Recent reviews by soup in boots

Played the trial. It's everything I ever hated about Madden made even worse.

The story is ham-fisted and not very compelling. The characters start out interesting, but wind up being incredibly bland, and they often come off as being one-note caricatures.

80 to 90 percent of the enemies you fight are re-colored variants of the first enemies you fight (and maybe with different elemental weaknesses). The small bit of variety comes from bosses and mini-bosses, but even those are often retread variants of enemies you've already encountered. The complete absence of variety means combat encounters become boring very quickly.

Speaking of combat, the gameplay in battle is probably the best part of the game, but even this breaks down. Some enemies, particularly the larger ones, have bizarre hit-boxes on things like weapons and attack areas. Lumbering giant carrying a mace? Stay five feet clear of the mace, because it will damage and stagger you if you get any closer (and no, you don't need to actually contact it). The auto-targeting system also makes bizarre decisions, causing you to potentially lunge ineffectually at an enemy halfway across the (relatively tiny) battlefield instead of the one right next to you. This is not helped by the visibility issues, where you'll often be blindsided by an enemy because they're behind the camera, or else blinded by the extreme number of large visual effects that, to be frank, should come with a seizure warning.

This game is *NOT* Open World, despite the tag. The game is *heavily* railroaded. There is a bare-minimum of dungeon crawling that you can do to discover items, but don't expect to get lost, and don't expect to stumble upon any hidden areas or secret bosses. Everything is laid out in front of you like the instructions for a color-by-number picture.

This game seems to want to straddle the line between being a cinematic experience and a hard-core challenge. It fails at both. It's a lazy, plodding, repetitive, and boring game. I wanted to like this game. I put a fair amount of time in it trying to get invested, and it continually rebuffed me.

For a rating, it gets 2/10 because the combat kept me entertained for a few hours at the beginning.

Nothing is ever perfect, but Larian always comes pretty close.