Okay, here’s the deal. There are a lot of games coming out this year and money is tight around the Sidequesting HQ. Dali keeps threatening to replace us all with monkeys and typewriters. So from time to time we have to wade into unfamiliar waters and take a chance in the name of keeping food on the table. At first glance Divinity 2 looks like a fun romp into a fantasy world with dragons, heroes, and bad guys bent on domination. Unfortunately, unless you’re willing to put up with some pain, Divinity 2 falls far short expectations.
Here’s the bottom line up front: this game is not done. It seems a bit trite to say a game “lacks polish” or “could have benefited from more time” but the fact is, Divinity 2 is just those things. The cracks in the façade were bad enough for me, that after only a few hours I couldn’t play it any longer. I wanted to like this game as I got a Fable vibe when I first looked at it. As a person who played the hell out of Fable 2, this set my excitement bar pretty high. So, when this game failed to impress me I was very disappointed. However I didn’t immediately dismiss it. I kept at it, hoping for something to shine through. It never did.
Customizing your in game character can be as easy as selecting male or female, or as complicated as moving ten different sliders millimeters at a time to get just the right likeness of Sloth from the Goonies. Divinity 2 falls just right of deciding between male or female. You can pick between a few preset facial models but that’s it. It’s about as deep as a rain puddle. You are given the option to select the characters voice, but this is limited to preset phrase and grunts. There are no Mass Effect dialogues in this game.
(The word “Slayer” hasn’t been used so much since Buffy was on TV)
As soon as I entered the game world and my character moved about, something didn’t sit right. After a few minutes I found what that was. Not only did my character seem to skate across the landscape rather than walk, but he also had no turning animation. Let me explain: if my character was facing left and I pressed right on the thumb stick, he would pop to facing right. It was a binary left and right facing. He wouldn’t smoothly turn from facing left to forward to right. It was either left or right.
With that solved I was able to begin to explore the world. Along the way I ran into some very bad voice acting and dubbing. It makes Jackie Chan’s early work seem like works of art. The NPC’s would speak and not only was the syncing off, but their animations were grossly over acted as well.
If you played the Fable 2 you’ll be familiar with the combat system in Divinity II. You can pick from melee, ranged or magic attacks. In the beginning you can try out all three before picking one to focus on. This is where things really started to fall apart for me. I was willing to forgive the relative unfinished nature of the rest of the game, but the combat was so bad I wanted to throw the controller. After trying all three types of attacks, I found melee to be the most effective. Ranged attacks were slow and magic was near worthless (I nearly died in the tutorial).
After completing the tutorial level I went to the first town to start questing. One of the initial missions was to rid the church of an evil ghost. Being the intrepid Dragon Slayer that I was told I was (by everyone!) I went right to work. I opened the door to the church basement and encountered a skeleton with a sword. I hacked and slashed and died… quickly. Alright, I tried again and died again, and again… and again. Finally I was able to beat the skeleton and move forward only to encounter two more. After dying a few more times, I thought that maybe I was supposed to level up a bit before attempting that particular quest.
(Just your run of the mill…mill)
I walked around the town and picked up a few more sidequests to work up my experience, quests that ranged from helping a guy find his pigs to clearing the forest of goblins. After a few hours of killing goblins and trying to get pigs out of a pen — my character can hack a goblin into little chunks, but a split rail stick fence is unbreakable and requires a key to open — I returned to the church to show those skeletons what’s what. Upon laying a hardy smack down on the beasts I then encountered the ghost that I was sent to bust. His first attack killed me instantly.
It was at this point where I had had enough. My patience had run out. I had over-looked the lack of customization and the overall unfinished nature of the game, and now the game had become the anti fun for me. I took a deep breath and set my controller down, walked over to my Xbox and ejected the disc. I put it back in its case and said, “No more.”
There is just one word to describe Divinity II: unfinished. It has cribbed a lot of stuff from Fable 2 and frankly I’m okay with that. What Fable 2 did felt right and I wouldn’t hold that against a developer. However, the execution of Divinity II was just not there. I had a difficult time writing this review because I found it so hard to play the game, and in the end that is what it boiled down to for me. I simply can’t recommend this game. Next time, the monkeys can have it.
This review is based on a copy provided by the publisher.
Images courtesy of dtp entertainment AG and Larian Studios.
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