Outstanding stat-driven rpg with the best combat animation I have ever seen in a game of this kind.
Positives:
- Great storyline that involves many different locations, interesting personalities, and opportunities to use lots of different skills.
- Excellent tactical combat with many different manouvers and the best animations I have seen for an crpg. Combat is real-time, but you can pause it or set it to pause after every turn.
- Outstanding graphics, sound and music. Voice acting is well done. I am running a quad core i7 with 4 gigs and a Radeon 4850.
- Side quests are not run-of-the-mill and several involve puzzles.
- Rich character development. You can allocate stats to develop your character how ever you want.
- Very stable, no crashes.
Negatives:
- While the mechanics stay true to the pen and paper roleplaying system this game is based on, the game manual does a poor job of explaining how stats affect gameplay. Some of the mechanics in this roleplaying system make DnD look like Candyland. That said, there are forums/sites where helpful players explain how stats affect gameplay, armor, spells, skills, etc. - not hard to understand, just absent from the manual.
- I found most of the fights in the game, with the exception of a handful, to be fairly easy with a full party. A harder difficulty setting would have been welcome.
- Some dialogues and one puzzle tend to be confusing due to poor German to English translation.
- Camera angle can be a pain in tight spots (small rooms, corridors, etc.), but you learn how to work around it pretty quick.
Bottom line, if you like old school stat-driven crpgs with great combat, storylines and character development, your gonna love this.