Previews got me psyched, game let me down. Too bad, there is a lot of potential here.
I continued on, a little discomfitted, but still excited to see what the world of Mage Knight had in store. My first quest, simple enough, was to retrieve some tools for an ogre/troll thing from some orcs up ahead. I wandered down the path and attacked a barricade of wood that had been set up. Though it wasn't as easy as it sounds. I had to continually click on the barricade for it to break, and the timing and response of the controls seemed off. I would click click click only to get one swing in. Targeting was a frustration as well, and I noticed a lot of "gliding" animation during combat and especially when running over the landscape. The selection of left- and right-click spells seemed easy enough at first, but I found it more frustrating than it needed to be - they should have paid more attention to Titan Quest or Diablo II. Later, I did find some recipes for crafting and making potions, but again, the interface deterred me a little here as well, so I didn't put as much effort into it as I should have.
The most frustrating aspect to me, however, was the multiplayer. My brother-in-law and I love to play co-op games over the Internet together, so we immediately got on the phone and started up a game, only to find that our servers couldn't be joined by each other. Having seen this before with firewall ports and router issues, I went to the forums to get the list of ports to open for playing. Even after setting them up, we failed miserably, and even though we can play Titan Quest, Ghost Recon, and many other online games together, the only way we could experience this was to join a server already out there. Once in, though, the way the quests were handled in multiplayer didn't seem to work well, and the difficulty scaled so high, that both of us died continually as we journeyed through the world. My character kept getting stuck on items, and at one point, a tent (which disappeared when I got too close) held me for quite some time, long enough for three archers to fill me with arrows and kill me. We respawned so many times that we never got past the second resurrection point. Clicking on bad guys, running through an area that constantly snags your character, trying to manage your skills, and dying more often than not made us give up on the co-op game for a while, hoping we could get our own servers working.
I went back to the single-player for a while, but started noticing the same issues there, to the point that I finally uninstalled the game. The forums are full of bugs that other players can't resolve, and the game just wasn't that spectacular to begin with. On the bright side, I did manage to get $30 for it on ebay, so I only lost $20 as a rental fee.