5 years later, the game is almost playable... almost.
Oh, and the character models and animations are terrible, and so is the overall art design. And most of the dialogue and voice acting. And peas.
First off, the combat: it consist of you pressing LB first which causes an enemy to fall into a stun lock where they can't do sh*t and you auto win. However, if the enemy hits you first, they auto win. There is absolutely no skill involved, just pray you hit them before they hit you and you win. And there is a total of 2 combat animations which look ridiculous.
Now then, the quest system: the game a pretty interesting faction system and lots of quests to do, but suffer from a really glaring flaw: NO QUEST MARKERS!
I mean whatsoever, there is no direction at all where to go or what to do. The first 3 main quests are:
- Find Xardas (who the f*ck is Xardas and why should I care? And where the hell am I supposed to start looking? Beat's me!)
- Find all Fire Chalices (how many of them are there? Where are they? What the hell are you supposed to do with them?)
- Find the teleport stone into the King's castle (why should I get in there? Where is the damn stone?)
There is no info whatsoever in the quest log, it only repeats back the dialogue you have gone through. Here's how a standard quest will work: go along the road. Find a random dude who gives you a quest. Wonder around in the direction of where you think your quest target is. If you are lucky, you'll find it. If not, spend 10 minutes watching a video walkthrough, and maybe find it. Often your only direction given to you in the dialogue is "I don't know where X is, but I think you should go north" or "go to this guy X and get this". There are no quest markers, and the map is mostly useless. Even worse, certain quest hubs does not even appear on the map, so you just have to remember where they all are from memory. Same goes for every single named NPC in the game.
At one point, I was supposed to gain influence in a city in order to gain entry to the castle. Well, after doing 20-something quests, I almost had enough influence. But ofc, I had already done every quest available and the one quest needed to do gain enough influence I had already passed on. No really, it is possible to pass on ONE quest in the game, which make you unable to finish it. Because that quest also leads to finding one of these sh*tty fire chalices, which you cannot get if you turn down that quest. WHY would you make a main quest available to turn down, with no options to pick it up again?! The quest system is so so ridiculously broken it's not funny.
So would I recommend this game? Well, if you like sh*tty combat systems and walking around a large landscape and don't care if you can finish the game or not, then go ahead. Just make sure to patch it A LOT first.