Drakensang - Review @ GameBanshee

Brother None pens GameBanshee's official Drakensang review, which spans an extensive five pages.  The story, pacing, ease of combat and shallow companions all come in for criticism, although the quest design and general level of polish result in a score of 8.2/10.  Here's a snip:

Dialogue and quest design actually improves as you go along, with the dwarf mines containing some of the best quests of the game. A variety of resolutions and testing of player skill for quests remains fairly constant, but does peak in certain short parts later on, and you'll suddenly find your social skills are pretty damned useful. Heck, for two major invasions into enemy strongholds later in the game, the game actually encourages you to try and sneak in unnoticed rather than go in swords swinging.

This approach of keeping design at the same level throughout is really refreshing, and makes it worthwhile to play the game through to the end. However, the game does feel a little on the long side. Some sequences are a bit too familiar later on, making you wonder if a more focused, slightly less sprawling approach to length would not have been better. Particularly, a lot of time is filled by walking, as discussed, which is an absolute disaster, and much of the rest of the time is filled in combat, which is nearly as bad, but more on that below.

The review is included with their newly-launched Drakensang sub-site, with an equipment database and ruleset details.