Divinity II was one of my favourite games. So it is bitter to give this one a thumbs down, but there is no way around it as this version of the game is afflicted by hellish loading screen crashes and design choices that cut away the fun part of the original endgame.

The loading screen crashes appeared in the second half of the game. And they got worse and worse. So worse that I had to replay the final battle and the following cutscenes (and reboot my PC) four times before the game finally moved on to the beginning of the addon. And it was hardly enjoyable having to save everytime before you enter or leave a dungeon or even a house with one single room. Not to mention the saving marathon in the dragon tower.

As you can see in the trailer the game features battles against flying fortresses. In the original, there was an epic introduction cutscene for each fortress. They also had extensive defensive systems that you had to shut down. E.g. landing on a certain spot, fighting your way through the enemies to destroy a generator that creates an anti-dragon forcefield. Then fly through this now open space to a teleporter. And the Developer's Cut? well it ... cuts ... each intro and all of these defensive systems. Only the foot soldiers and the towers remain. But the only thing they do is granting you exp. You can simply fly straight through the whole fortress and kill the boss. The dragon content in general became a child's play.

Divinity II is still a great game and it has in my opinion the best ending of all times. But the flaws of this version can't be overlooked.

Divinity II has charm, I'll give it that. It has a beautifully realized fantasy universe, excellent writing with snappy dialogue, engaging characters, and a genre identity that seamlessly blends serious epic fantasy with satire and humor.

Despite these wonderful marks in its favor, however, the game itself is rife with flaws. Divinity II is a hard game, but not in the satisfying or rewarding way that many other RPGs claim to be. The gameplay is typically uninteresting at best and painfully difficult at worst, thanks to many random and often nonsensical difficulty spikes. The story, while incredibly well-told, is still typical fantasy tripe involving the monster-hunter becoming the monster, an evil megalomaniacal sorceror, plot-twisting betrayals that can be seen from a mile away, and more McGuffins than you can shake a stick at.

Transitioning between Dragon form and Human form is perhaps the worst offense that the game commits. While you can transform at will at almost any time, your enemies are tracked separately. Having trouble with a particularly tough pack of necromancers? Turn into a dragon and burn them to a crisp from above, you might say! Well, because of the way the game works, you can't. Those necromancers suddenly disappear along with every other enemy when you become a dragon, magically reappearing right in the same spot the moment you switch back to human form. This creates all sorts of other problems as well, like using dragon form to reach an otherwise impossible floating platform, only to be eviscerated by the sudden appearance of enemies as soon as you land. And don't get me started on how aggro is handled...

Despite its flaws, I couldn't help but enjoy Divinity. I enjoyed creating my character out of every skill imaginable. This wasn't just a fireball-spewing demon-summoning plate-armored dual-wielding berserker, it was MY fireball-spewing demon-summoning plate-armored dual-wielding berserker. As painful as the transformation process was, I couldn't help but get a gleam in my eye and a smirk on my face as I soared through the skies in dragon mode while epic fantasy music blasted in the background.

Divinity is a game that really wants you to like it. To be fair, it does fix most of its big issues by the second half of the game, Flames of Vengeance, but the first half of this 30 hour adventure can feel like a bitter ordeal up till then. The writing and charm, however, keep the game alive. It is truly a beautiful game, and one I did enjoy, personally, but it's not one that I could recommend in good faith. It is definitely a game that is worth borrowing or picking up in a sale, but unless the charm infects you, and it just "clicks" for you, there are definitely better options out there for you.

This game left me with very mixed feelings. It felt like there was a downside to every positive.

The mindreading mechanic was interesting, but paying XP to do so - often for nothing useful - invited tedious save scumming.

Combat offers some interesting options, but is undermined when enemies get stuck on the environment or simply forget about the fight and stroll away while you shoot arrows into their back. It also feels pretty simplistic when compared to other games of its genre. Seeing enemies in Kingdoms of Amalur dodging arrows and reacting to being set on fire made me realise just how basic combat is in Divinity II.

There's some enjoyable quirky humour, but also plenty of bland and tedious lore.

The game generally looks good, but the animations during dialogue are bizarre; the characters appear to be undergoing a seizure while speaking.

The prospect of playing as a dragon is exciting, but it takes a fair while to get there.

When you do get there, it's rather disappointing. It is a feature which is essentially walled off, not only from certain locations but all ground combat. Worse still, it can be graphically overwhelming - the dragon battle with Zagan prompted me to uninstall, being one of the most disorienting and frustrating segments of a game I've ever encountered.

There's a lot packed into this game, but I just couldn't embrace it.

So bummed that I couldn't get this to run on my modern rig, as it crashes during every loading screen and the fixes others have found didn't work (or didn't last).

I'm just posting this as a warning to those who are interested, as it may take you a lot of work to get it to run...and it might not at all.

The game seems decent if it didn't crash 50% of the times that I tried to use doors. I've tried everything but nothing works. It just stays in an infinite loading screen.

I'm very split about how to review this game, but ultimately I would not recommend it for the time being. The story is very good, the environment is gorgeous, the world and lore feels a lot more developed than a lot of ARPGs, etc., but the game does suffer from a lot of bugs and other issues which seem to get progressively worse the longer you play. The gameplay is decent and has its own flaws and quirks. This game has a huge amount of potential but seems to become more and more unplayable. I really want to play this game more, but it's just too broken. I reached about 30 hours in before the game got to where I just can't progress any further. I've tried using previous save files, but some bugs still get triggered and it's not worth repeating hours of the game to see whether the bugs show up or not. I really want to recommend this game because of how much I enjoyed what I could play, but it's just way too buggy.

I've encountered several bugs which range from annoying to completely game breaking. The longer I play, the worse the frame rate becomes, to the point I have to save and restart the game. The only issue is, the frame rate has gotten permanently slower no matter what settings I try. When I first started the game would be about 60FPS (at the cap) but has fallen to average somewhere between 20-30FPS (sometimes falling as low as 10FPS for no real reason) even in the same areas I got 60FPS before. It doesn't seem to be an issue with my computer, but a bug in the game itself since it only really happens with this game and several other buggy games. Certain cutscenes will also crash the game randomly.

I've also had a bunch of random physics and control bugs which aren't too bad but are extremely annoying. I've managed to clip into things and come close to sequence breaking from issues with the physics. If you land on certain objects (things which you can very easily jump on), you can get stuck to the point of having to reload a save file. Sometimes the game will freak out and the controls lock up or get stuck performing the same action if you perform an action while moving or if you use a spell while attacking. If I use the dragon's flame attack and cast a spell, sometimes the dragon will get stuck attacking with flames, and be unable to move left or right, until I click several times. I've had several other issues during combat where my character gets left unable to move or attack and the camera stays locked until I cast a spell (it isn't a status effect), but I can't figure out exactly what triggers it. The dragon form targeting seems to have broken permanently in my game and will randomly jump between targets on the screen (literally all of them) even without moving (mouse or keyboard) and with stationary enemies being the only thing on screen.

Certain quests have been rendered impossible because of bugs as well. The General Raze fight is impossibly bugged on my game. The first time I played I ended up dying as I opened the menu, then I reloaded from an earlier save and the Walking Armour spawns were broken. If I reload from any previous save and work back to that point, the spawns are still broken. The number of spawn points has doubled (the healing pods spawn them), each spawn point spawns about the same number of things that the whole room did before the bug (could be more, hard to tell since they spawn inside each other), and the delay time dropped to somewhere between 10 and 15 seconds or so per round of spawns. They spawn so fast and with so many that it is quite literally impossible to kill them all. They continue spawning in the same spot past the point the game AI stops trying to control new spawns. The dragon form seems to have broken on my game after resetting my skill points since it doesn't get any increase in health or other stats when my character levels up. I do get random dragon skill points every couple levels for some reason though... Certain battles which require dragon form have glitches with enemies spawning, like the Zagan fight, where the other things keep spawning even when the nest towers are all dead. There are other minor bugs like certain quests where you choose who to give something to or whatever are either both completable or both incompletable depending on the savefile (played through the first 2 hours like 3 times on different files, had the first savefile be completable for both options for an early quest, normal choice the second, and incompletable the third). I've also failed to find certain NPCs which are supposed to be in certain areas, I don't know if these have been because of any kind of bug or just not hitting the right trigger.

The gameplay is overall very fluid and fun, albeit extremely unforgiving. If you level properly and fight very strategically, you can get extremely overleveled very early on. Of course, the game is unforgiving with your stat points so if you plan poorly, you can completely gimp your character until you get a lot more stat points. Combat is pretty easy to follow though it is easy to get overwhelmed depending on what kind of character you play. Certain parts of the combat system can get annoying, like enemies healing faster than you can kill them, no real blocking mechanic, and other minor glitches. The biggest drawback in the gameplay is the fact the difficulty ramps up pretty harshly with very little warning. It's usually possible to take on higher level foes if you're used to playing with Dark Souls style tactics and can lure enemies away. Certain areas are almost impossible without coming back later even if they should be the right level for you to beat. Tricking the enemy into falling off the map or knocking them off doesn't seem to net you experience though, which can ruin certain areas since enemies don't respawn.

The story, lore and environment are what really shine in this game. The story itself is a pretty stereotypical bad guy turned hero type thing, but the way it's told is what makes it actually good and not just a complete cookie cutter type scenario. Lore seems to be mainly divided into books and interactions with people. People in towns don't always have something important to say but usually have something unique. You have NPCs who feel more alive than most RPG NPCs. Towns feel like they're filled with people rather than just reskinned NPCs from the town back. NPCs also feel like they have personalities; their motivation for their actions aren't just good or evil. You also have choices to make that aren't just black and white, good or evil, but hinge on personal judgement. You can try and glean more information from other NPCs but the choices are almost never obviously good or bad, but just different which is a nice change of pace. I don't know how it ends since my game broke too badly to really hope to complete, but it was definitely building up pretty awesomely.

It's insanely fun, and innovative for the time it came out.

BUT, after I got to the third area, it started crashing every third time it loads a new area, which happens every few minutes. It stopped being fun after a little while, so I gave up on it. Unless they fix the crash problems, don't buy it.

The game is certainly enjoyable, but it doesn't really do the things it's supposed to well. It's not an open-world of an RPG. The game is very "on rails".

Thus it would be obligated to have a better story, but it fails in that regard by having too many things that just don't make sense. The story is just bad. There's even one scene where the bad guy and the mentor just show up, out of nowhere, for no reason. Then you, the bad guy, and the mentor just stand around for the bit. Then the mentor tells you that the two of you have to fight because you are the hero and the other guy is the villain. Then the bad guy and mentor teleport away. End cutscene.

The story wouldn't be *that* bad if it were an MMO or an open-world RPG, but it's not.

The other big draw for this game is supposed to be flying around as a dragon. But they control use of it too much. They explicitly didn't want the player to turn into a dragon to easily kill ground enemies, so those enemies disappear until you transform back. To farm XP in the area, you have to clear one set of enemies as a dragon and other set of enemies as a human. This is supposed to be the power fantasy you earned after clearing 2/3rds of the main story, and they took it away with game mechanics.

The maps break immersion. Often times the only way to get from point A to point B is to fly there, and yet NPCs seem to have no problem moving about.

It would be a solid 'budget' RPG, and the gameplay itself is fine. It has some good humor in same cases that do a great job at being enjoyable without being over the top. But, there are a lot of artistic mistakes that hold this entry back. It doesn't do the things its supposed to do well.

I tried hard to like this game, but in the end, this game was just a no for me. However I do credit what Larian tried to do with this title, they were ambitious with this game:

- A lots of recorded dialogue
- Transforming to Dragon for air combats
- Open-world design (Sort of)
- Hours and hours of content

but damn... the main gameplay is unpolished, combat animations are choppy, feels like everything constantly hitting me and everything could kill me with 6 to 7 hits. (Yes I am aware I am not using a build guide, but I shouldn't have to rely on one to progress normally)

That being said tho... knowing Larian's development track record and how much they have learned from the past, if they are going to redesign/remake this game, I am willing to give this title another chance.

The game itself, is a fun and great game, inspired by classic RPGs with loads of possiblities.

However, I have experienced a lot of problems with it, regadring crashing, specifically when attempting to launch the game. No matter what I do, it doesn't seem to work.

So I can unfortunately, by no means, recommend this game for having such gamebreaking bugs.