Mohammed Abbas (Mo Abbas)

This game started off strong with interesting characters, an intriguing storyline, fun combat and lush environments. But it soon started to drag, and the slowed pace highlights faults that will be deal breakers to some. Chief among them is that this game does not respect your time. It has an ostensibly open, sandbox style map but some enemies are so ridiculously overpowered that it becomes clear that parts of the map are off limits till you level up. This leads to a tedious amount of trial and error, constant saving, loading and backtracking after getting slaughtered. This smacks of poor design to me. It's turn based combat and some battles last ages with no way to speed up the enemy's often slow turns. This gets really boring when you're swarmed by multiple combatants. In the second act you're quickly loaded with a tremendous number of mostly tedious quests ("I dropped my ring in the water. My wife will be mad. Please fetch it for me." - seriously....) and the quest tracking system is a mess, with nothing to indicate the importance of a quest or what level it may need your characters to be. Puzzles and quest lines are driven by annoyingly obtuse clues that often make no sense (at one point you're supposed to use a spell that allows you to see ghosts to view hidden levers on a wall. What?!). That's led to an army of people scouring online forums for tips on what to do. The game's difficulty level is also seriously borked, with incredible spikes at the beginning all but forcing you to drop down a difficulty level till you can afford better gear or level up. Surprisingly, there's few opportunities to grind or build up gold reserves by fighting weaker enemies. Every other battle feels like a major boss fight (and lasts forever). There's a crafting angle to the game but despite the map being littered with mountains of items very little is actually useful and almost nothing useful can be created by crafting. Character spells and powers are seriously unbalanced (Lohse is pretty useless) and it's very easy to accidentally create a rubbish character when allocating skill points that will cripple your progress through the rest of the game. It's a real shame as DOS2 showed a lot of promise and I love other turn based games like XCOM, Fire Emblem and Advance Wars. But it really needs a lot more polish to be worth your time and money when there's so many other good games out there.