I always play as a archers or thieves or assassins for my main in wrpgs if there's a choice. So far, I'm pretty impressed with the options you have as an hunter. You can craft arrows to deal with a variety of situations: stunning, fire arrows which allows you to take advantage of gas/poison areas and enemies, poison arrows;etc. The game gives you enough leeway to use archery as a legitimate option, at least early on, but I can see it becoming broken later due to all the options you get.
First impressions:
- Presentation is extremely good. Wonderful large landscapes, beautiful aural and atmospheric music. There's a song early on where there's a woman singing and I thought it was in the game some where and I was searching for her for a few seconds until I realized it was just the music. The colors are bright, the art style memorable yet simple. The way lanterns light, and the way monsters explode into bitty bits of goo, ooze, and blood is nice to see. RPGS should always have that air of super strength going for them in combat. For a game that had a KS campaign of only 900k USD, the presentation is cream of the crop.
- It runs excellently on my machine. I have a 2009 ROG gaming laptop and it runs without a hitch on High.
- The game feels really familiar and yet, novel and unique. It brings together a lot of inspiration from a lot of different rpgs. It has the mold of a crpg like Ultima, with the combat of a strategy rpg, and some 'isms of jrpgs. The strategy rpg influence is a big one, because recently, crpgs and wrpgs in general have had a massive downgrade in terms of depth, particularly combat-wise. So it's refreshing to see a crpg going for a type of gameplay that has been labeled outdated, but does a lot to bring some new blood into the formula. The end result is something that feels like a cross between Divinity, Baldur's Gate, Ultima, Valkyrie Profile 2, and Valkyria Chronicles. Probably in equal share.
While I realize VP2 and Valkyria Chrocniles may not be direct inspirations, the combat and gameplay really feel like an isometric version of those titles. Here we have manipulation of environment, an AP system which requires careful use of movement and skills to maximum damage and develop strategy. The AP system especially feels taken straight out of a jrpg, especially Valkyria, and despite the low number of fights compared to its wrpg peers so far, the game makes a great point to teach the player something about battle even hours into the game. Which, again, for a wrpg is refreshing, since wrpgs have kinda skimped on battle heavy rpgs in focus of story-oriented rpgs long since KOTOR released. You can tell the developers played Ultima VII and other Divinity titles.
- The manipulation of objects helps bring forth a normally static gameplay genre, into something that feels more experimental and organic in its puzzle solving. While simple, I really enjoyed the basic puzzles of the tomb you enter at the beginning of the game. Moving your characters to stand on switches, shooting water barrels to take out giant walls of fire, blowing up gas and moving barrels around to maneuver past poison. Despite this being an intro dungeon, the premise shows great promise due to how all of this influences combat, which again, feels like a jrpg inspiration.
- I really don't like how slow everything is. After playing hundred plus hours of Diablo 3, I find the interface and player movement to be more than little limiting and slow. It comes off as a nitpick, because it is, but it really shouldn't take a double click to grab loot from a chest and then click the x to close it out. Should take two clicks to get everything from a chest, max.
- Story and writing are blah so far, but I get to play as a black chick with dreadlocks so I don't really give a fuck. I'm satisfied. Also, the game is charming enough where this isn't a big problem. Only issue is that the game gives information to the player without much reason to digest or care. I still don't know who the fuck this guy whose murder I'm investigating is, nor why I should care, but I'm sure I'll fill out the blanks later.
Even though I've only played the initial hours, I'm really impressed with the overall thing so far. Can't wait to dive back in.
Now, to find that damn song from the intro area with female vocals.
