Last game you finished, tell us about it

[Philistine]

Finished AC Valhalla finally after 253 hours. 65/92 Achievements, 65/70 Challenges. Still a lot of content I could have done but my desire to move on became to strong. I didn't complete a few POIs, the Mastery quests, or River Raid, and didn't even start the Forgotten Saga (Forgotten Saga has most of my missing Achievements).
Pros: The most content in any AC, best visuals in a game I've seen so far.
Cons: confusing motivation caused by open world and dual nature of characters, very weak ending - again perhaps because of the open-world.

 

[Carnifex]

I finished Chain Echoes yesterday, and what an outstanding game!! Quite possibly bigger and more robust than Final Fantasy six, which it resembles, in all the good ways.

You get a huge selection of characters to find and use, and I'm not even sure I found them all. On my first play through I never use guides so I easily could have missed a few characters, certain treasure, etc. The story is massive and far-reaching, lots of character backround information and things that change during the course of gameplay. I really cannot throw enough praise at this game, it will go on my all-time top ten of kick starter projects that paid off huge, positive dividends. All I can say is if the genre is of interest to you, get this game, even at full price you'll be a victor.

The exploration factor is also huge and at times seems almost never-ending, as some areas can change during the course of the game. I literally lost days running back to discover new quests, new treasures, new opponents, ect.

And should this company put out a sequel or any other games in the same vein, I'll be buying them. Believe that.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Finished AC Valhalla finally after 253 hours. 65/92 Achievements, 65/70 Challenges. Still a lot of content I could have done but my desire to move on became to strong. I didn't complete a few POIs, the Mastery quests, or River Raid, and didn't even start the Forgotten Saga (Forgotten Saga has most of my missing Achievements).

That's a whole lotta game. That's the most common thing I hear about both Valhalla and Odyssey. That they're enormous. And sometimes not in a good way.
But hey, I got burned out just on the base game of Witcher 3 + Hearts of Stone. To this day I haven't really touched Blood and Wine, and whenever I think about going back I just see that whole thing as a mountain to be scaled. My personal Everest.

 

[Philistine]

I used to love epic games back when they were years apart. Now they are a log-jam. I want to start Solasta and Pathfinder:WotR but won't until they stop releasing additional content, and that seems never ending. How long will I need to finish WotR when I do play it? 300hrs, 400hrs?? That's insane.

 

[JDR13]

I used to love epic games back when they were years apart. Now they are a log-jam. I want to start Solasta and Pathfinder:WotR but won't until they stop releasing additional content, and that seems never ending. How long will I need to finish WotR when I do play it? 300hrs, 400hrs?? That's insane.

I think you can safely skip most of the DLC for the Pathfinder games. By most accounts, it's pretty bad.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

The Last of Us - Part 1 - PC
Not to bury the lead, the game is great, as it was on every previous platform it already got released on, and the remake is beautiful and very faithful to the original. If only the technical issues weren't present at release time. Which seem to vary greatly, in how much they affect players, depending on how much of a beast of a PC you have running it.

Having played it on a more towards the higher-end spectrum of PCs, it ran decently (though it was hard to have it keep a constant 60 fps @ 3840x1600 with most settings on high or ultra) when it ran. The most annoying thing for me about the port was its instability, with around 7 or 8 counted crashes in a whole playthrough. The interesting thing was that around the midway point I lowered a few texture settings from high to medium (they were already at high since my card (3080Ti) "only" has 12 gigs of VRAM, and a few texture settings set to ultra would apparently push past its VRAM limit) and the crashes went away completely. I finished the whole game and no other crash happened. Now I'm not sure if it was the patches that got released (some time had passed since the latest patch, and I think I still had crashes after that), the fact that I lowered those settings or maybe just sheer luck and maybe I just finished playing sessions just before it would crash again.

Anyway, the state of the port is pretty faulty, from the general oppinion on the various forums and steam reviews. If you have a high end machine that can handle it, you can likely enjoy yourself very much, if you manage to make it stable. Hopefully more work will go into that, keeping it stable and crashing as little as possible. For other optimizations to the extremely high requirements, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Now with the technical issues out of the way, I can focus on the review itself. Not that the game really needs another review at this point. The game has already been reviewed to death, since it first got released in 2013. I'll echo some of the same thoughts.

The Last of Us Part 1 still holds one of the strongest and most grounded narratives, with two characters probably having one of the most compelling journey together, as they learn about each other and affect each other's lives in profound ways.

I was also surprised that I enjoyed the whole story much more than its tv-series counterpart. That show's main issue was that it was way too short and they sprinted through most of the compelling stories and characters, most of them being introduced and taken off in the same episode. The pacing of the game feels much much better. And it's amazing how much more I prefer the voice actors in the game. While I liked Pedro and Bella, I guess there's just no comparison to the original characters. So it very likely depends on which one you saw first.

In terms of gameplay, it's a decent stealth action game and most of the time the AI is surprisingly solid and puts up quite a fight; especially on the higher difficulties. Higher difficulties also turn the game more into a survival action game, which is very welcome considering the setting.

Another remark with regards to gameplay, is how much better the game feels on mouse and keyboard. I guess I'm preaching to the choir when I saw aiming is much much better. As was expected. But this point is reason enough to want PC ports of all console games. Since for some reason console devs either don't want, or can't be bothered to offer m&k support native on the console themselves.

Visuals are probably the most affected areas of the remake, with the game looking absolutely gorgeous. The lighting and vegetation especially looks very nice. The character models are also outstanding. On the level of Part 2. Of course, all of this if you can run it at high settings. At lower settings the game seems to have sufficient glitches that make it behave very erratically in how it presents itself. The impressive visuals stand that much stronger when I seem remember players complaining that the PS3/4 graphics were still acceptable and some even went to lengths to say that they don't notice any difference at all. They were probably looking at a different game.

On the final score side, I think it fair to issue two scores, one disregarding the technical issues (which at least for highend machines, we hope they can fix; not exactly acceptable, but it's the best I can do for it) and one considering the issues I've experienced and others have drawn attention to.
Score with technical issues: 4/10
Score without technical issues: 9.5/10

I hope to god Part 2 is also coming to PC and in a better state than this one.

 

[largh]

I finished Mass Effect 1 Legendary Edition. While the graphics are brought to modern age, the game itself shows age with clunky controls and animations look sublime compared to modern games. ME nails the space atmosphere and the story is memorable, but I have to admit that I looked at this game with rose-tinted glasses. Great setting with restricted dialogue options, boring character development and class system. The game has that Bioware writing which I find disturbing. All in all, great game back then, now only mediocre. I hope Starfield will be better. 7/10

 

[danutz_plusplus]

I also finished Left Behind, a great expansion to the story and I loved playing as Ellie, in certain regards even more than Joel, since she's more vulnerable and this forces you to use more stealth and trickery.
Another thing which surprised me was how much easier the expansion was from what I remember on a controller. I seem to remember that I played on the same difficulty (Hard), and the final fight was an absolute nightmare on console.
On pc, 2-3 tries and I got it nailed. Of course, being able to properly aim was the game-changer. I only had 5 bullets in the end, but made great use of each of them. And then took out the rest.
The cat and mouse gameplay of Last of Us is pretty great and suspenseful.

 

[Lakorus]

I finished Bloodstained: Ritual of the night. It's a "Metroidvania" and I enjoyed it quite a bit: the gameplay is competent with a wide range of weapons, special attacks and magic to be used serving different purposes and enabling different playstyles (different ranges and attack rates etc). The exploration is fun and the enemies and bosses have a nice variety with attack-patterns etc.. The difficulty was fine for me (playing on normal) - especially at the beginning some monsters require a nice bit of tactic, choosing the appropriate weapon and magic. I can imagine that on higher difficulties, this will be crucial, but that isn't for me.

Reading up on it on the internet after the completion in order to find the last hidden secrets I learned that there were a lot of things that I didn't find in my playthrough. And of course, all the references to former installments of the game and even Castlevania itself were lost on me, but I can imagine that some of them are guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Some things that I didn't enjoy that much:
- The sheer amount of weapons, armor, magic, craftable items and so on are just overwhelming for me and I ended up using the same combinations for very long time.
- Towards the end it is possible to craft a completely overpowered weapon, which can attack so fast that even the three last bosses can be beaten just by walking up to them and mash the attack button, ignoring the damage they do, because you are just faster than them
- I tend to be a completionist, which can become a drag in this game. For example, having 30 or so craftable types of food, each requiring a certain amount of ingredients lead to a lot of grinding the same monsters again and again just to get a component that only has a drop-chance of 1%...

So in the end I was relieved having finished the game. It took me almost 30 hours according to GOG Galaxy.

I just have to start the game once more, because I have only discovered 99,9% of the map, so that only 0,1% is missing for the 100%-achievement...

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Commandos - Behind Enemy Lines. Technically I've not finished it yet. I only reached the 14th out of 20 missions, but I feel confident in review it. I'll likely stick with it further, but this whole experience was mainly as a test as to how well the game has aged, and how good it is compared to my memory of it. And unsurprisingly it's still pretty fantastic. My review:

A game I had a lot of nostalgia for, since I played it during my childhood.
And it still holds up fantastically, once you get over the little quirks, like the fact that it only renders at around 20 FPS (if I read this correctly on some internet page). It's nothing too jarring, once you get used to it. Maybe when you're panning the camera around. But otherwise it looks great for its age, and the 2D art aged fantastically, considering the game is now 25 years old.

The other little gripe is the fact that save slots don't display a timestamp, and since I've been abusing the hell out of the save system, I constantly forget which one I used last. Tried to setup a rule for myself, as what to use when, but I constantly didn't stick to it, so every so often I would need to reload multiple ones, to find the right now. Not that big of a hassle, since it loads almost instantly, but still annoying.
And, I think that's all I can name in terms of annoyances. It's all perfect from this point on.

As I mentioned, the graphics have aged beautifully, and still look great. There's some pixelation, but still looks great for a 25 year old game. 3D games from that period likely look awful right now. The realistic render style is beautiful, and can still very much be enjoyed. There's little quirks in terms of perspective issues, since it's 2D and it's hard to interpret depth sometimes, and you sometimes can't 100% depend on what the enemy view-cone displays, but it's fine once you get used to it.

Sound and music is decent, but music specifically seems to either be almost missing, aside from menu music. The voice overs and character lines are very nostalgic, and I've enjoyed them a lot; hearing them again.

Gameplay is where this one truly shines, and it's a real shame this genre of real-time tactics hasn't grown a lot bigger, and aside from a few spiritual successors, the market has been pretty empty. It's nice to see a small resurgence with things like Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3, and I hope the Mimimi studio manages to keep at it and sell enough to make it worthwhile. It would be a shame for this genre to die off.

The game is basically a puzzle game where you try and manage multiple enemies, patrolling around and/or guarding places, keeping track of what they see, using tricks and devices that each commando has under his belt. It's a great feeling once you solve every puzzle encounter. And some of them are significantly difficult. Compared to the more recent games from this genre (Shadow Tactics especially), it really seems like a good part of the games were lost with all the streamlining and easing of difficulty. But at least they're still being made.

I've managed to reach the 14th mission (D Day Kick Off) out of the 20 listed on the game's wiki page, and I think I've really hit a brick wall in terms of difficulty. I'm pretty certain I've not reached this point when I initially played it as a child. It's impressively difficult and I've actually hit an encounter that might be a show-stopper. At least in terms of getting through the mission without sounding the alarm until the very last moment when set explosions go off. And I've managed that so far, but this mission is really trying my patience, and I might just need to get over myself and try for blowing the alarm.

Anyway, it's been great fun and it really shows how solid games can age beautifully and still be enjoyed 25 years later. And that is impressive.
A 9.5/10 from me.

 

[Philistine]

Went back to My Time At Portia and finished it this time. I see Portia as an rpg that focuses on crafting and relationships, rather than exploration and combat, which sounds like a good change of pace.... And pace was the problem I had the first go around! What looks like a cheery, relaxing game on the surface belies that it revolves around schedules and timed events. In the early game I was running around like a maniac trying to get everything done. Too intense for me, so I quit. Years later, after AC:Valhalla, I decided to give it another go. Going over the settings I discovered a Game Speed slider. This may have been added
in the interim, but I had not seen it before. By default it's set to Max, I moved it down to Min, and lo now I have a playable game!
Took me 193 hours to get to the credits, on the How Long to Beat site they say 70.5 for the main story and 135 for completionist, so typical for me. Worth doing but not as chill as it looks. Tip: if you want to save time in the end game, plant crystal trees early.

I haven't played a racing game for a couple of years so I started up NFS:Rivals. First off want to say the way the new EA App links to Steam is horrendous. I spent a good part of an afternoon trying to get it to work, because my son had previously linked the app to his Steam account and apparently once you link accounts it's PERMANENT. EA support were able to fix it, but still, that's some bullshit right there. My mood was not improved when I got to play the game. The two biggest things I dislike in NFS games are cop chases and multiplayer (ok I hate multiplayer in anything) and in Rivals they dial right into those two elements and minimize everything else. In single-player mode the game is still online, and every time you see a cop on the map, and in every race, they will chase you. Sucks beyond belief. Worst game in the franchise.

 

[largh]

Did some split screen co-op games from Gamepass with my partner:

• It Takes Two was an entertaining couple game with creative art design. Light mood and cheesy love stuff. Mostly jumping, solving puzzles, and levels with elements from other genre such as FPS, Diablo, Souls-likes...Would never buy this game but it's a perfect addition to Gamepass, which gives us good value so far (also playing Skyrim and Fallout 4 through it, but those are single player as you know). 6.5/10
• Unravel Two had incredible graphics and some levels were cool. We especially liked the old forest parts. Otherwise, this is a co-operative platform jumping and puzzle solving game. Ok, but, again, would not buy it. 6/10
• A Way Out was an interactive co-op movie. The story had more holes than a sieve, but once one ignored them it was an entertaining experience. It tells a story about two criminals escaping prison to avenge a bad guy, with a twist. This also is about jumping and co-operative puzzle solving, but also shooting and car driving. I enjoyed this one the most out of the three. 7/10

All in all, I am happy to pay that 125 NOK a month for Gamepass when we both use it and get so much out of it. We have run out of co-op games (we don't find Stardew Valley and Minecraft interesting due to the graphical style and my partner doesn't like shooters). Considering to buy DOS 1 because I have not played that through yet. An alternative would be to wait for BG3, but it's not clear when it comes to Xbox. Also AoW4 could be played as local multiplayer using the hot-seat, right?

PS. It's hard to believe that all of these games are made by two Swedish studios: It Takes Two and & A Way Out are made by Hazelight Studios based in Stockholm and Unravels by Umeå based Coldwood Interactive. Especially It Takes Two appeared more American than most Americans themselves. All of them are published by EA, though, so the market is clear. Impressive that they manage to make something that American-appearing without living in the country themselves. I would have bet that It Takes Two was made in New England.

 

[Redglyph]

I finished RDR2, at least the story part.

Spoiler

I didn't like the ending with John Marston either, even less than with Arthur Morgan. The final mission is so ridiculous that it's distracting. So many enemies coming from everywhere, camped at unlikely places in the mountain. Then the final part doesn't make any sense. So for me, the story wasn't great to begin with, and the ending isn't worth the trouble. I've lost any interest to continue the game after that, even if I'm only at 80-something %.

Otherwise the epilogue was nice, though it felt unnatural to continue as someone else. Hard to complain since, after all, it's an epilogue. Maybe I'm in the minority of players who value the roleplay enough to dislike such a change of character.

Overall a good experience despite that and a few technical issues (controls, save system). The features I really enjoyed were the gorgeous open world that feels so much alive, the atmosphere, the variety of missions and other optional occupations, the variety of weapons (firearms, a bow, silent weapons, and... a lasso), and the horse system that was sweet and well developed.

 

[Robollix]

A while ago; Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem. Gave myself a big pat on the back for that. I've got all the Sam games, and it's the very first one that I've ever finished. Due to my complete hopelessness at fighting Bosses. (And inability to find suitable cheats... ).

 

[Dasale]

Screwed up a validation before finishing write sry.

 

[Dasale]

That's a whole lotta game. That's the most common thing I hear about both Valhalla and Odyssey. That they're enormous. And sometimes not in a good way.
But hey, I got burned out just on the base game of Witcher 3 + Hearts of Stone. To this day I haven't really touched Blood and Wine, and whenever I think about going back I just see that whole thing as a mountain to be scaled. My personal Everest.

Well, that's not so basic, firstly both cases are quite different, secondly it's heavily dependent of player type.

I can understand too long play duration, and some games as Skyrim and The Witcher 3 suffered of it when I failed finished them and gave up after about 80H of play. Fallout 4 didn't last that long but I suppose you don't store it in those very long play games. And still, I played odyssey twice.

Bloated content is definitely a tag players enjoy set to Odyssey no matter if they enjoyed the game or disliked it. But where it is bloated is the absurd amount of secondary quests with most having a quite good writing, for mechanics it's not as good but if you like combats and stealth it should not be a big problem. But the point here is:
- Generated quests are grey so easy to skip.
- The insane amount of secondary quests can be ignored, pick some ignore others.
- There's various systems that can be ignored so not finish them if fine, arena system, mercenary ladder, second mercenary ladder, totally new build possibilities starting at level 50, a cult order you can skip fully destroy, mythic animals you can skip kill all and ignore the quest that follows.
- You can fully ignore the DLCs, in fact one is more late content past end of main story.
- There's an equipment crafting/resources system allowing upgrade stuff at each level up. Firstly at first you can't do it until later and get bonus or prices through an optional system, secondly it's non sense bother at each level up. So this can burden a play if you don't realize upgrade when you can upgrade isn't the right/most efficient choice.

That's a ton of stuff you can ignore, reach level 47/49 and finish a first play (or lower level for skilled players or with lower difficulty), bloated content is only for players that cannot ignore content to play.

For Valhalla i don't remind at all it is bashed for bloated content, but yes it has a lot more content anyway. But it's a special RPG and a design path I hope no more Rpg will follow no matter its qualities. It has just one huge main quest truncated in parts, apart last parts of it that I hated, I found this quite well done. And past that it's only a myriad of mini games and small games except you can pick some and ignore a ton. Moreover if you don't bother on difficulty level and kept default difficulty it's easy mode so allowing even more rush to finish the huge main quest. And, at least for me, it worked better than Skyrim or The Witcher 3 because it's a much much better main quest, no comparison (but TW3 still blow up the concurrence on writing quality of many secondary quests).

And then I have some doubt those both games can be that enjoyable all along without enjoying a lot the combats and having fun to dig them. Moreover for Odyssey character building is another spice to dig along a play, and it includes an interesting equipment sets approach, so a build is a sort of a mix of multiple builds that aren't fully mixed but that you switch between. Caution for Valhalla it has perhaps a combat system somehow better than odyssey but its default difficulty is insanely low apart for DLC and eventually a few mini bosses. I don't think I had to play Odyssey past default difficulty and still had a fun learning curve along second play. For Valhalla I ended a play with almost highest difficulty for all options but high damages though options to avoid hit in walls.

So in few words, I advise more Odyssey, for both be ready for excessive content if you have some completionist syndrome, for both it won't be that fun if you don't like dig combats but thanks to the quite good huge main quest Valhalla will probably be more enjoyable if you don't dig combats, and only Odyssey has a really fun Stealth/Assassination system but it will hardly fill a full play without digging combats. Another point, a bit surprising for me, if you are found of tricks and puzzling, then Valhalla is quite a collection and certainly the biggest collection of such stuff in RPG, but most are a bit like various puzzles small games included in the core game, and too few are well embedded in the core gameplay.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Haven't finished it, but I think I'm done with WH40: Space Marine 1. My review.

This is a game I never got to when it was originally released, so here I am, trying it out properly 10+ years later. And I say trying it properly since I tried it before, years ago, and bailed on it within the first hour.

Well, I think I gave it a fairer shot this time. It originally appeared on my radar when there was a lot of positive buzz around it. Unfortunately, I think it aged poorly overall. But it also does very depend on what you're in the mood for.

At the core of it, it's an 3rd person action/shooter, with some very light narrative context to the whole thing. The action is decent to even solid, most of the time. But I did, for a number of times, get a very repetitive feeling. Of just grinding through encounters, quite easily most of the time. And with some nasty difficulty spikes once in a while.

The setting, while it fits the type of game it wants to be, is just not that interesting for me. The WH40k universe has some cool things about it, but subtle and interesting I would not really call it. Of course, I never got into it, almost at all since it never presented too much interest for me. But I also think the game never really leveraged the story and narrative too much, which I'm pretty sure you could write a strong one in any setting. It just didn't seem it wanted to be that type of a game.

The graphics, unfortunately have aged very poorly. Except for the nice combat animations. But the world and levels are very corridor-like and very drab and low in presenting anything interesting. Which would be ok, had the story and gameplay been truly remarkable. But as I said, the story I found to be barely there. And the gameplay/combat, while decent, was nothing remarkable. It seemed to slightly want to mimic the Gears of War style, but that was more impressive back then than this is. Even if maybe only ever so slightly.

One cool mechanic I did really enjoy was the level where you get, for a limited time, access to the marine jump-jets. Now that was kind of fun, and maybe if they wouldn've designed the whole levels around that, it would've been better. Plus that would've forced them to make more open-ended levels, and not just corridor after corridor. That's another thing I really dislike in most games. No reason to explore. They only tacked on some "audio logs" here and there.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to push through, and get too far into the game so far. I've reached the point where you escape the sewers with Titus holding the power device they want to take off-world. Having reached another scripted fight where I apparently need to take out some ork rocket launcher dude in a specific way, I just lost all interest in going through the motions again.

Especially since there's a long list of better games to spend time with. It's unlikely I'll return to this, at least until Space Marine 2 gets released; which was the whole impetus behind me trying this game again. But I'll try Space Marine 2, and hopefully it looking very pretty (which Space Marine 1, maybe similarly looked back in the day) plus maybe some better levels and decent combat will be motivation enough to keep at it.

At least for now, I'm not sure what to do about either recommending the game, or not. I think it will have to be a non-recommendation, and with a score of 5.5/10. It's decent in some areas, but pretty inadequate in others, especially if you're in the mood for something a little more than just endless hack and slashing.

 

[Arhu]

Bramble: The Mountain King. Very atmospheric game about Nordic folklore, with giants, trolls and gnomes. Quite gruesome, too. Included in XBox gamepass.

It was only 4 hours long, but I really enjoyed it.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Baldur's Gate 2

This game I had started back in 2001, before I even tried Baldur's Gate 1, so you can imagine how lost I was in all of it. But even so, one thing piqued my interest. The great antagonist they seemed to prepare for me. Irenicus is easily one of the most recognizable antagonists, mostly due to the fantastic voice actor behind the character. But even so, I never managed to get past the third chapter, mostly due to being overwhelmed by it all. It was also probably my second infinity engine/d&d game, after Icewind Dale, which still has a very special place in my heart.

Well, 20+ years later I've finally managed to finish the main campaign, with some caveats that I'll detail towards the end.

Overall it's been a pretty great ride, that started with some fantastic chapters, but then it slowly started to stumble, while managing to pick itself back up for a high point towards the third to last chapter; but then ultimately being kind of disappointing in how it wraps up and reveals the history and motivations of the main antagonist.

I wished more from such a promising antagonist, more than such primal and basic motivations and reasons as to why he was doing what he was doing. I wished we could've resolved our differences with some philosophical discussions and debates. But unfortunately it was not to be.

The game is a grand adventure, with so much sizeable side-content that it can be overwhelming. While I did go through all companion quest chains and other side quests, at a certain point I felt I needed to say enough and progress the main one. But I did enjoy a lot of them. The only negative was the apparently superficial time pressure that the companions put on you, keeping you on edge as to whether they will leave your party or not, if you don't get to their respective quests. That really rushed my whole experience, but even so I managed to have a good time. And this was after I had abandoned my Siege of Dragonspear playthrough right near the end, as it just couldn't keep my interest.

In terms of structure and world, I think I might have enjoyed Baldur's Gate 1's approach of a more open world, than this one. But what this did manage to achieve was a much more tighter narrative. And denser areas, where quests seemed to almost be setup one on top of each other.

One part that I didn't enjoy was either an imbalance in how certain encounters are supposed to run and how difficult they are, or maybe an over-reliance on the intricasies of the D&D ruleset, which I have to admit I'm very much a beginner in. I know most of the basic rules, but I feel what I'm missing is great patience to learn of all abilities and spells, and how they all function together and counter each other. It's a whole heap of particulars and details which I never had the patience to dive too deeply.

So because of this, I've encountered three types of combat scenarios. Most, at around maybe 80% of the whole, are absolutely easily doable with just my standard party, and no explicit buffs and enhancements. (Btw, I played the whole campaign in core rules, so slightly more difficult than normal.). On top of those 80% I then had around 15% of encounters I could easily overcome by just buffing my party to hell and back. That leaves the final 5% of encounters, mostly with liches, dragons and Irenicus, which I absolutely could not overcome. Even after dozens of attempts. My main suspicion is that I was lacking certain spells that lock down certain enemy spells. And I also didn't have the patience to start scouring the internet for the counters to whatever particular spell some enemy was using. So I've managed to tackled almost all of these impossible encounters via non-combat options. Which I didn't have for the final encounter wit Irenicus. Which is why it pains me to say I cheated in order to defeat that last encounter. And sadly, the actual ending was no improvement over the general lowpoint of the final chapter.

Another part I should to mention, that was very annoying across some of the game, were the verbal fights companions would sometimes get into. Two NPCs in particular really took it unbelievable extremes, that I was honestly shocked they put this kind of bickering in the game. I won't name them, but anyone facing that combination of characters will likely recognize them.

But even while saying all of this, I still need to grade the experience while taking everything into account. So I'd give the first 3 chapters an easy 9.5/10. The middle point a 7.5, and the final chapter a 6/10. Totalling, I guess, an 8/10. Which might seem high for how much I've complained. But even with these issues it's been a very solid game that's been a whole lot of fun. It's just disappointing that with this great premise and start, they didn't manage to knock it out of the park.

I will need to update this review after I'm done with the Throne of Bhaal expansion.

 

[JFarrell71]

Why does the bickering bother you so much? I like that alignment actually matters, and ideologically opposed characters don't just shut up and go along with it. I prefer the personality. Besides, they give you a ton of characters (16, I think? Somewhere around there), so if you don't want your party members to have conflicts, that's easy enough to accomplish by using different combinations of characters.