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| | Gameplay
Sound
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Value
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| | Genre: Adventure & RPG | | | Min OS X: 10.6 |
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Some notice should be paid to the magic system as well, should you choose to go that route. Rather than putting points into ready-to-use spells you will craft custom spells using a card-based recipe system and assigning them to your hotkeys. It's complicated and not exactly user-friendly but it seems to offer a wealth of options for spells; you can modify the delivery method (Area-of-effect, bolt, spray, trap, and so on), the effects (decay, fire, freezing, healing, etc.) and various other secondary-effect modifiers. I will confess that I have a predilection for playing knuckle-headed fighters but I intend to play through the game as a magic user and really delve into this system.There are other activities you can pursue; horseback riding plays a significant role in the first act, and the option to rent a sailboat occurs in the second act. I have yet to figure out why you'd need to rent a sailboat (it doesn't come up in a quest as far as I know), nonetheless, you can do it, and the sailing mechanism has been thought out and implemented carefully. And by the way, apparently it's possible to swim a really long way in full armor if you fall out of the boat, so don't be afraid of the water even if you're no Horatio Hornblower. GRAPHICS In general, the production values on this game are extremely high. The graphics are almost cinematic in quality, particularly the scenery and the various non-human opponents you will encounter. Some of the animations are a bit clunky and mechanical, but this may be a function of my older iMac's graphic limitations as opposed to the game's limits. One thing I should note is that the highest resolution the game seems to offer is 1920 x 1200. My screen goes up to 2560 x 1440, so I had the choice of either playing in windowed mode, which offers really incredibly sharp detail, or full-screen at 1920 x 1200. I usually chose the latter, and while there was a certain dreamy diffusion to the imagery it did not interfere with my game-playing enjoyment at all. I have to say that I was quite pleased with how smoothly the game performed on my older machine. As far as the human beings in this game, the designers obviously went to a great deal of effort to create realistic faces and bodies for the central characters. Unfortunately, I think that they either went too far or didn't go far enough, and landed squarely in the famous Uncanny Valley. Most of the faces you see seem to be slight variations on the same model, either a basic male or basic female. When one character interacts with another they are generally not exactly looking at each other and it takes you out of the game a bit. And there are the usual weird "I'm handing you something important but you can't actually see it because the animators didn't want to make a whole custom animation just so I can hand you a key/trophy/human head/scroll" moments that always seem to happen in games like this. It just may be that the technology is not quite there yet when it comes to realistic human depictions in games. Also, the few clipping issues that pop up generally revolve around a human character. But these are pretty minor quibbles. They certainly don't interfere with the actual gameplay.
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