Pope Amole II
I'd really love to read your review of the game. Just to get a second opinion after Rush Limbaugh's devastating verdict.
Dunno, man, I'm not much of a reviewer these days and, well, I've said pretty much everything already. To reiterate, I really hated the story and world of the PoE - they felt unimaginative and, while there are huge info-dumps at the beginning, there isn't that much actual attention to the most important details of the setting. And the whole story feels somewhat mish-mashy.
The exploration aspect also felt rather bland - lots of checks in the game but they're just to create the visibility of complexity. In reality, they don't really amount to anything and sometimes they (or, rather, the very obvious lack of them) lead up to hilarious things (like the ever-burning fire-godlike freely making some hot loving at the brothel). But they're not really hilarious, though, more like annoying. The game is not bad enough in this department to be so bad that it's good (besides, that approach works with the 80 minutes movie - the feeling won't last for a 60 hour game). The writing is downright retarded in many quests.
Another thing with the atmosphere is that it's direction changes rather abruptly. You see, at the beginning, they're going for a very bleak, dreary feel. Your caravan gets slaughtered, your newly found buddies share the same fate, you enter the city and the first thing you see is a tree full of hanging corpses, it all, compared with a highly stylized graphics, creates a rather specific feeling. And, actually, the game felt rather awesome while this dreariness lasted. The problem is, once you got the citadel, it absolutely vanished and it felt like the authors were never paying as much attention to creating it as they did before. It's like they took this direction, then they understoond that no, they don't have the money for this shit and instantly scrapped it. That's my gut feeling, at least. If they were able to pull this to the end (with less inconsistencies and dumb thing in the plot), the game would've been top-notch.
On the other hand, the combat is pretty cool. Sure, compared to the BG, the mages got a bit more restricted in their options (though, have no doubts, pure casters remain the most overpowered heroes in the game and, as I've said, all the complaints of game being too easy stems from having lots of them in the party), but the rest of the crew got much more developed and now various melee & ranged warriors actually have some depth. The only problem is that the hard is the new easy so to have any challenge with the game you need to play on the Path of THe Damned and even that will vanish in the last quarter of the game. The middle & start are good enough, though, and, as you've seen from my post, you can get creative with the builds. Should you wish to.
So, frankly, it all depends on what do you prefer more in your RPGs. Whether you are fine with combat-only rpg or not, can you tolerate the faux-plot with faux-choices, etc. I'm not saying that the game is bad - I really enjoyed it until the fun lasted (and, tbh, I would've absolutely stopped playing it past that point if not for my funbuilding purposes). Most of the time - some overly filled with fedex questing hours were bad, yeah. So it was about 35 hours of good time - not that bad in my book.