Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition

Amazing game! If you like both RPG and turn base action, then this game is for you. Extremely well polished game and fully voiced over. I sank 90 hours into it.

--RATING 0 OR 10 DUE TO HOW METACRITIC HANDLES USERSCORES-- Cons: - Limited character customization. - Pace can be a little inconsistent. - Later areas are a little simpler than early areas. Pros: - Great, tactical RPG combat. - Amazing CO-OP implementation. - Good difficulty. - Whimsical tone, reminds of Fable (Yes I know there have been Divinity games before Fable, it's just a good comparison) - Lots of room for player creativity. - Amazing music, RIP Kiril. - Feels like a true adventure. Overall: Absolute must for RPG fans, the sequel looks to be addressing the few Cons I've mentioned.

There was an obvious effort to lessen the User Score of this game but it won't work simply because it's so good. Any person that enjoys RPGs should play D:OS and even more now with the Enhanced Edition. It's a really wonderful game with excellent mechanics, very very few bugs, pretty visuals, a deep character system and many many more good aspects that should be enjoyed, not written in a review. And D:OS 2 is on the way! Hurray!!!

Really fun game. Very open, where you can solve the problems in an amazing amount of ways. Probably the most similar videogame to Dungeons & Dragons. Very fun.

First of all, let me say that I was saddened to read that Kirill Pokrovsky, the game's composer, recently died. The music of this game is probably its most memorable aspect. It has a lightness of being and sense of mystery that will likely outlive the games it was written for. A few tunes definitely tread past the boundary of genius and "mere" game music. Now for the game. It's a mixture of various qualities. It's an old school RPG, complete with all the good and bad things that implies. The combat is surprisingly fun, and the vast majority of your skills are actually useful, which is refreshing compared with most modern RPGs. I found myself thinking tactically in most fights and frequently exploiting the weaknesses of my enemies. Quite often the tide would turn and I would win by a hair's breadth. Most of the way the combat is exquisitely balanced and the challenge aptly matches your capabilities and current range of supplies and equipment. What a refreshing change from the open world plague that has taken over the industry, where everything is overabundant and too easy beyond a certain point. There are probably two down sides in the game. The first is the writing. The dialogue is of a form that feels better read than spoken aloud. It's written in an expressive--sometimes outright belletristic--literary style. Characters always have a bon mot or clever turn of phrase for describing the drama that has just taken place, completely unlike real human beings. I find myself wishing for less literature and more psychology; fewer wordy reflections and more visceral engagement with the world. Don't tell me a thing has happened or an emotion evoked, show me it has happened and evoke the emotion in me. The result of this style of dialogue is quite often overacting and melodrama, which is a bit of a shame. The story is filled with characters craving power who wax poetic about how they crave it, the way that actual cravers of power never do. It sports its Good and Evil badges in the way of a children's cartoon. There are shades of moral ambiguity, but they're quite sparse. The story is also quite smarmy, as your characters turn out to be really special in the end. So special I found it a bit overindulgent. Needless to say, I would have preferred more subtlety. One other note about the writing: the writer cannot do declension, which is really very embarrassing. Seriously, if you think a sentence like "we came here for Dave and I" is proper grammar punch yourself in the face right now. The "...and I" plague is endemic in this game. If you don't know whether or not to use "I" or "me" in a sentence just use "me" and be wrong the common way and not the hypercorrect way, which makes you look like a fool. The game makes similar mistakes with other pronouns and I won't even start on the mediaeval grammar. Seriously, there is a simple difference between "thee" and "thou". Don't use those words if you don't know it. Okay, rant over. Now the second problem with this game: the puzzles. Some are fun and rewarding, and some are just frustrating. I can proudly say I beat the game without even once looking for help from the Internet or any other source. But, honestly, I don't really know how I did it. Seriously, some of the things I did must count as cheating. In one case I completely skipped a (presumably) very large set of puzzles because I (apparently) guessed a combination you need to get to the other side. That means I found guessing easier than the puzzles. A common problem with the game is that the devs didn't correctly anticipate what I would find easy or difficult. I'd pass a difficult puzzle and advance the story while missing an "easy" one. As a result, some dialogues wouldn't make sense. For example, there is a certain kind of power up that must be consumed to advance the story. I didn't need to use it (even though I played on Tactitian mode) and spent hours scratching my head about what I should do next. Another time I needed to loot a certain weapon from a dead enemy to advance the story... but I didn't notice it was there because he fell over top of it. That also cost hours. If a puzzle's resolution makes you groan, it isn't a good puzzle. All these things being as they may it's still an excellent game. It's unafraid to be what it is. It doesn't apologize or hold your hand through anything. It requires reading and crafting. I requires the skills that many games consider to be bonus. The environments are atmospheric. The banter suits what has happened. The creative direction has focus and consistency, which is refreshing and something for others to emulate

A good (but not great) game that has a lovely turn-based combat system which encourages strategic thinking as opposed to the itchy trigger finger free-for-all fest we've seen too often in so-called CRPG games of late. I would have happily given this game an 8 but I feel the following issues reduce the overall score by 1 point. - The recycling NPC dialogue. Dear lord, do I really have to listen to 2 townsfolk in the marketplace repeating the same couple of lines every few seconds while I consider what to do next? It really makes it hard to think sometimes. There is thankfully a mod available to fix this but some areas are still a problem. - Railroading. The game tends to force you to follow a certain route and visit areas in a specific order as enemies who are above the general level of the party will wipe the floor with you owing to the combat system favouring them exponentially for each level they are above you. This slows the gameplay down a lot as you dither and dally over trying to find areas where enemies are around the same level as you. - Instant death. I'm one of those CRPG gamers who likes to try and play through a game without getting my characters killed so I don't have to save-scum, as this feels like cheating. Unfortunately this game tends to occasionally throw enemies or traps at you that (a) can one-shot a typical party member or (b) are invulnerable to your attacks, with no advance warning. One example from my last game - my 15th level party gets into an underground tomb. There's a large semicircular room with what looks like an animated humanoid statue (an eternal guardian) at the far end, and when I hover the mouse pointer over him, the blurb tells me he's 16th level. I move my party forward (anticipating a battle against him which I figure I can win), and suddenly 4 gigantic eternal guardians appear and attack, 2 from each side of the room. I throw a summoned zombie at them as a meat shield, and when I see it getting one-shotted, I figure it's time to flee. Unfortunately the game doesn't let me flee, as it keeps telling me one of my characters is still in combat, despite my entire party standing near the exit stairs. I then manage to get my stealthed ranger to the far side of the room, up some other stairs, and then I teleport the rest of the party to her using a magical device. I figure then combat should end as I'll be out of sight of the guardians but voila - the whole party instantly dies as they teleport to her area, as apparently there was some deadly trap there which was triggered by one of the teleporting characters (which the ranger failed to spot earlier). GAME OVER. It's moments like this that make this game incredibly frustrating at times. - Other poor game design elements - dialogue options that keep showing up, despite them having been used in the past (eg. option "1. Who are you?" still showing up despite talking to a specific NPC for the nth time), characters repeating dialogue for events that have already happened (eg. finding a buried treasure chest and later coming across a book that mentions the treasure, then making a comment like "this treasure should be buried somewhere around here....."), characters repeating lines like "What a lucky find!" every time they pick up one of the magical teleporting pyramids they've just used for the 20th or 30th time. - Too many useless loot drops - I'm not into crafting in CRPGs so it gets really irritating when you constantly find things like rat's tails, arrowheads, sheep's wool, bomb fuses, wood chips, etc, etc. Also the other loot you find on slain enemies is usually inferior to what you can buy from merchants, so you find yourself constantly running back and forth in search of better gear like headless chickens between the various weapon, armour and magic merchants in the game as their stock changes each time you level up and after every hour of real time. - Environmental effects in combat - a bit overdone as often the central area of the battleground becomes a veritable morass of lightning/fire/poison, which can limit the usefulness of melee-orientated characters without ranged attacks/teleporting ability, as they get stuck waiting for the elemental effects to clear so that they can close with any remaining enemies. I've backed Divinity Original Sin 2 via Kickstarter so hopefully Larian Studios will make it a bit more polished than the first one.

This game is horrifically unbalanced, poorly designed turn-based combat and otherwise lackluster in every way other than the modding support. This is not an old school RPG like others have claimed. It is the devs lazily throwing stuff out without balancing and saying it is "old school". In old school you didn't continually face twice as many enemies as your party and always several levels higher. Each combat is a luck-based gamble. Sure, combining attacks is advertised but this is utterly useless when, no matter what your attributes are, you consistently have to attack last and by that time every enemy has already charmed, stunned or feared your party. Furthermore every enemy has way more attacks then any of your characters irrelevant of their level. Your characters can basically either move or use an attack each turn. Meanwhile I've seen whole packs of enemies move all the way across the screen and then still be able to attack 2 or 3 times and basically reduce your characters down to nothing in 1 turn. This game is utter garbage. It doesn't matter about the story, environment or anything else if every combat encounter is a gamble. This isn't fun, this is bad development and testing. Don't even go into the bad character designs that really don't provide any true value to your character. The leveling is horrificly slow to the point where I'm almost to the end of the game and I'm only level 12. At this point you haven't even hit the top tier of your skills yet. The RPG aspect is bad. I am done with the Divinity series and Larian in general. Thanks for destroying a series that was going good.