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| Divinity and Aarklash by Lurker 410942 07/21/2014, 6:20am PDT | ||||
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| I finished Aarklash last week on hard and then started out on Divinity almost immediately after.
Aarklash +Characters! The thing I hate about games like FFXII are that they create these huge fantasy worlds and stick you with human, human, elf, and dwarf. Right away here you start with human, mad hatter goblin, cyborg, and furry (maybe not a positive?). +Combat! At the beginning, combat is JUST hard enough to make you constantly pause and think between every move. It really hits its stride near the middle, but then starts to fall apart right around the end. I like the DOTA system that they set up here, and I think a lot of games could make good use of it (and do!). Risk of Rain was okay, but too many of the character classes were inexplicably made for co-op despite it being a single player game (to begin with at least). -Character classes. For the most part, there's no reason to use anyone besides your original 4 party members. Not because you'll be so attached to them (you can switch out party members at any time out of battle and also respec points at will), but because their alts are so bad. The cyborg, for example, has a toggled taunt skill that affects a wide area (useful since you'll almost always be fighting 6+ enemies) and a health recovery skill that gets her back around 200HP (out of 2500) per hit. She's basically invincible! The alt tank has a single target taunt and can only recover 1% of his life per second. MAYBE he's useful, but not nearly as overpowered as the cyborg. -Skills. As mentioned above, you can respec your skills at will and some are objectively better than others. Would you rather have a heal skill that makes all characters in a line INVINCIBLE for 5 seconds or one that damages a single enemy for 500 HP? Some of them are based on the player's ability to queue up abilities and do skill shots, but these are incredibly easy to pull off unless you just never use the pause button, so there's no contest unless you're just a lazy asshole. -Balance. Around the halfway point, I got a spell on the main wizard girl that silences a HUGE group of enemies (no save) for 5 seconds for barely any mana. Since most battles consist of 6 wizards and 2 tanks, this pretty much made every fight a matter of spamming silence while the tank girl rounded got dinked for wizard autoattack damage. For a game that's just a series of medium to hard battles, that's just unacceptable. It's just an incredible chore near the end. Divinity: Original Sin I just started this, but I'm really digging it. I'm a little bit worried since once I hit level 7, I suddenly started steamrolling enemies when my mages both got that skill that gives you double the AP per round, but there's enough bits and bobs around the place to keep things interesting. The combat is wonderfully full of explosions and mayhem and explosions, but that unfortunately means the tank and rogue classes are largely useless since your mages can hold down as many guys as they feel like AND summon big burly dudes to tank anyway. The AI's a bit dumb since I was able to beat a giant fire boss well above my level by repeatedly summoning a fire elemental and having it just tank all 5 dudes, but even fights where you totally trounce enemies are still a joy. Kudos to the team for not making any Monty Python/Fallout/Arrow to the Knee jokes. |
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Divinity and Aarklash by 07/21/2014, 6:20am PDT  |
