The game’s story and exploration are coupled with equally impressive and immersive dungeon crawling and combat. When you venture out of your party camp into a city, forest, mountain or crypt you bring along with your main hero, three of your companions and you will want to have a nice mix of the games classes as they compliment each other quite nicely and each feature unique skills. For instance Rouges can pick locks and disarm traps, an invaluable talent as both provide experience and loot for your party. Combat is fast paced and action packed on both the console and the PC, though the PC experience is far superior as it is more challenging and tactical. In tune with this PC players may pull back the camera to gain a bird’s eye view of the battlefield to better plan out their strategy. Console players cannot do this and probably wouldn’t have to because the console’s difficulty is a lot more forgiving.

Mechanics:

The game’s action is fast and brutal and while the game may appear an action RPG to some there is a lot of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ style dice rolling behind the scenes. The action may seem too fast and you may find yourself somewhat overwhelmed, but you can actually pause the action mid combat to issue a single command to each of your party members, just as you can in Baldur’s Gate. On the PC you will probably be pausing the action every couple of seconds to micromanage your team due to the overwhelming odds and increased challenges. The combat on the PC is much more cerebral, engaging and rewarding than its console counterpart.

The console version features a simplified control scheme and a single camera angle. In both versions you may set up custom tactics and behaviors for your party members to follow when they are not being directly controlled. The tactics are very flexible though, no setup will handle every situation perfectly and you may find your characters acting like straight up twits and running headfirst into a mage’s fireball. These situations prove to be very frustrating. Combat is for the most part smooth and fun; each class is a blast to play and has a unique play style. You even have cool finishing move animations like slicing off heads or slicing up an ogre a satisfying final blow. However characters move extremely robotically and will often shuffle into position before attacking which sometimes feels jerky and makes avoiding a large enemies big “I’m about to hit you so doge this attack”, very hard to avoid.

Character Customization:

Character customization is deep and fun and you will want to experience all the different play styles and options available. Each class behaves initially as you would expect; warriors rush in headfirst and smack things till they are dead, rouges sneak around the battle taking out priority targets and mages stand at the back casting spells. Though as you advance your character you are given the opportunity to choose two of four specializations that further customize the way your character plays and will make two characters of the same class feel very different. For instance, you could choose to play a Rouge with a bow and specialize as a Ranger, which allows you to summon animal familiars like wolves and bears, as well as specializing as a bard who buffs the party songs. Or you could play a Rouge who wields two daggers and specialize as an assassin who DE buffs a target for optimum shanking as well as specializing as a Duelist who gains bonuses for fighting with two weapons.

Building your character is fun, deep and allows for a lot of variation. However the mage class is undoubtedly the most powerful and flexible as they have access to dozens of spells, many of which can be combined for devastating effects. Mages can devastate huge groups of enemies by mass paralysis and then dropping a lighting storm on them. While each class is fun nonetheless it would be nice if they were equally balanced.

Presentation & stability:

Technically the game both succeeds and fails. Playing through on the PC under ‘windows seven’ I experienced the last patch of the game crashing over a dozen times (which isn’t that bad considering how long the game is) and most notably several times during the final boss fight, which was so frustrating I almost smashed my keyboard against my head (and then I thought how much that would hurt, and I just booted the game again). Graphically the game is stunning with some really tight texture work and fantastic effects such as spells and blood splattered across your team after a heavy fight. The art direction is fantastic as well and gives the game a unique style that sets it apart from other fantasy games. The character models can at times seem brilliant and well-animated and other times stiff and robotic, the environments and their variety however never fail to impress. The sound effects are tight and extremely well done as is the voice acting with few exceptions. The soundtrack is nothing short of amazing and is worthy of a top notch Hollywood film, it is epic and beautiful and I found myself wanting to hear the orchestral score even after playing for dozens of hours and finishing the game.