Zachary Freeman

I've never written a game review but my thoughts on this one are all over the place after completion so I felt the need to write it down. There are some really great things about the game but overall, for me, I feel like the bad outweighs the good. I'll start with the good: The world is beautiful. The colours and textures of the variable landscapes are as good as, if not better than, the best of the open-world RPG genre (i.e. Skyrim, The Witcher 3 etc). Like I did in these games, I frequently found myself taking a moment to stop and stare at the incredibly aesthetic environment I was exploring. The combat system is fun and the enemies are interesting. Although limited in variety, their move sets are unpredictable and their design and animations are very cool. Each enemy you face has a weak point that you can exploit, like a puzzle. It's also not just the enemies that make combat enjoyable, the skills you acquire as you level up are a decent amount of fun and the different vocations add a lot of variety to your options. Adding pawns to the mix also adds an element of pseudo-online co-op-type combat, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Other good things: the voice acting, the level design, the gear variety. The bad (not considering the obvious micro-transactions, performance issues or chatty pawns): My number one issue with the game is the lack of fast-travel options. Yeah I know there are oxcarts and portkeys, but when you're travelling back and forth between areas that don't have oxcarts and you don't have any ferrystones, you're literally have to run the distance - you don't even get a horse or something to speed things up a bit. I know the idea is to make you explore and level up, but the lack of enemy variety, limited stamina gauge and chatty pawns make running around the map very tedious after a while. The inventory system is also unnecessarily tedious. There is no segmentation of items except for the sort order of the list of items you carry. Many of the items are dead-weight, which tend to build-up and ends up slowing your character down until you can organise your storage; so you're constantly optimising your party's inventory and withdrawing/depositing items from storage which means you're spending a sizeable portion of the game in menus. Another frustration for me were the side quests. I appreciated that they were plentiful and (mostly) interesting, but the fact that they had you running all over the fast-travel-limited map, had unexplained dependencies on other side quests and occasionally didn't trigger or bugged-out for no reason made them an overall frustrating experience. For a few side quests, I did exactly what the game asked and I still ended up with a bad outcome, or the NPC would disappear leaving the quest incomplete for the remainder of the game. Overall there were some aspects that I really enjoyed and some I found annoying or poorly executed. In the beginning I found the poor aspects easy to ignore but by the end of the game I found them so frustrating that I just wanted the whole thing to be over.