Be Excellent To Each Other

If you have been on the Steam store this week, you may have noticed a bit of an oddity. A game you have quite likely never heard of, is at the top of the sales list, and has been all week.

What is it? It’s an isometric display RPG with turn based combat, that was originally a kickstarter and has just been released as the full game. Why have you never heard of it? Because they spent all their money making the game and had none left for any advertising. So how come it is top of the charts even though nobody knows about it and it is full price (£29.99, monetary value fans). It’s because it is quite simply brilliant.

I played it solidly for around 4 hours yesterday and loved every second. It wasn’t till I stopped playing that I realised that even after that serious chunk of playtime, I’m still only level 4, i’m still in the starting city, i’m still wearing the majority of gear that I started with and i’ve had less than half a dozen fights. Yet I didn’t even notice that while I was playing.

Why is it so good? For starters, it’s pretty fucking hard, go the wrong way and you will get beaten down and know about it, but it is brutally fair. If you fuck up you know why.
When you kill something it stays dead, no forever spawning here.
The questing is actually interesting. The first main quest is to solve a murder in the town, which mainly involves talking to people, and the conversations and characterisation are just lovely.
You feel like you have been dropped into an ongoing world and you have to carve your place in it. I ended up killing two legionnaires at the start as I wasn’t clever enough to reason with them effectively and they wouldn’t let me pass. A few hours later I wander back to find someone standing over them wondering what the fuck has happened and I agree with them that it must have been those awful orcs and what a terrible situation it is. All the time feeling incredible shame for my actions, especially as they were drunk and couldn’t fight back that well, and after i’ve talked to the legionnaires in town and found out how much they hate it here, and they only volunteer for duty outside the city walls in the hope that will get them a ticket home…
There is loads of stuff to do and you can interact with everything.
The combat is very nice, it’s turn based and the environment matters, winning is as much about skill and tactics as it is about level. Fighting a fire demon, who has set one of your characters on fire? Switch to your dude with the water spell and make it rain! Fire gets put out, everybody is now wet, oh wait, he has an electricity spell… BOOM! Electric shock baby, fire demon is now stunned… along with everyone else around him as they were all in the water too… oops…
I haven’t tried this yet as i’m playing solo, but it is fully co-op for the whole game and has been built around it. Even playing solo you start with two avatars that you can control, either linked together in follow mode, or separately. If playing in co-op mode then you can choose to work together or not.

Sure, it has a few problems. Inventory management is a nightmare, the UI in general is a little clunky, knowing what to do next can be a little tricky. I’m used to being led around by the nose these days, so it’s a bit of a mind shift to have to work everything out myself.

If you like RPG games, then (bearing in mind the short time I have had with it so far) you should buy this, it’s the best RPG i’ve played in a long long time.

aye, this is on my very interested list. Mrs SG is also into games like this so as a co-op game it could be most ace

Sounds interesting.

I'm playing this through co-op with my GF -- I knew she'd played Baulders Gate + Icewind Dale in her youth and always chats on about it, so thought she might like this. We've put about 20 hours so far and have yet to leave the first map. She's not the world's best tactician, but she's not terrible in combat either, though she continually electrocutes the Madora companion + the giant spider I summon. Of course, playing co-op means I can't min/max this to death, which I'm not sure if that's a pro or a con. We're both really enjoying the game, however. She's very keen to continue playing at ever possible opportunity!

The inventory sucks, there's no shared gold system, which is rubbish even in co-op. (I have the ID skills so I'm the one that mostly ends up with the loot, plus she likes to just dump it on me if she doesn't want it. As such I sell it all and then have to keep transferring her money... so much like I do IRL!). Also, the game lets you sell anything, including important things, so I'm fairly certain I sold a plot item ('Legionnaires will'), as it's not in my inventory yet there's a quest in the quest log mentioning it. NIGHTMARE. Thankfully there's only about 9 vendors in town so I can probably waste 10 minutes visiting each of them to see what their stock is. (They retain everything you sell them it seems. Infact the world is 100% persistent, so if I leave something in a random crate it'll be there when I get back). Let's just hope I also actually picked it up from where I originally got it!

It does suffer from what most RPG suffers from: A huge pressure right at the start of the game to invest "wisely" in your skills and attributes. Frankly, we didn't do that, so we both have a couple of waste points in things we don't need/use.

pro-tip: don't get many of skills that aren't in the spell section, unless you're a melee type in which case you can also get the top 2 sets of skills. Even then you might still want to dump points in the man-at-arms skill so that you have lots of room for MAA spells/skills. You don't want to invest in them as

a) they usually don't help you in combat or walking around questing, as you can often find people to do those things for you.
b) these are the skils that are most often buffed on random pieces of loot, so it's quite easy to go from 0 to +4 simply by swapping clothes over, whereas that would normally cost you 1+2+3+4 permanent skill points!

As for attributes, none of them are useless. There's no 'charisma' attribute waiting to uselessly suck up points. (Though there is a charisma stat, but once again it's easy to get on amulets and stuff). Preception sounds useless but is in fact very, very useful. It helps you see all sorts of hidden goodies + contributes to starting AP.

The game doesn't do any of that autolevel crap and so has some fairly difficult fights if you wander into the wrong zone, but if we've lost a fight a few times we just go elsewhere on the map and then come back later to sail through it. WHO'S THE POWERFUL WIZARD NOW?!?!

Hmmm...it's the weekend tomorrow. A weekend playing an old school RPG while the cricket's on in the background?

Sounds like a plan to me.

Downloading now...