Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

I've been waiting for this game after I have read a couple of previews. Since I live in germany I got the game a couple of month before the international release. I played the first two hours and got stuck on other games for some time, because the game had some great ideas (Mind reading, transform into a dragon and a couple of other things).

I played the game further now and I reached the tower, where you get some useful NPCs.

The game is still full of bugs and the performance is pretty bad (I have a Intel Core2Duo E8400 @ 3 GHz, 4 GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 285 running on Win7 64 Bit and I play Fallout 3 and DA Origins on full Res with all maxed out). The player often runs without moving (the enemies as well) like it's still loading in the middle of the map. Sometimes it works fine but sometimes it happens every 30 sec. There are a couple of other minor bugs but so far I found nothing really major.
The other side is that the game could be so much fun and innovative if these original ideas were used in a proper way.

The mind reading is a great idea for example but it doesn't really help you much since some NPCs need a lot of XP to read their minds. The results are often very disappointing and you need to level up pretty fast if you want to survive on medium difficulty, because the enemies get harder pretty fast and the balancing is still terrible after 2 patches for the german version.

I didn't try the turning into a dragon thing very often yet but it could be a lot more fun if it wasn't for the barriers that take away the feeling of freedom. Plus the ground enemies disappear if you turn into a dragon and the flying foes ignore you if you turn human. So there is no Air-to-Ground fighting here...

The Necromancer in your tower is a great idea, since you can create your own creature (which can be really helpful) to help you during fights. No complains so far since I'm not that far into the game yet.

If I told you the story so far it would sound pretty good. There is some good background history and some NPCs that could be interesting. But you can't really feel yourself into it. Especially the arch enemy Damian has pretty boring conversations and monologs. Your first encounter is a warning, the second one as well (even if he sends you some of his soldiers to kill you, which is a pretty easy fight).
The conversations are not very convincing, like when you find the dying Dragon Knight you wanted to kill she gives you her power in hope that you go out and kill Damian. When you meet your former mates they give you back a powerful sword they took from you before, since you were too inexperienced to fight a dragon knight, and attack you. In cases like these the motives of your team mates and other NPCs seem illogical.

There are some puzzles, which can be solved pretty easy (push some buttons in the right order stuff). The platforming part could be a lot better because you have almost no control after jumping. This could be called realistic but once you try it out you know what I mean. So after jumping a few platforms you want to jump from a moving platform to another and you jump just a few inches too far and fall to death.

If Larian Studios would have put a couple of months of extra work into it, balance the game right and expand the good ideas they had, I think the game would have had a lot more success. But in its current state I think I will play it further until Mass Effect 2 comes out and I will forget about it again.