Been playing it nonstop for the past 3 days, its pretty fucking great. There are a few things that it does right that im a sucker for:
- Random encounters: There are many, can have long lasting consequences to your character and are fairly creative
- Fairly deep character building: a feat on every level that changes how your character plays.
- Good itemization: While the bonuses look small, they are huge, as the game works with small numbers, so even a +0.5 can a big leap if it rounds you to another +1 on a constantly tested stat. Add to that the different weapon types, each with their own thing, elemental weapons and artifacts.
- Ability to export characters as a game mechanic: Once you are done with the story you can still bring back old characters. Old characters with all the changes they went through in their campaign, only losing their level.
Ive gone through 4 campaigns, one of them i did twice. The game can get pretty challenging, especially in the longer campaigns, where your fighters retire from old age (Usually your hunter will drop in the last chapter or barely make it in, your mystics will last through 5 chapters).
There are 3 classes:
Fighters: Your fighting force, these are the heavy hitters, the tanks, the vanguard. They will easily rack up the most kills. They retire at a young age though, and arent good at scouting, so you kind of have preemptively start working on one or two new recruits. A weak fighting force on the last chapter will be crippling if you dont prepare. There are several ways to make these guys into monsters in the field, but you need to have a plan and stick with it, and get lucky with the options you get on level up.
Hunters: they fit the rogue/ranger archetype got access to hiding, but are otherwise pretty weak both in terms of offense and defense. You still need them to scout zones faster and are nice to have in a few encounters, having 1 per team seems to be the sweet spot.
Mystics: These guys offer unique interactions with the environment and can help you resolve several encounters. They can easily pin down enemies, destroy armor, devastate entire areas, and target enemies weak resistances with ease. You can have 1 or 2 in every team and not feel like you are missing out on a lot when it comes to fighting potential.
There are several campaigns with different enemy types and scripted encounters, if you bring your legacy characters into it you can get them unique equipment that will stay with them in future campaigns.
Anyway, theres enough here to justify the asking price, and i thoroughly recommend the game to anyone that finds my thoughts interesting.
