I ignored them and came back to the area much later to clean house
2) Slightly before or after the end of Act 1, you will begin to encounter wisps. Unless you know to counter them with see invisibility (protection from lightning is at least rather obvious), they are basically unkillable and will slaughter your party. Had to google this one.
3) Towards the end of the game, mobs will begin to have paralyze spells/abilities that are cast every round. I had legitimately been crushing everything in my way until I hit this area of the game. Big monsters, dragons, mobs, whatever - I walked all over them. Then paralyze turned my AC50 monk into a chump (goodbye armor bonuses from dex). With no knowledge of this (and you won't have your entire party on hand initially, either), I had to google the solution. Turns out, this can be countered by spells like Free Action or feats like Blind Fight. If it weren't for google, I doubt I'd have made it past this point in the game. (thinking about it now, it's very much like the beholder lair in BG2.. the correct items/spells make it almost a cakewalk).
4) In this same endgame area, you may lose some or all of your party members depending on your relationship with them
5) In the final boss fight, mass dispel and mass dominate will wreck you without the right spells/spellcasters in your party. Luckily, one of my spellcasters could provide the right AOE buffing at the right time, because I earned a spell from an endgame quest that I would normally have ignored if not for following a walkthrough at the very end. I was getting tired, hah
The story is good, though I'd be lying if I said I paid close attention. I mostly just wanted to build an uber party and smash stuff, with the story pushing me along. By the end, my monk did monk things, which was a) punch everything to death b) have sky high AC and be invincible (except anything requiring a will save, because apparently monks get AC from charisma instead of wisdom?). There is a super duper secret ending for the truly hardcore/dedicated, but I'm not about to start a fresh game to accomplish that.
Overall, I'd say it's a great game if you are a veteran to the D&D RPG universe and want a challenge - "challenging" will definitely get you there. If you're new to the D&D RPG genre, definitely go for an easier setting so you're not overwhelmed by a lot of different mechanics. Max out the difficulty if you're truly insane or know D&D mechanics inside out.
At 117 hours, I definitely got my money's worth.
The game starts out with you being a mercenary competing with another merc team (with whom you can predictably join forces with later). You need to take down a baddie, eventually do so, and the story evolves from there. Kinda standard D&D RPG fare so far.
Map movement is neat at first - the token symbolizing your party slides along the map board. This works out well when the board is small. Later in the game though, this becomes a huge annoyance, because traveling from one side of the map to the other means sliding your piece aaaaaallllll the way there, with few exceptions (there is limited ability to teleport).
The city mechanic is also fun and interesting for the most part* - you can develop regions to give you bonuses, get special items from vendors, and so on. *However, there are two major problems. The first is that the city mechanic is not well explained within the game. How do I unlock new advisors? How do I upgrade my village to a town? Why can't I upgrade all my villages to towns? How do I unlock new advisor slots? Speaking of advisor slots, in my particular case, I was missing key characters to act as city advisors for nearly 2 full acts - either they bugged out or legit died before i could recruit them. That set me back a huge amount. By far the worst part of the city mechanic is that if your city fails, it leads to a game over. Which normally doesn't sound like a problem, until you get into the final stages of the game and the problems facing your city become so difficult to solve that your city will invariably be crushed unless you really understood the city mechanic in the first place. What's the solution? If you don't want to see your 90+ hours of gameplay go down the drain, you have the option to make your city invincible, which I did. One review I read cited this option as an indicator of a failed mechanic design. I'm about 50/50 on that assessment. On the one hand, the challenge should ramp up, especially on the harder difficulty settings. At the same time, if you've been able to make it to Act 4-5, you shouldn't be squeaking by with your kingdom about to be crushed by an impending onslaught, either. I literally went from succeeding most of my problems, to having far more than i could solve, and being unable to solve them even with a roll of a 20.
Graphics and sound design are excellent, especially some of the environmental effects like lightning. The boss fight music, in particular, really makes it felt like a big deal.
The party members are all fantastic in my opinion, and there's an absolute metric shitton of voice acting. They even have conversations during resting, which adds a lot of flavor to each character.
Combat is standard D&D RPG. Diseases, curses, polymorphs, elemental damages, the whole shebang. Finding and disabling traps is always clutch (did the first level of BG2 teach you nothing?
). Some spells take resources, which was new to me. I was super annoyed to find out I couldn't resurrect a party member because I didn't have any diamonds. And even protections like stoneskin require diamond dust (pricey early on, but later you're richer than scrooge mcduck and shouldn't have issues affording it).There is a huge range of itemization, which is both good and bad. If you're a fighter wanting to specialize, you may not find your weapon of choice at the start, or have to forego that new shiny item because all your bonus feats don't apply to it. In general, my characters were not wanting for good gear regardless of their class.
There are a few difficulty spikes that I think are not quite unfair, but at the very least poorly introduced
1) Right at the outset, you can encounter swarms. Swarms can only be damaged by AOE. Your fighters have too low BAB to hit them with a torch, and you may or may not have a spellcaster to cast offensive spells at the swarms in the first place. Using fire bombs would work if your frontline characters could survive long enough. But because you're level 2, good luck. I ignored them and came back to the area much later to clean house
2) Slightly before or after the end of Act 1, you will begin to encounter wisps. Unless you know to counter them with see invisibility (protection from lightning is at least rather obvious), they are basically unkillable and will slaughter your party. Had to google this one.
3) Towards the end of the game, mobs will begin to have paralyze spells/abilities that are cast every round. I had legitimately been crushing everything in my way until I hit this area of the game. Big monsters, dragons, mobs, whatever - I walked all over them. Then paralyze turned my AC50 monk into a chump (goodbye armor bonuses from dex). With no knowledge of this (and you won't have your entire party on hand initially, either), I had to google the solution. Turns out, this can be countered by spells like Free Action or feats like Blind Fight. If it weren't for google, I doubt I'd have made it past this point in the game. (thinking about it now, it's very much like the beholder lair in BG2.. the correct items/spells make it almost a cakewalk).
4) In this same endgame area, you may lose some or all of your party members depending on your relationship with them
5) In the final boss fight, mass dispel and mass dominate will wreck you without the right spells/spellcasters in your party. Luckily, one of my spellcasters could provide the right AOE buffing at the right time, because I earned a spell from an endgame quest that I would normally have ignored if not for following a walkthrough at the very end. I was getting tired, hah
The story is good, though I'd be lying if I said I paid close attention. I mostly just wanted to build an uber party and smash stuff, with the story pushing me along. By the end, my monk did monk things, which was a) punch everything to death b) have sky high AC and be invincible (except anything requiring a will save, because apparently monks get AC from charisma instead of wisdom?). There is a super duper secret ending for the truly hardcore/dedicated, but I'm not about to start a fresh game to accomplish that.
Overall, I'd say it's a great game if you are a veteran to the D&D RPG universe and want a challenge - "challenging" will definitely get you there. If you're new to the D&D RPG genre, definitely go for an easier setting so you're not overwhelmed by a lot of different mechanics. Max out the difficulty if you're truly insane or know D&D mechanics inside out.
At 117 hours, I definitely got my money's worth.
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