Well, that's that done, thanks for the help many peoples of teh internets. I think my main problem 1st time on the final battle was the fact that it had already been going on for an hour before the end-boss even made his play, and I was itching to go do something else by a deadline so tried to rush it. But really, having to spend an hour and a half on one battle? That's a debate between hardcore versus ridiculous if ever I heard one.
So onto my review.
I wont make a new thread for this as I'm no Dark Eye expert and have a very low opinion of my opinion matching public taste but I'm sure a lot of the stuff I say will be useful to people who know how to separate useful from irrelevant information and take what they need from such as I'm about to write.
Drakensang: The River of Time (a Dark Eye cRPG) (2010 EU 2011 US)
This was my first experience with the Dark Eye ruleset and I went into the game deliberately blind to knowledge of the ruleset in order to increase my enjoyment of the exploration of the new. I had heard it was a presentable cRPG from the modern era and a Youtube video of the first tutorial fight confirmed to me it was a game which adhered to a lot of my personal expectations of what a modern cRPG should be like. The following is a list of things that stood out to me from this perspective as I played through the game:
The first thing that really stood out in a big way is how awful the camera is. It's appalling. You can be standing out in the open somewhere and rotating the camera will produce a Helter-Skelter effect as the camera dives to the floor and back up again with very little obvious logic. If you wander into a corner you can expect the camera to be on top of your head with every clickable area of the screen being a click on your character instead of a move order. When in battle I often spent more time trying to find and stick with and return to the best camera angle possible than I did executing my orders to the troops. The camera view zooms to whichever party member you select, so, with many of the game's long, long, battles I found myself needing a break more from the epilepsy inducing camera flashing than I did from the minutia of the mechanics. 3/10
When it comes to free roaming the game is pure genius. The game will never force you to proceed without asking you in triplicate if you are sure you want to proceed and will also reassure you in triplicate that you can always come back to that area whenever you want. You are very rarely trapped in anywhere and if you forget to buy something or find you need to craft something half-way through a dungeon you can just go back to the area you require whenever you want. It's basically all one big open world, which is very nice. However, the final stage of the game involves a gigantic lock-in, so I can't give the game 100% here - why do even games which obsess about no lock-ins still insist on shoving them in at the end? Really annoying, just let me find a secret passage out or something! 9/10
Itemisation and loot is piss-poor. There are literally thousands of loot boxes to loot, all with their own descriptions indicating what level of loot interest will be in each sub-category of loot box. You could drive yourself mad making sure you crack open every box, they're literally everywhere, from behind random trees in the furthest part of a forest to sitting at the bottom of a gigantic pile of fooled-you non-interactive boxes. What do they all contain? 95% crafting materials. My character went the entire game without looting one single weapon upgrade, as did Cano, and the other two members of the party found one single upgrade each. Clothing you pretty much just buy from vendors when you've sold enough crafting materials or pick-pocketed enough NPCs. The game doesn't have a loot system, it has a crafting system. I'm not a crafter, I must be the only person left in the world who has never played Minecraft and never wanted to. The 5% of cool loot is nice when it lands though. 4/10
Questing variety is excellent and always fitting/interesting. When you first arrive in the opening city it can appear a bit intimidating, with every Tom, Dick and Harry giving you this and that to do but once you're out and about it settles down into more satisfying adventuring. While many of the bigger quests involve dungeon crawling to an end-boss there are also lots of other quests, many of which revolve around talking to people, having drinking competitions, stirring up a revolt, and even counting sheep (well deer to be precise), some of which even have choices as to how to proceed. Very impressed in this department. 10/10
Monster encounters and variety are quite a mixed bag. The bulk of the game is the basic Humans/Elves/Dwarves/Animals and very, very, very rarely do you encounter enemy mages. There is a smattering of interesting foes but only a smattering and they also tend to come in quantity rather than quality (as in large packs). The only really strange beasts are the various end-bosses, from the first, a Junk Golem, through Demons, Dragons and all kinds of interesting types and what-nots. It does have one really hideous dungeon where you have level after level of repeated set and monster, think the Remorhaz grind-walk in the Icewind Dale expansion Heart of Winter and then repeat that level 5 times and you know what I mean, it had me yelling "what were they thinking!" almost throughout. Generally though, most combat encounters are interesting and thought-required, even the crappy ones. 7/10
The game also has puzzels. There aren't many but they are there and often in crucial places where you'll be desperate to work them out. I found them all quite easy, but not dumbfuck easy and a non-puzzle person might stumble on some. Yes... there's a SLIDEY PUZZLE!!! (lol, in-joke for all slidey-puzzle haters). You could even class some of the people-quests as puzzles in their own right. 7/10
The general ambiance of the game as a whole is one of neither exuberance nor hatred. The opening town feels over-stuffed where-as the Elven Forest feels bare and empty bar one cool dungeon, the Dwarven mines area is a bit of both with an intensely busy centre surrounded by empty pointlessness with two big dungeons. The Dragon's Lair is a long walk to a dragon and literally nothing else. The Temple is just one big appalling, repetitive dungeon. The final section is just really weird as it starts with a dungeon which you can choose to either fight through or peaceably walk through followed by lots of end-boss stalling tactics before finally doing the end-battle thing. So the game is constantly flipping you from too much to too little to just right, never allowing you to make a definite decision about what the game feels like as a whole. Disjointed, but not necessarily badly. 6/10
A lot of people I since read about seem to think the english version has badly acted voice actors and it's not a patch on the original german. I never had a problem with any of the voice acting aside from the odd very small sore thumb and generally found it all fully satisfactory. I didn't dislike any of my forced companions (it's a single player game with forced companions up to a total team of 4) and I thought them and most of the NPCs sounded great. 10/10
The look and graphics of the game were fine for me. They're probably not that much advanced from the original Neverwinter Nights (2002) and there's not much to write home about with quite a lot of repeated scenery, but they present their world concisely and coherently and nothing sticks out as particularly bad. It's all exactly as you'd expect a NWN clone to look. I even prefer this look to how they made NWN2 (2006) look, everything being a bit smaller and less in-you-face but still obviously pretty. If you like just standing next to a waterfall watching deer bounce through the flora for 5 minutes in your RPGs then this game is up to the aesthetic challenge. 8/10
I had no noticeable bugs or technical issues with this game from start to finish. 10/10
So, my big ten categories added up and divided by ten equals a total score for the game of... drumroll please...
7.4/10
(Metacritic critics 7.5, users 8.6)
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