This is the best turn based tactical combat engine I have played, and I have played many of them. I've been gaming since the late 70's. This game implements the best isometric perspective combat engine ever, IMO. Superb tactical battles. That being said, the learning curve can be very steep for newcomers to the official D&D ruleset. This game may not be for the initiate role player. The graphics are beautiful. I can tell that the artists poured a lot of effort into creating very detailed settings. The animations of creatures, NPCs and PCs is excellently done. Spell particle effects are also well above average. Phonically, I find the soundtrack a breath of fresh air. The soundtrack has more of a electronic synth feel than I expected, but I quite like it. It does a great job of putting the right ambience to battles and more peaceful settings. The voice work varies from fair to great, and I suppose my complaint here is the lack of consistency. The ambient sounds are great. There are a few bugs that cause some frustrations. I assume that a patch will fix these. Here's a short list: PC pathfinding needs to be fixed and optimized. Your party can be split up because the perspective of some NPCs has them get lost depending on your party formation. Also, it seems as though pathfinding is not dynamic at all, and a PCs path is determined before it ever begins to move... either it can make it there or it can't. If it can't, it never moves, which leads to the split party problem. At times the pathfinding logic can be resource intensive, which results in a full-stop pause of the game engine while pathfinding is done. Item details are sparse and item identification either through spells or through a vendor doesn't reveal much about items. I read a developer interview that states that this will be addressed in an upcoming patch. Time restraints prevented over 300,000 words of "flavour text" from being added. This includes item details text, and such things. There are some minor scripting issues which render some low level town quests unfinishable. They are not important quests, but there are a few bugged side quests that I can see. In larger scale combat (dozens of foes), this game can get very demanding on your hardware. I have an Athlon 1900+, Radeon 8500/LE, and 3/4 GB of ram, and it can get pretty chuggy at times unless I turn some visual detail down. Turning down the number of fog checks per frame makes a huge performance difference. I don't see any bugs that can't be easily fixed by a patch. My playability score would have been a 10 were it not for the nagging bugs listed above. I just wish that the development team was afforded more QC time before they were told to ship. Minus the bugs, this game is in my opinion a groundbreaking D&D implementation. It is heaven for the hard core type roleplayers, especially those who like Pen & Paper roleplaying, or those familiar with the D&D ruleset. Newcomers may be overcome with details, and they will definately want to read the great 170+ page manual before beginning their campaign. The combat alone is well worth the price of admission.
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