Alright buckle up cause I have a lot to say about this game. Oh man does this game disappoint. It has a lot of potential but utilizes about 0% of it. At a basic glance it's a cartoonish Divinity Original Sin clone, but it's actually a lot simpler and less fleshed out than Divinity. Sadly there is a lot this game does wrong. I'm now going to explain the cons. The only pro is that the game is easy to 100% if that is your thing.
Cons:
- Bland. We'll cover this more further down the list, but essentially this game is just really basic and fairly boring. It doesn't do anything new or interesting. It doesn't have any wow factors or moments where you get really excited. It's just overall a very stale game.
- Divinity combat but not well done. Let's talk combat. The core of this game, which is what you will be doing 80% of the time while playing. It uses the same system as DOS where you get a certain amount of ap per turn, and different skills and movement cost ap. This is a fine system. Where the game fails however, is how to properly balance and implement such a system. Firstly, the AI for enemies is flat out brain-dead. EVERY enemy in the game is programmed to always focus their attacks/abilities on the nearest party member. This makes abusing them REALLY easy. Simply put, the AI are all idiots and provide no intellectual challenge for the player. I quite literally used the same strategy for EVERY fight in the game, and won 95% of the battles first time without any issues. The combat issues do not end there however. Enemies are VERY generic. Almost every enemy pretty much consists of having a basic attack and one ability (excluding bosses). Most of their abilities are very generic as well, such as simply buffing their defense or attempting to stun you. This makes fights very one-dimensional and repetitive. There is no variety to what the enemies will do. They will never surprise you or make you rethink your strategies. Unless they out-stat you, they provide 0 challenge. (As a note, I played on the normal difficulty, one below their hardest. I don't even want to know how ridiculously easy the two lower difficulties would have been). Lastly, combat is tedious and buggy. Everyone moves quite slow and the battle environments are not properly designed, as projectiles can go right through walls. I encountered several small bugs during battles, such as skill names not being properly displayed, instead showing something similar to "cobra_skill_002_poison", and skill tooltips freezing on the screen while enemies take their turns. Luckily nothing gamebreaking.
- Odd RPG mechanics. Stats and skills are kind of weird here. Strength gives initiative in this game. This is a very odd choice, as initiative is almost exclusively tied to dexterity or speed in every other RPG. Skill-wise, passive skills are standard, though some are pretty overpowered, but most of the attack skills do not scale well at all. The damage difference between attack skills and basic attacks is pretty negligible. I found it didn't feel worth using an attack skill unless it had a secondary effect, such as a stun.
- Linear and no replay value. You go through the game one area at a time, each one more difficult than the last. There is a small amount of backtracking for a few quests, but otherwise there is not really much choice in where you go or what you do. You follow the story and do quests along the way, almost all of which are simply "go to point A and kill this enemy, then return for a reward". Along these same lines, there is pretty much no variety in the characters you play the game with. You get a knight(tank), warrior(melee dps), mage(magic dps/healer), and a ranger (ranged dps/support). They all have a single small skill tree, and not a ton of skills to choose from. They also are all pretty much locked into only upgrading their best stat when leveling (I.E. mage always takes intelligence, ranger always takes dex) with the only variety being how much hp you want to give them by dipping into vitality. Essentially, if you play the game a second time, you would be playing it the exact same way, and doing the exact same things.
- Boring equipment and loot. You might think, well perhaps equipment could spice things up. You would be wrong. Equipment in this game is equivalent to simply applying a brick of stats to your character. Better equipment raises stats more and ... does nothing else. There is no variety in what you will equip. There are no passives or uniques to spice things up. As mentioned before, the game is VERY bland. Along those same lines, for an RPG this game has very little looting. There are barely any chests, and the ones there are never contain more than 2-3 things, usually one of which is gold. Normal monsters only drop gold or crafting ingredients, and a few bosses drop decent equipment. Nothing to ever be excited about. The main things that take up your inventory space will eventually be unsellable key items -_-.
- Wait there is crafting? Yeah I didn't use crafting at all. Supposedly the game has it, though you wouldn't know other than finding items that are obviously ingredients, since it never actually mentions or explains crafting to you. Sadly a completely ignorable feature that added nothing to the game.
- Bad UI and controls. Pretty simple here, but the user interface and controls could have been a lot better. There also really isn't any quality of life. You can't change the order your party walks in or stop them from moving as one large bumbling unit that paths terribly. Picking up items often requires multiple clicks. The game as a whole plays slow and clunky.
- Forgettable story and characters. The story is super basic, riddled with cliches, and offers little to no stimulating or thought-provoking scenarios. All of the characters are really bland and generic. The dialogue and writing is pretty awful. The main character constantly has internal dialogue about how pretty he thinks his two female companions are, and eventually confesses his love to one of them (Your choice) which is super random, completely unneeded, and the returned affection doesn't feel earned at all. There are also several quest NPCs that are complete spoofs of characters from popular franchises (LotR, Star Wars, Batman, etc...) all of which are immensely cringe-worthy and break what tiny bit of immersion you might have been experiencing. The game makes many attempts at humor, zero of which made me laugh.
- Shallow world-building. Along with the lackluster story, the game offers a very boring and generic world. All of the locations are simple and one-dimensional. Single terrain with no deviation within each map, and pretty uninteresting layouts. There is hardly any lore or history for the world the game takes place in, and the game is very un-immersive. It very much feels like you are playing a video game on your pc (or laptop or whatever) and not like you have entered another realm or reality. The music doesn't help with this. It is incredibly repetitive, and often does not even fit the setting you are in at all. Happy peaceful music in a creepy dungeon? Makes sense.
- Truly wasted potential. Honestly, this feels like an early-access game. Something that needs tons of polishing and is still missing a lot of its content, and yet it is a full-release. The game is very short, and when you finish the game (quite abruptly), it feels like it should have just been the first act. I completed the whole game in 11 hours, including every side-quest I came across, and reached ~level 18 with my party, which feels far too early for a game to end. The game alludes to a sequel? I really doubt it, and would be very uninterested even if it did come out. It simply disappointed me in almost every way.
Verdict: 2/10. Pretty much a complete waste of time. I guess if you love the DOS combat system to death you might mildly enjoy this.
