Having finished the game, the short version is: amazingly complex, epic RPG when it comes to character building. This could be one of the best games of this type out there, but it has problems. Some of these will be related to it being made by a still small company in a comparatively short period, others with the desire to remain true to the pnp, which imo doesn't always translate that well.

Details: (minor spoilers may follow)


I played a chaotic good dhampir overwhelming mage necromancer on the azata path. Sounds bizarre? Yes, but the azata path is perfect for misfits as it's all about inclusiveness, freedom and cuteness really. As silly as this sounds, I was so fond of my character by the end of the game, it's hard for me to envisage trying another playthrough. The complexity the mythic paths offer and the number of class choices there are along with how this changes the story are really mind-blowing. I also really liked to liked most of the companions. The two I wasn't too keen on have the pros that in one case you only need to take her along three times and the other one sticks around even if you end up not helping her. Also, unless you build a character that can pass a lot of skill checks themselves, you will likely end up with a stable party, as switching out characters can leave you crippled as regards skill checks otherwise. All in all, this is a massively ambitious game which imo has been pretty well implemented, esp considering the restraints mentioned above and the scope of the audience that needs to be catered to.

Now for the negatives:
-The game has bugs - a lot of them. If you dislike unpolished, buggy games, I highly recommend waiting to play.

The crusade system is clunky, boring, badly implemented and dreadfully explained. Dealing with it as well as questing and the crusade management aspect involves hella micromanagement, tedious loading screens and - as I discovered too late, day skipping. In my case, I'd slogged through the map with a sub-par army so I could quest in peace, only to find myself amassing vast amounts of now useless troops (that were much better than the ones I'd used) and both the morale and the conquest banner flipping to yellow. In other words, if you want to max all your crusade stats, you will probably want to leave some forts to be conquered and spend some time in between questing and fighting armies in crusade mode, just hanging around in your headquarters skipping days to move stuff along. Also don't be afraid to wait until you can recruit a lot of decent units unless you want to reload some battles a lot of times.

Difficulty spikes: from chapter 4 on there are horrendous difficulty spikes leaving you locked in battles that take hours in turn-based mode. There also seems to be some kind of (I hope) bug involving fear auras that causes both your own party and enemies to constantly flee, sometimes aggroing the next fight. To spice it up even more, the game starts lagging horrendously at this point.

Lots of stuff doesn't work as intended. Summon havoc dragon summons a deva, for instance. There's a super useful item you get early on that the game deactivates constantly, meaning you have to check literally every time you do anything - rest, pass a loading screen, whatever (I could go on, but it would be boring). Turn-based mode is also inherently buggy atm. That's not to say the game's unplayable - if I managed it most reasonably capable gamers should and the difficulty sliders (use them!) mean you can tune it to your preference. I really didn't feel very special at the end of the game due to the way the difficulty increases faster than your power does at this point in the game.

Alignment choices in dialogues are sub-par. Evil, in particular lawful evil, is just uptight kill / imprison everyone who doesn't do as told, whereas good is some kind of super naive forgive everyone no matter what atrocities they have committed and even if they don't even pretend they regret anything (an attitude that's also held by one of the companions). I expect it's least irritating if you play some kind of neutral, as then you won't feel like you ought to be picking the "good" or "evil" options even when you think they are ridiculous. Having said that, I kept my chaotic good alignment pretty much dead centre in spite of frequently not picking the good or chaotic options - it's just better to pick the option with no alignment descriptor most of the time if you don't want to end up changing it. However, there are scrolls of atonement allowing you to get your alignment back, or you can respec your character which allows you to pick alignment again and resets it BUT it's bugged atm.

Table-top mechanics that are tedious in computer games: clunky resting system, slow movement on the map, mechanics that are there to basically force you to spend more time moving around the map slowly and ploughing through loading screens. Missing 9 times out of 10 even with a level 20 myth 9 party on nerfed normal, rng-based checks that can be circumvented by reload-spamming. During resting, companions talk which is the only pro, but this imo is much better in Dragon Age, where your party talks while you walk around and even build up relationships with one another (so without forcing you to sit there staring at an ugly resting interface).

Well I've gone on for long enough and probably forgotten a lot, but in short: flawed masterpiece which will get a lot better with bug fixing and other improvements, but it'll stay micromanagement and loading screen intense, as well as laggy and probably difficulty-spikish and hence a slog in parts. Oh and the puzzles are terrible. Oh, and finally, getting the ideal playthrough (and/or the secret ending) will require either a lot of playthroughs and and epic memory/note taking effort or extensive meta-gaming.

Now for my trickster playthrough ... :)