dmarusz's Full Review: Beyond Divinity for Windows
At first play of this game, you’ll feel like this might be the game for you. It is fun point-and-click play. You run around fighting monsters in a dungeon with what looks like to be an involved plot. What’s not to like? Well, wait an hour, you’ll see.
It’s not that this game is terrible. It has this nice way of creating uneven challenges which keep the boredom of slowly progressing at bay, worrying that you are too advanced or too behind in a skill tree. Those types are always fun games, continual boredom or frustration. Great. But back on topic. This game does not do that! But, that’s about it. The uneven, but repetitive system of combat makes for fun. However, it’s only in bursts.
I think the key to the overall problem is that this game feels incomplete. Let me state another gameplay example to give you an idea. They have this thing called battlegrounds where you are transported to another place away from the main game but you can pick up items and money and even level. It’s a fun distraction and can help you beef up your character in one way or another.
The battleground concept sounds like a great idea, but it just wasn’t thought out well enough. They are not worked into the overall plot, and almost all of their quests revolve around doing a dungeon crawl, killing repetitive monsters, finding an object (which is usually guarded by the monster) and returning it to the person who asked for it. I know that this is the staple of RPG quests, but a little variance … please. I don’t even mind doing the above mentioned four things over and over again if you have some twist or something unforeseen. I just felt like I was going through the grocery store in real life. Yep, same place, same time, same day, same boring.
The initial premise of the game seems like it will pull you away from the same tedium. You start out with two people, not one, due to this fact that you are soul-binded (or whatever), with one of you being good and one bad. Then, in theory, you can make decisions that will alter your reputation. Unfortunately, if you go good, the Death Knight you have will moan and grumble like a bad marriage. Oh joy.
Your ultimate boss is an uber-demon. Insert originality here … please. Guess what his name is? Samuel. Forget Mephisto or Bhaal, nothing strikes fear into the hearts of men like the name Samuel. I guess Felix was copyrighted.
The only thing scarier than names is the amount of hit points you receive in the beginning. Get ready to die, and often. This gets even more hampered by the fact that you usually don’t have the attributes to equip the items you find. You would think that you could keep these things for later, but that’s out because your carrying capacity is minimal. You’re constantly selling stuff off as is to think about carrying something for later.
The constantly selling is annoying, because it feels like you’re buying and selling more than playing. They need a bag like in Neverwinter’s Night that reduces the weight of the items. Things like this could have possibly dressed up this game.
Getting back to the attributes, they don’t have a set up for paths of individuality. They have a casting system where the more intelligence you have, the more powerful a spell you can weave. It sounds good in the beginning until you realize that it eats up more mana to cast these powerful spells. So, whether you are a novice or a master, you get about three magic casts per 15 minutes. It’s that or you invest in mana futures. I ended up having my caster become an even better archer or else he’d be one dead depleted mage. You would think that you could be anything you wanted to be, but the necessity of the game forces you otherwise.
As I’ve been stressing, this game has a severe unfinished feeling. The plot becomes incredibly thin in spots. Plot quests seems unfinished or un-thought out. You have useless abilities like eating and sleeping which I rarely used. Even shopping has holes.
The biggest unfinished business would have been the art. It’s pretty much bad all around. The in-game art is similar to Divine Divinity. Now DD was underwhelming, but how do the artists that you employ not get better at what they do over the next few years? The 2-D art is not any better. I’m not going to harp on it too much, because it didn’t create a worse experience, but still.
Well, whatever you can say about the art, you can probably say about the sounds and audio. The voice acting is something out of a junior high class. It’s possible that they just couldn’t get good American voice actors over there in Europe. The Death Knight that you are bound to sounds just so over-the-top. Half of the time he sounds like he’s relieving himself during speech when he is trying to act tough. Just imagine Alice Cooper talking mad all of the time without any vocal inflection. The imps you come across often are just as weak. I would go more into this, but this article will put you in as much pain as the actual game if I write a few more lines on it.
The mood music is actually decent, although derivative of things like Diablo and the typical Diablo clones. I know that this is in the vein of that original series, but take some liberties from time to time. There would also be garbled sounds or the voice-overs would cut out in the middle. Usually, not a huge deal, but it just added to a long list.
They’ve managed to keep the same map system as Divine Divinity. You move seamlessly over what appears to be a very large area. Their mini-maps kind of keep things in order well, although the high and the low limits of their zooming could use a little work. Their maps put all dungeon levels on the same page. It might be off-putting to the purist, but I again found it convenient.
The one problem with the seamless environment might be the lag it causes. Load times are almost unbearable, and in some cases the real time action turns into a set of screen savers. This bogging down is probably enhanced by their use of Starforce. If you get the updates, you can get Starforce totally removed (which is nice because you don’t need the CD to play.) However, your performance still seems hampered. My guess is that it doesn’t remove itself fully.
The big problem with load (and save) times being large is that you die often in this game. They like the “learn by dying” method. Each time, you have to wait for the reload after death. You think that you can get out of it by doing quick saves, but no. Those saves are so slow that you’ll start a risk/reward analysis to see how often you have to bite the bullet and save.
Another and final annoyance (and you thought this wouldn’t end) was the combat system. You could equip/unequip your weapon, but gameplay was such that you’d have to do it all the time to keep from the loopholes. In the wild there are a lot of neutral animals that will only attack you if you attack first. Since you are using point and click for movement, you end up accidentally attacking an animal … often. The kicker is that once you kill an animal of one type in the level, all of it’s brethren attack you. If having cats attack you on sight is your bag, that may be fine. I just usually restarted from the last save to avoid the larger frustration.
In the end, this game was quite a let down from the original Divine Divinity. The improvements were flawed and unfinished. This lead to an inferior product which is more of a de-evolution to the original game.
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Detailed role playing game where you become soul-forged with a Death Knight Highly interactive world in the Divinity universe New style of gameplay wi...More at Amazon Marketplace
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