I really wish I liked this game and I've given it plenty of chances. It's a much older, VERY niche title, so right out of the gate, it's not for everyone. It should have been for me, as Wizardry 7 is among my top 5 RPGs of all time, and I was desperate for more like it.
The good:
It's an old-school style dungeon crawler with its own personality, and one of the rare ones to feature a massive world, rather than a massive dungeon. For that alone, it's worth trying out.
The classes are fairly well designed, with a large range of class/race combinations.
The bad:
Performance-wise, this runs worse than any DoS-emulated game you can find. I've never seen a game with this many performance issues in my life. To start, its fullscreen option and resolutions don't work on modern Windows machines and you need to literally change your desktop resolution for the game to actually become fullscreen. The problem has been known about for years, but the project is long-since abandoned. From there, it's prone to random crashes, and otherwise feels extremely janky.
The art style, in my opinion, is just plain awful. The sprites, for the most part, are less interesting than Wiz 6 or 7, and between the NPCs that do exist, they have radically different art styles. Not in a way that some monsters look truly unique, in the way that different NPCs in a town look like they are from different games. The art design, overly cluttered UI, overly complex ways to investigate items or make any actions at all, combat that in some ways is great and in other ways is a massive step back from DoS-era RPGs, and sound design that sounds like someone ran every sound through an echo generation machine, all come together to create a game that has a genuinely ugly vibe.
The lack of information, contradictory information, incomplete data, and wiki that is occasionally missing, all combine to make this purposefully convoluted game even worse. Even in terms of the era it pays homage to, games rarely were this convoluted. In fact, each game in that era built off the previous in terms of convenience, QoL features, and immersiveness. To circumvent it all isn't an homage, it's misunderstanding what made those games good.
In terms of what it brings to the table, the most it offers is interesting class/race combinations, as long as you ignore the forced differences between men and women and honor 40-year old race-locked conceptions that games had already moved on from by the time Might and Magic rolled around and was criticized in games like Wiz 6 and 7 even in the 90's for unrealistic sexism.
The enemies, at least from the roughly 30 hours I made it through my campaign, were uninspired. You've got beetles, bandits, bats, fire beetles, green bandits, big bats, skeletons, big skeletons, spooky skeletons, bandits that look like they're from a different game, red bandits, bigger fire beetles, an owl thing, and maybe, after you grind through dozens of hours, you'll meet a neatly designed boss.
The plot, dungeon design, enemy design, and rigid class design all feel like they were lifted from a bootleg game that an in-movie DnD player has on in the background, which is to say, it feels like a B-grade version of a product that existed 30 years ago and did it better.
I can't recommend it, because chances are, you can't even run it without needing to jump through hoops, that frankly, aren't worth jumping through.
