It is with a very heavy heart that I give this game a thumbs down. I grew up with a fawning adoration of Obsidian's predecessors, and some of the studio's other titles rank among my favorite games. As a young adult, their office building was literally visible from my window, and I had high hopes and aspirations to join and work among them, though that did not pan out. Until recently, I had regarded Obsidian as nearly unequaled masters of their craft.

That's why I found it so surprising when I found myself so bored that I never finished my first playthrough, and put the game down for some time. I was disappointed, both in Obsidian and that I'd kickstarted the thing. I recently have finally set down and finished both the original game and the White March expansion, but it again got pretty tedious, and it took a very forced effort.

The gameplay is a purposeful homage to many of the classic Infinity Engine games of old, and it was very true to this. 2D isometric (though frequently gorgeous), you manage a party of six heroes, including yourself as the distinguished primary PC. The mechanics are D&D-but-not; they feel deceptively like somebody's house rules, though they're actually just dissimilar enough to be a problem. Examples include odd, unanticipated quirks to attribute function, such as that barbarians benefit strongly from having a high Intellect and your blaster wizard really wants a lot of Might.

Combat is real-time-with-pause, as in its spiritual predecessors, and it was one of the many elements of the game that proved to be a real chore after a while. Combat actions tick by pretty quickly, even with the slow time option active, and micromanaging six characters tends to mean that you're only going to be advancing a few seconds at a time before you need pause and manage them again. If you don't like micromanagement, there is an AI available, but for most classes I found it pretty dreadful, routinely positioning characters suicidally and declining to ever use certain core abilities. The silver lining is that few encounters are ever truly challenging, and so less-than-ideal performance just means more regular nigh-costless rests and trips back to town.

You will come to resent those return trips, though. The game's maps may be beautiful, but the loading time on each zone is staggering, 10-15 seconds each on my modern machine while running an SSD install. When you're looking at 3-5 transitions to go recover, you *will* get irritable after a while.

Inventory management is also a staggering slog. It has been long enough that I do not remember quite how bad it might have been in the old IE games, but here, every enemy has loot, the vast, vast majority of which is useless. You get tons of monster and crafting parts you'll never use, and every human opponent leaves you their regular, boring old sword. Around a third of the way through the game, I stopped bothering to even sell most of this junk, as you find more incidental cash than you ever need either, in large part because you never need to buy anything. By the end of the game, I had some 50+ 'unique', legendary, named weapons, which were mostly indistinct and uninteresting to choose between. The White March expansion added 'soulbound' items, which progress and evolve in response to certain triggers, some of them boring (do X total damage with this weapon), and sometimes a bit more compelling (sleep with this weapon in the den of a dragon). These are pretty neat, but you get to them quite late, and yours may have already become permanently glazed trying to compare the morass of mundane 'epic' items you'd have hoarded up to that point.

I found the world compelling. It is D&D-esque at its base, with your standard various basically-still-human fantasy race, ancient but advanced fallen precursor civilization, feudal-Renaissance sociopolitical structures struggling with one another, a pantheon of archetypal Involved deities, and so on. What makes the setup a bit more novel is the emphasis on souls; reincarnation is a thing, as is awakening the memories of past lives. A modern science is developing around the treatment of soul-related afflictions, such as the trauma of resurfaced memories informing you that you were a right vile *bastard* in a previous life, as well as the manipulation and detachment/reattachment of souls. This practice is viewed with both great skepticism and superstition, and yet it might be the only hope for a crisis that the region the game is set in has been suffering from for the last decade: the vast majority of children are being born soulless, effectively comatose. This is some offbeat stuff, and I found the more the game focused on it, the more engrossed that I was. Unfortunately, I found this goodness spread far too thinly between far too many tedious 'adventuring'.

In the final act, the game's writing veers wildly off course. Sparing details, there is an 11th hour twist that explains a great deal about the world, the primary antagonist, his motivations and his actions, and it opens a lot of interesting questions... absolutely none of which are pointed out by the game. Instead, the PC spends the remaining hour in a crazed freakout over something that would seem trite in Philosophy 101. I got the odd impression that the fact of this final revelation and the dialog and interactions of its aftermath were written by two very different people, with very different takes on what it meant, though I'm not sure if that was the case.

With apologies to my beloved Obsidian, given the price of completing this game, both in dollar and hours, I cannot in good conscience recommend it. The return on investment, both in terms of novel gameplay and moving, effective storytelling, is just too low. Go play New Vegas or something, instead.

It is with a very heavy heart that I give this game a thumbs down. I grew up with a fawning adoration of Obsidian's predecessors, and some of the studio's other titles rank among my favorite games. As a young adult, their office building was literally visible from my window, and I had high hopes and aspirations to join and work among them, though that did not pan out. Until recently, I had regarded Obsidian as nearly unequaled masters of their craft. That's why I found it so surprising when I found myself so bored that I never finished my first playthrough, and put the game down for some time. I was disappointed, both in Obsidian and that I'd kickstarted the thing. I recently have finally set down and finished both the original game and the White March expansion, but it again got pretty tedious, and it took a very forced effort. The gameplay is a purposeful homage to many of the classic Infinity Engine games of old, and it was very true to this. 2D isometric (though frequently gorgeous), you manage a party of six heroes, including yourself as the distinguished primary PC. The mechanics are D&D-but-not; they feel deceptively like somebody's house rules, though they're actually just dissimilar enough to be a problem. Examples include odd, unanticipated quirks to attribute function, such as that barbarians benefit strongly from having a high Intellect and your blaster wizard really wants a lot of Might. Combat is real-time-with-pause, as in its spiritual predecessors, and it was one of the many elements of the game that proved to be a real chore after a while. Combat actions tick by pretty quickly, even with the slow time option active, and micromanaging six characters tends to mean that you're only going to be advancing a few seconds at a time before you need pause and manage them again. If you don't like micromanagement, there is an AI available, but for most classes I found it pretty dreadful, routinely positioning characters suicidally and declining to ever use certain core abilities. The silver lining is that few encounters are ever truly challenging, and so less-than-ideal performance just means more regular nigh-costless rests and trips back to town. You will come to resent those return trips, though. The game's maps may be beautiful, but the loading time on each zone is staggering, 10-15 seconds each on my modern machine while running an SSD install. When you're looking at 3-5 transitions to go recover, you *will* get irritable after a while. Inventory management is also a staggering slog. It has been long enough that I do not remember quite how bad it might have been in the old IE games, but here, every enemy has loot, the vast, vast majority of which is useless. You get tons of monster and crafting parts you'll never use, and every human opponent leaves you their regular, boring old sword. Around a third of the way through the game, I stopped bothering to even sell most of this junk, as you find more incidental cash than you ever need either, in large part because you never need to buy anything. By the end of the game, I had some 50+ 'unique', legendary, named weapons, which were mostly indistinct and uninteresting to choose between. The White March expansion added 'soulbound' items, which progress and evolve in response to certain triggers, some of them boring (do X total damage with this weapon), and sometimes a bit more compelling (sleep with this weapon in the den of a dragon). These are pretty neat, but you get to them quite late, and yours may have already become permanently glazed trying to compare the morass of mundane 'epic' items you'd have hoarded up to that point. I found the world compelling. It is D&D-esque at its base, with your standard various basically-still-human fantasy race, ancient but advanced fallen precursor civilization, feudal-Renaissance sociopolitical structures struggling with one another, a pantheon of archetypal Involved deities, and so on. What makes the setup a bit more novel is the emphasis on souls; reincarnation is a thing, as is awakening the memories of past lives. A modern science is developing around the treatment of soul-related afflictions, such as the trauma of resurfaced memories informing you that you were a right vile *bastard* in a previous life, as well as the manipulation and detachment/reattachment of souls. This practice is viewed with both great skepticism and superstition, and yet it might be the only hope for a crisis that the region the game is set in has been suffering from for the last decade: the vast majority of children are being born soulless, effectively comatose. This is some offbeat stuff, and I found the more the game focused on it, the more engrossed that I was. Unfortunately, I found this goodness spread far too thinly between far too many tedious 'adventuring'. In the final act, the game's writing veers wildly off course. Sparing details, there is an 11th hour twist that explains a great deal about the world, the primary antagonist, his motivations and his actions, and it opens a lot of interesting questions... absolutely none of which are pointed out by the game. Instead, the PC spends the remaining hour in a crazed freakout over something that would seem trite in Philosophy 101. I got the odd impression that the fact of this final revelation and the dialog and interactions of its aftermath were written by two very different people, with very different takes on what it meant, though I'm not sure if that was the case. With apologies to my beloved Obsidian, given the price of completing this game, both in dollar and hours, I cannot in good conscience recommend it. The return on investment, both in terms of novel gameplay and moving, effective storytelling, is just too low. Go play New Vegas or something, instead.