Recent reviews by fweep

Pwning ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Much like PoE1, this scratches my RPG itch in a way that nothing else since Baldur's Gate II has. The writing and voice acting are solid. There are plenty of quests (mostly optional) and tasks to do. The graphics are beautiful and not very taxing on low-end hardware. Isometric view is the best for RPG games like this. I wish more games would use it. The sound effects add a lot of atmosphere. The music is okay, but not great; it gets tedious, and it's too generic-RPG-game. There's a nice variety of classes, subclasses, and multiclass options. It's all very clearly a clone of the Baldur's Gate system, and based on AD&D, just without the branding. Solid fun. Lots of depth. Replayability.

Many of the side quests are trivial gofer quests beneath the station of a might Watcher who had his own castle and army of followers. I wish that game designers would make quests scale to the station of the character in meaningful ways, rather than simply upping the difficulty of monsters guarding the next trinket. That's fine, but why send me back and forth across town running errands? Is there a shortage of teenagers looking for work?

Combat mechanics, skills, and spells are good, but there's an excess of choice that makes things confusing. As a new player, it's impossible to decide which abilities to select at level-up time. All of them are situational, and many have only small differences from each other. I'd prefer fewer abilities with more obvious effects. You can always respec/retrain, or play the entire game again, but if you're not reading all the spoilers and wikis online, you're going to make a lot of inefficient choices. Having to rest all the time is also a pain in the ass. In a challenging dungeon, you're likely to burn all your cooldowns on every fight. That doesn't feel realistic and mostly adds tedium.

The naval aspects are annoying. It's hard to keep your boat provisioned, and it's exceedingly costly. Early on, I had to skip almost all naval missions because I couldn't afford provisions. Even though members of my party were complaining that we kept going off on tangents and weren't following through on the main plot, I had to run countless trivial quests because I couldn't afford to sail. The sailing combat is broken (there's plenty already written about that), and it feels wedged into the game rather than a native part of it. To the extent possible, I stay on land.

Overall this game is a solid A, almost A+. There's no other single-player RPG out there that comes close to the Baldur's Gate experience, and BG2 is the all-time best RPG.