Avowed

très beau (le monde et les combats qui sont très visuels). un peu bavard mais scenario intéressant.

amazing

Fun underrated game. Exploration is great, combat is fun, graphics are good. Enemy and boss variety could be better, but it's not bad either. There are many different weapon types and combos that are all useful and fun (guns, swords, magic, wands, etc etc). The story is decent, not amazing but decent. Party members are solid, I especially like Kai. And I love the world of Eora after playing POE. It's overall a rock solid, fun game, 8/10. I'm probably 75% through my run with over 60 hours on it, I'm completing everything along the way. I take my time, but it's not a short game...

This game is defined by highs and lows. There is, literally, nothing in between. For every good thing it does, it has another thing that just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ blows donkey ♥♥♥♥. The story starts out strong with choosing your background, decent charachter customasition, and a lot of dialogue options in conversations you can use to really make some of those darn choices people love!! Then you realize most options just all lead to the same outcome, like some Telltale cutscene, and the main story itself is just “rigged from the start” as in, it is so predictable what sides the game wants you to take and what things it wants you to pursue. Some side quests and characters, like the Dawntreader questline, are amazing and really pulled me in. Talking with the other godlike for 15 minutes and learning all this excellent lore, all to wrap up nicely with some good revelations and dialogue, really invested me for a bit. On the same note, I talked to some random god worshipper who told me about like 8 different gods, and that really intrigued me for a while. Turns out a lot of the lore is inherited from Pillars of Eternity, which is NOT a bad hing, but it did sometimes feel like the most interesting parts were the world it came from rather than Avowed’s own story. The god that starts talking to you is real awkward and feels forced, but then the ancient memories you can experience with them are a bit more interesting so im like, bennefit of the doubt!? The companions can sometimes be funny, like Marius made me laugh at least 5 times and even Kai has some good banter. Hell, I was looking forward to talking to Giatta more, but just as evenly, the companions will act cringe as hell or just say things that feel like filler for 5 minutes, or just act blatantly out of character. Marius was at some point in a quest like “This guy is starting to make sense”, then I killed that guy and he suddenly 180 degrees turned to “Yeah, this numbskull wasn’t getting anywhere with this” like ha????? The combat is flashy and really entertaining — for like 10 hours. Then I had to turn the difficulty to hard from normal just because I was bored with simple hacking and slashing or, in my case, shooting and burning all enemies while using half of my brain capacity without consequences. The graphics are beautiful!! The plants, sights, and everything look mostly colorful and well-rendered. But then my graphic card crashed three times on different occasions, giving me a heartattack, cause I thought my PC was dying after the stuttering and glitching persisted outside of the game. All in all, the game has a body but no soul, which is ironic because the entire story and this entire world’s lore is about souls and their essence and people dreaming and becoming mad, or hey for all i know maybe they were just becoming sentient, realizing they were stuck in this lowkey dust in the wind blowass game were npc have zilch interaction with you or anything at all. No freedom here, only the illusion of interacting with stale scenery pieces. 5/10. The most fun I had was throwing myself off the lighthouse in Paradiso for 15 minutes, laughing at the body ragdoll physics while the game was pumping hype scenery-viewing music in my ears.

Tolles Spiel

Easily has the best combat of any medieval fantasy game I've ever played while also simultaneously having the worst storyline I've ever experienced in a medieval fantasy game. Taking place in the Pillar's of Eternity universe, the game drops you into an isolated island where you're tasked with discovering and stopping a virus from taking over the population. Unfortunately, the story is filled with way too many characters, way too much dialogue, and a narrative that just isn't interesting at all. None of your companions are particularly interesting, many of the in-game choices are inherently neutral to prevent anything major from happening, and I just found the ending really abrupt after building up to so much. There are some good narrative moments sprinkled in there (such as being able to actually destroy settlements off the map), but they happen way too late in the story to actually affect anything you do. There are some side quests that are far better than anything the main story offers up. Putting the trash story, narrative, and dialogue aside, the combat and map design are genuinely excellent. Each section of the map is massive and offers dozens of side quests, boss encounters, and new gear to keep the player engaged as they progress forward. New abilities are unlocked regularly, new weapons and spells are unlocked regularly, and the combat (specifically the magic) is extremely fluid and rewarding to play. Easily the best part of this game was just aimlessly exploring the map doing side content while fighting hoards of enemies and bosses with increasingly intricate spell combos and high-level gear. I recommend this game because the feeling of getting lost in a new world and exploring dungeons, grinding out gear, and increasingly feeling like a god in this world is done to great effect. Everything to do with level design, combat mechanics, and overall exploration was done extremely well and is arguably some of the best that you'll find in this genre. The narrative and characters are straight garbage, but if you can get past that, I think you'll end up having a really good time with this game.

I really miss the crossbows from the Pillars of Eternity universe. I distinctly remember there's a unique heavy arbalest in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire that pins enemies to the ground.