The Quest

Disappointing experience overall. The game starts off somewhat weak and unfortunately declines further as you progress. The main issue is that a large portion of your character’s power comes from items that are primarily obtained through shops. This creates two problems: first, you often need to grind for money because normal gameplay provides very little of it; second, players may feel encouraged to repeatedly reload the game to refresh shop inventories until a desired item appears. Neither of these mechanics is particularly satisfying on its own, and together they make progression feel more tedious than engaging. Another issue is that simply maxing out the weapon skill is not enough. Even if you fully enchant your equipment and focus those enchantments on boosting the same weapon skill, it still doesn’t feel sufficient. On top of that, you’re expected to rely heavily on potions. Since weak, medium, and strong versions stack, you can drink them in sets of three, but their effects last only a short time. In practice this means constantly consuming potions, which in turn requires repeatedly resetting shop inventories to obtain them. And this is in addition to the usual mana and healing potions. It’s not that ordinary enemies are particularly dangerous, but combat becomes very slow. Instead of defeating an enemy in three or four attacks, it often takes ten or twenty, which quickly becomes repetitive. For example, an orc appears: you attack, pause; it attacks, pause. It barely damages you, but you also deal very little damage in return. The system can become even more cumbersome because you end up needing separate gear sets for combat, alchemy, enchanting, and other activities. Each of these requires more shop resets and more money grinding. Because of this, the initial Might & Magic-style feeling fades fairly quickly and is replaced by a rather tedious gameplay loop.