Alright, this game may very well end up as my GotY for this year. The only complaint I have, and it’s fairly minor, is that the sidequests kind of suck. What I mean by that is that there’s no real point in doing them, aside from loot and experience I guess, but they’re usually extremely simple things. I still ended up doing the majority of them, and they’re no worse than say, Skyrim’s.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the game. Especially the visual style of it. Every area looks quite distinct and has a very interesting feel to it, from the desert canyons to the swamps to the starting forest, it all has it’s own feel and look. I especially like the gratuitous use of colour. There’s reds and oranges and yellows everywhere, and green out the wazoo.
Gameplay wise it’s quite solid, the combat is satisfying and the fate-mode finishers are quite fun. Combat’s fairly simple, press a button to attack, and use the others to roll, evade, etc. There’s special abilities like as a rogue you can set ice traps or hurl smokebombs to become invisible, fun stuff like that.
I started off as a pure stealth thief/assassin type of character, and it was great fun sneaking up on enemies and brutally stabbing their faces off, but I ended up respeccing later on to a “universalist” which is a combination stealth/combat/magic type of character, mostly to try out the various other forms of combat, and I basically fell in love with magic so I respecced again to a mage. Magic is basically absurdly powerful, though there are a few enemies that are pains to fight without some form of reliable physical damage (trolls in particular). Anyway, it’s real easy to respec, it just costs a meager amount of coin, and the game hands out so much coin it’s practically worthless.
I guess the story was a rather weak point, but they pulled it off adequately enough I suppose. It’s a fairly generic “save the world” plot, but there are some different little things that make it fun I guess.
I did end up buying the DLC for it. The Teeth of Naros, and The Legend of Dead Kel. Dead Kel sucked, it was buggy as crap and all-in-all just not that great. Teeth of Naros was pretty good though, cool looking and fun. Too many trolls though.
One last thing I want to mention is that the demo for this was way worse than the actual game. It was crazy-ass glitchy and I never came across more than one or two trivial bugs in the main game, DLC excluded.
LordoftheReDead's Odyssey 