Story
So it is another Bioware game, if you have played their other games it’s pretty easy to guess what’s going to happen here. You are a main character, you start of insignificant then you have greatness thrust upon you (The Spiderman phenomenon) and you have to defeat a supreme evil. This time it is all thanks to a bunch of crazy monks making deals with demons.
The main aspect of the story is the “origin” stories, you select to start out differently, be it a Dwarf noble or Elf surf. Also your class can change the beginning as well. What makes this work is the great writing that binds everything together beautifully. My first play was with a dwarf noble, one thing leads to another and you end up above ground going to help fight a battle. Though after the “origins” story has ended it’s all the same, the only difference you’ll see is “You’re a dwarf ain’t ya?” or there will be some key npcs who will react to you differently. The story and journey are the same really.
Littered through the well written dialogs you can find a lot of humour, especially between the conversations between your allies. I found myself stopping just to listen to the dialog you overhear.
The voice acting never seems to falter from its good standard.
You look like orcs to me
Another interesting thing is the complete lack of a moral compass to show that you are either being good or bad or even neutral. Instead it is left to the player to decide on what needs to be done, as some actions may turn out to be something a lot different then it seemed at first glance. It makes you think which I find refreshing in today’s gaming world. Though if you have 1 good character and 1 evil character in your party you can pretty much see the outcome of your actions as their “liking” of you goes up or down.
For example there is a child possessed by a demon, do you kill the child to stop any more pain or death, or do you attempt to kill the demon. The latter has another choice, you risk time by going to get help from the mages or do you sacrifice the child’s mother to allow someone to attempt to kill the demon? Further into the game the choices get more and more complex and it makes you want to play through the game again just to see how it pans out with a different main character.
Bioware are amazing storytellers, through and through.
Shortly after Wuffles biting him
Gameplay
Nothing new in the game play front, the classes you can pick at the start are the same affair as many rps out there warrior, rogue and mage. At least there are “specialisation” classes which you can help mould your character into your own play style.
Warriors hit things and get hit a lot. Rogues do more damage from behind and Mages heal or throw fireballs and so forth. Nothing new there, while the warrior can specialise in going red in the face (berserker) dealing with mages (Templar) rallying the troops (champion) or blood happy (Reaver) it doesn’t really change them much, each specialisation provides a small boost to their respective stats
There is a “tactics” system which is a simple set of rules you can assign to the other characters, for example “self: surrounded by 2 or more enemies: use area of effect attack” this can help you keep the micromanagement at bay for the most part. I have seen some instances where they will ignore their order which is a bit odd.
Skills are wide in variety and make combat engaging and hectic. You will be surrounded by enemies multiple times. The difficulty of the fights is interesting. You will find being swarmed by skeletons easy while the next room with less skeletons will prove significantly tougher. Such is the way of “luck” based things.
Each of the characters you encounter will have specialised in something, a human Templar, dwarf berserker and so forth. You can unlock the specialisation through them, by quest or by buying a book on the subject from a handy merchant (“how to get angry in 10 easy steps”).
One notable mention is that you have a inventory space, thought it can be upgraded through buying bigger bags through merchants (for some strange reason you can’t attach bags to your allies or keep them in your camp) in previous bioware games (kotor and mass effect) you could carry an army’s worth of arms in your pocket. Strange choice me thinks but it doesn’t affect gameplay really, not if you don’t pick up every dagger you see lying about.
Graphics & Music
I am not helping this game distance itself from LoTR am I?
Graphics are very pleasing, everything looks nice and medival-ey and with real nice looking locations and scenery. The music is quite well made and arranged nothing feels out of place audio related when walking around a dwarf town or human slum (you can tell they like dwarfs more)
The good
The bad
