You know, without using characters on hexes displayed on an isometric view. In fact, characters aren't displayed at all, it's only a blank first person view and the character portraits are on the sides of the screen.
I'm floored, not only did they eliminate random battles (you see the enemies on screen beforehand and have a chance to avoid them), but there's so much depth, so many sweet little touches that it's a joy to play just to fiddle with the different possibilities.
So the enemies appear in front of you, and if you don't have a mage or someone with a ranged weapon you need to move close to them in order to be able to hit. Before any turn you can choose to either run or walk, and that allows the enemies to strike first, and then you can move wherever you like. The attacks of your heroes are pre-set, before a turn begins you only have to click on a button and everything goes on automatically; however those pre-set actions can be changed individually to each character to your liking. In combat when you click on a character's portrait you see icons for the actions that your character can do. If you use a spell on the next turn the mage will keep its pre-set action, but if you want to cast the same spell such an icon will appear.
There's a lot of depth to the spells! You can choose the amount of mana points that you want to allow to a spell, and if your mage is inexperimented spells using a lot of mana points could backfire and hit your own party.
The options for character classes, leveling, inventory, equiping weapons, pieces of armor, make those from most any other RPG pale in comparison. There's a bit of level scaling when it comes to the enemies you meet in order to provide a constant challenge, but unlike in Oblivion it remains tame in order not to eliminate the feeling of reward as your character become better. I could go on and on and on!
It's very funny, the game absolutely doesn't take itself seriously. The heroes make jokes all the time, and it's a mix of sci-fi and tolkienesque fantasy.
What's cool is that it works on modern PCs even with Vista and there's native widescreen support.
