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| Changed my mind! I didn't even pay for this and I want my $3 back. :( by Pricing mistake? 07/02/2016, 4:11am PDT | ||||
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| I was legitimately blown away by Chapter 1's temperate rainforest made entirely out of extremely narrow intersecting outdooridors. If the rest of the game had just been traipsing around beautiful lush wilderness, hunting and killing weird Serious Sam reject monsters, inserting myself into fractured fairy tales like the one about the alchoholic bridge troll, I would've been over the fucking moon. Instead, starting in Chapter 2, the whole thing descends into the Your Mom Hates Dead Spacest circle of Dante's Inferno of tabletop roleplaying: courtly intrigue.
Courtly intrigue is where serious D&Ders go when they're too old to roleplay visiting a brothel anymore without technically qualifying as homosexual. It's also where my delicate flickering interest in fantasy literature goes to overdose on pills. It doesn't help that the sort of intricate roundabout rat's nest level design I found so charming when it was used to abstract huge swathes of woodland into something the size of a Duke Nukem 3D level becomes positively infuriating when applied to a castle that people are supposed to live and work in. I'm willing to switchback up a cliff and through a waterfall to get from the haunted swamp to the magical glade right next to it; I'm not willing to do the same to get from my motel room to the ice machine. And man, is there a lot of trudging back and forth between your motel room and the ice machine in those last two chapters. Even on Dark Mode, combat becomes a non-issue once you max out your Igni (Polish for "fireball") spell and vigor (Polish for "mana") regeneration. The AI has absolutely zero defense against some jerk rolling around like a Madball setting them on fire. Half the time the developers don't even bother to lock the combat arena, so you can just roll out of the monsters' patrol volume and wait for your health to replenish, while they hop up and down on the edge of some invisible county line shaking their pincers in frustration. And since the only thing you need money for is buying weapons and armor you won't bother to equip because your body is already a human basketball and your hands are the literal fire that envelops a basketball when you dunk it too much in NBA Jam, that just leaves dribbling between NPCs, trying vainly to give a single fuck about their bullshit Middle Earth trade disputes. It's not all bad. Like I said, some of the area design is SPECTACULAR. There's a secluded pond in Chapter 2, between the dwarf fortress and the old dwarf catacombs, that could almost pass as a real place. One of the few more precious than gold fractured fairy tale sidequests can end with bedding a succubus (no such outcome for the harpy quest, alas). And the dialogue, for the most part, won't prompt you to make a choice unless it actually matters. Sometimes this means a conversation will have no choices! I am honestly fine with that. Also, several of the quests are complex enough to require taking notes, which the game helpfully does for you, in probably the best journal I've ever used (it's all written in-character by your bard, Volo - he's voiced like a fucking Kotex commercial, but he's alright when it comes to bigging you up). There are plenty more negatives I could add - all the characters share a medieval level of ignorance, the inventory system is almost as bad as the journal is good, the looting system is worse, all three buttons associated with drawing your sword are so unresponsive that I'm still not sure I was ever pressing the right one - but let's be real, if the game was any fun I could overlook all of that stuff. Instead it's boring as shit, with braindead combat and a story that's the All the President's Men of pretend dragon politics. Avoid. |
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