Badger and Tilly

If you met them, they loved you, and if you never met them they would have loved you.

They will be extremely missed...

Bird Photographs

While I started this at the beginning of the Summer, I thought it about time I bought it up here. Basically, I decided I wanted to have a go at wildlife photography, but not being able to afford an SLR I bought the 'normal camera' with the biggest zoom I could buy, as an upgrade from my old camera with that as a side reason. With that in mind I started a very geeky project which was basically to try and photograph all the kinds of bird in the country. I'm uploading them to a blog, with the eventual aim of getting a nice photograph of every kind, along with advice for seeing each one and photographing them.

I'm approaching half way through now in terms of things photographed, although to get them all up to good standard photos will, I suspect take a lot longer. Anyway, if for some reason you are interested, take a look here.

Mini Retro Reviews 1

Over the last few weeks I've got inspired to go back to some older games I haven't touched in a while inspired by my own blog post, the blog post of another and whim respectively. Two of which I never completed, one of which I did. Two RPGs and a Strategy game. So I've devised a simple test, install all three, play them all and see which one I end up playing most, and how these games look in retrospect. What's more I'm going to fight every natural instinct I have on the matter and I'm going to try to be relatively concise.


So, lets look at the games:

Impossible Creatures

Relic Entertainment
2003

Impossible Creatures, as people who have read before will know, is a real time strategy based around the concept of combining real world animals to create your units to fight your wars. There are 51 creatures to begin with, plus an extra 25 official ones for free, plus a selection of less well made unofficial ones (see previous post). Only the initial ones are available in the main campaign.

The concept is brilliant, but I perhaps wonder if also difficult to work of properly. The units are visually distinct, but the statistics system means there is less tactics in directing your units than just picking the right ones for the jobs and base building. Effectively, at the end of the day the only tactic that works consistently is a tank rush. There are varieties in the form of amphibious, flying, artillery, ranged and a selection of more subtle abilities, but ultimately, you don't feel like its really that different if you field a team of tiger-hammerheads or a team of gorilla-piranhas. There *are* differences, but a lot of the time the only significance that you'll see is that creature a tends to die quicker than creature b.

The campaign is a fun little pulpy story, where the protagonist (one Rex Chance) and his generally more useful female associate (Dr Lucy Willing) are out to stop evil Industrialist Upton Julius and a trio of his equally evil associates. The benefit of the campaign is it uses scripted events to add variety to the 15 levels, but some of them fall the wrong side of infuriatingly gimmicky. One in particular is just really horrible. Without these events however the multiplayer becomes less fun, playing against computers is fair enough, but with a game like this playing humans is just asking for tedious power-building which makes the game far less interesting. If there is one thing I find tedious in games it's power building - no sense of creative concept...

That being said, just creating creatures it itself is fun, and despite the age the graphics stand up very well - they have a nice caricatured art style which keeps it looking attractive unless zoomed in too close (which mostly only happens in cutscenes). The music is minimal but fun, and the voice acting usually amusing. It is also in my experience a very stable and system tolerant game - I at one point had it running on a 4mg inbuilt graphics card, when it supposedly required 16mg.

While not a classic by any means, if you see it for less than £10 it's well worth picking up.

Score - 72%

Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura
Troika Games
2001

Arcanum is, in it's most basic form, an isometric RPG which shares vague genre standards with the likes of the Infinity Engine games. The world however is a bit different to the standards D&D fare in that it's a Steampunk setting where both magic and technology are widely available. There is also a fair bit of interesting nuance to the setting, but suffers perhaps from trying to cram too many ideas together. I've always felt that in a fantasy setting, every time you add a major sentient race that the world becomes less plausible, and Arcanum gives us one more than D&D with the strange restriction that half of those races can only be male. Very odd.

Visually, the world suffers in comparison with it's Infinity Engine contemporaries - the characters are more detailed but the backgrounds mostly lack the spark of the fully painted environments of those games, most notable in the way that unlike an infinity engine game building in the world is built round a tile system, so all buildings are built exactly in line with each other, so the world feels less organic. The other thing is, that while the game is technically open ended in that you can explore any point of the continent, unlike, say, Oblivion there is no real point in manually exploring everything because it doesn't have the visual impact or variety to pull it off.

The story is interesting, but stunted, it seems to put artificial barriers on how far you can get before needing to be level x, for example, being level 12ish and then discovering that inbetween me and the place I apparently needed to go was a lvl 25 golem who could floor my party in seconds on easy mode. On normal difficulty modes games should really be accommodating the players organic progress rather than "if you want to go on, get grinding!" - an automatic level adjustment for enemies would really make the whole experience more fun. It also has a rather contrived learning system for new skills, which is basically a 'pick one skill, which allows you to pick a second tenuously related skill next time you level up'. I have no problem with levelling up allowing you to pull off a more sophisticated variation on a theme

The game is fun in chunks, but it seems to always find a way to get so far before it does something to annoy you. Usually it's one of those level blocks, or getting into a conversation with a companions where apparently every single dialogue option makes him like you less. The music is heavily violin based, and while atmospheric to begin with, there is not enough variety to cover the game so what music there is can become a bit annoying. Sitting back from the game, the core problem becomes apparent - the fact it tries to be both open ended yet focusing on a sophisticated storyline don't end up really meshing properly. Even if the game just told you to go and save up a certain amount of money to buy macguffin x to carry on, that would be a lot more reasonable than the current situation.

Finally - for a game which uses the player made protagonist + joinable characters, most of these characters seem very under explored when compared to a Bioware game. Only one of them so far seems to have much interaction at all, and that would usually be a way to pad out the game and make it more interesting.

Don't get me wrong, Arcanum is by no means a terrible game, but neither is it one that lives up to its potential, however, if you've run out of more famous RPGs, it's well worth a look.

Score - 66%

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Obsidian Entertainment
2004

Knights of the Old Republic 1, is regarded in many circles as one of the best Western RPGs of all time, and in some ways I think this ends up being both a blessing and a curse to it's sequel. On the one hand, the success of its predecessor allows the game to be more thematically experimental with ideas and in many ways be less commercial. Unfortunately, the game was rushed to release meaning that the overall experience is missing several planned areas, buggy and generally doesn't feel anywhere near as polished as KotoR1.

The most interesting thing about the game however, is how it challenges your preconceptions about Star Wars. This is in fact the games strongest suit - and it comes down largely to the character of Kreia, one of your companions, your Jedi mentor figure and the first character you encounter in the game. While the first game encouraged you to go to to either the far end of the dark or light side, Kreia tries to make you see that in many cases helping people too much merely weakens their own ability to achieve anything, and that good intentions don't always have good results. She is both helpful and manipulative and it's not towards right near the end of the game that she shows all her cards, and even then you are left wandering whether she really has.

Although the storyline continues from the first game, it's much darker in tone, while the first game was a fun very 'Star Warsy' romp with a very clever twist in the storyline, here we have a much darker tale, any perhaps it's telling that of the three party members the games share, two of them are dark sided characters, and one of them is hiding secrets of what happened between the two games. Incidentally, one of those Dark Sided characters has their storyline continued in a very interesting direction, but just as interesting is how Kreia cuts to the weakest point of someone who believes themselves superior. In some ways, you could even argue that though the game is a Star Wars game, in some places it comes off as to be somewhat critical of the conventions of the franchise. Gameplay wise however, it is a very satisfying affair, with combat being similar to it's very well done predecessor but with more force powers to choose from, but really I can't resist a lightsaber and beyond healing and some force lightning I tend to just stick to that in most combat

This all sounds like it's shaping up to be a great game, but here the bugs get in - I had more bugs on this play through than my original one several years ago, however, this was without patching so it probably isn't as prevalent as I make out. There was one particular quest which didn't even register as complete as far as the story went, making a big difference. However, even ignoring those it lacks the polish you'd expect in a production like this. Asking a companion where her master is outside the door to the room he is in results in her telling you that I wouldn't be able to find his ship. I don't blame the developers for this though, and I suspect that here is a case of a potentially superb game not getting its due because of publisher pressures. If you patch it up though, and particularly if you've completed the sequel, I highly recommend it.

Score - 86%

In conclusion, if they sound interesting to you, I'd recommend any of them, especially as you can currently get any of them on amazon for under £10. They may not be classics, but definitely some fun.

Alexjholt.tk Retrospective Part 1 - Impossible Menagerie

A few weeks ago, my original website went down along with the rest of things hosted for free on geocities. I'd known about it for months, and it basically seemed to me like a matter of economics to shut geocities down. Anyway, I'd intended to do a little retrospective on the site, but I've been a bit occupied with real world events.

Alexjholt.tk (or originally geocities.com/alex_j_holt) had been up for possibly about 7 years, and while frankly in retrospect a lot of it was kind of embarrassing, I'm still glad I did it. Here I'm going to do a series of articles on whatever happened to all the things that were on it and the unexpected ways that they may have changed how my life has progressed.


I shall start with one of the original sections - The Impossible Menagerie.


The basic idea was simple - a mod project to add creatures to the supposedly very moddable Impossible Creatures. The basic concept is a real time strategy game where you combine the DNA of real world creatures to create custom units. I could well do a massive retrospective review on the game, and in many ways it was very influential on me, if more in its concept than realisation. It represented the first time I was interested in a game enough to look forward to it, and the first time a game made me want to add stuff to it. It's a flawed game, but ultimately a fun one. I should really go back to it sometime to complete it.

Anyway, my youthful enthusiasm gave me the idea of creating a mod for this game, basically adding a big bunch of my favourite animals to the roster so I could use them too.

This then lead to my first experience of non-CAD 3D modelling, and furthermore texturing. This largely stemmed from the fact that the tools were effectively bound to gmax - the woefully stripped down free version of 3DS-max that I'd later discover at uni. A program in which the most basic and useful of tools found in it's big brother are absent.

I didn't get anywhere fast.

Eventually however, I did manage to push my way through gmax's problems and a tutorial which wasn't precisely ideal for a 15 year old with no experience of 3D modelling and eventually managed to produce my rendition of the African Wild Dog. The model was only tweaked from the default wolf included in the tool set but the texture was largely different (though effectively a paint over of the original textures). Not precisely the greatest achievement in the history of modding.

At this point my presence on the now defunct 'Impossible Creatures Planet' increased and I actually had a little more interaction with some other modders. In retrospect it was actually a bit funny. Essentially, a certain prominent member of the community thought that my little mod was a threat to the big mod team producing a thing called Creature Chaos. As I didn't really care about releasing the mod so much as getting it made in the first place I (perhaps naively?) agreed that I'd just hand over anything I did and let it be integrated into that mod.

I add here that ICP was BY FAR the most totalitarian forum I've ever had the displeasure to frequent. I was pretty much inoffensive, and the fact I didn't post much meant that I was probably just about the only person on the entire forum who didn't have a warning rating, including most of the moderators. There was only one person I met as result of that site who I'm glad I've known.

Anyhow, effectively at this point I was more or less an unofficial reserve member of the modding team in that I did stuff and handed it over to them. I didn't have any input into the overall mod beyond what I did, but I didn't really care. However, in general the same person who'd drafted me proved increasingly to be a rather unpleasant person to have to report to. It'd always been clear from the start that I was effectively just saving them competition and they were being my distributor, however, attempts were made into getting me into tidying up other peoples work, and furthermore that I should learn how to do things which this mod leader couldn't be bothered to do himself.

In this time I also submitted my snow leopard, my second creature to go into the game. However, the final straw for me was when I discovered all the statistics I'd done for my Wild Dog had been scrapped and redone from scratch for the release without my consent or even telling me, including removing the pack hunting 'power' which to me seems like the main point of the Wild Dog - an animal which possibly has the highest hunting success rate of any large animal because it hunts in highly effective packs. I was not happy.

Following that, I gradually broke off contact with the people involved (save that one person I mentioned earlier, who is awesome) and distanced myself from the mod, and the game community itself. It wasn't a pleasant atmosphere there to begin with, and they hadn't done anything that endeared me to it.

I did vaguely try and do a few more creatures (somewhere on one of my old computers there is a ratel and a gila monster just needing textures tidied and animating) but by this point I was heading off to Uni and I forgot about the project in a whirl of learning new stuff and meeting new people. As far as I can tell, I'm not even acknowledged on the current home of the mod as contributing except in thee below image and listed on the install file. Oh well.

I don't regret the Impossible Menagerie, or even the bad experiences I had with it. I do think it may have disenchanted me with modding teams to some degree, yet as I'm writing this I'm even tempted to have a crack at going back with the skills I learnt at Uni to see how much better I could do everything. I didn't even know how to add or delete polies back then! But I suspect I won't, there's a whole lot of new games that have been released since IC and I think it may be time for something new.

However, if perchance you track down Impossible Creatures, and fancy downloading the Creature Chaos mod, you'll see the snow leopard and the wild dog and thus have a brief glimpse at a more youthful time in my life.


You can find Creature Chaos on the heir to ICP - Impossible Creatures Hive

Review: Mirror's Edge

When the first trailer for Mirror's Edge appeared, it was immediately one of those games that stands out as something that looks fun to play. On the other hand, it wasn't the kind of thing that I'd buy for full price, thus, a bit over a year after it's release, a special offer on Steam selling it for under £4 has finally allowed me to play it.

One of the first things about it I'd say is that it's a game which revels in movement. This considered, just adding screenshots doesn't really give you the full grasp of the thing, thus I give you the trailer:



The basic premise is that in a clean futuristic city, delivering information via technology has become so insecure that corporations are forced to use 'Runners' who are basically a group of people who use Parkour to carry stuff across the rooftops from A to B. Presumably delivering stuff normally is somehow also impossible, although maybe those corporate business types like the idea of their pen drive of spreadsheets having a more exciting life than they do themselves?
You are one of these Runners, so it's your job to run, jump and climb your way across this urban landscape in as quick and death defying manner as possible.

In a practical sense, this ends up as a FPS-platformer-puzzler hybrid, which puts it in the same vague area as the excellent Portal. This hybrid genre however is both the games' greatest strength and its greatest weakness. On the one hand, when things go well, you feel awesome - you are timing things to perfection, speeding across the urban landscape and generally just being amazing. Then you slightly misjudge a jump and plummet to your death and have to do it all again.

Well, not strictly, ALL, there are relatively regular checkpoints, but even so it does negate the feeling of having done one bit really well and awesomely to have to do it again and not do it so well. To this basic theme, what tends to happen is the game stops and starts, you'll have a straight run through a good section of the game, then hit one particularly tricky bit and the the flow is shattered. The worst aspect of this is that these points tend to be disproportionately difficult to the point where in my playthroughs when I did have to restart a section, I often had to do it 3-5 times. Combat with armoured police (or 'blues' as the game refers to them) is often guilty of that - you go down in two hits, so unless your timing is a lot better than mine a single one of them can take you out very easily. Puzzles involving more complex maneuvers, particularly ones with several parts like walljumps and wallrunning then jumping can also require several attempts.

The combat follows the same pattern - you are by default unarmed, which is a great choice gameplay wise as it really accentuates the games distinct features. You can take weapons off attackers, and then use them against others, but they slow you down and you don't have any spare ammo, and thus you automatically discard the gun when there is none left. Unarmed combat is much more satisfying, with you being able to do flying kicks, sliding kicks and disarms in addition to the normal punching and kicking which really helps the flavour of your acrobatic protagonist.

Visually the game is very impressive, although not necessarily the most technically advanced in the world, the use of a clean blue and white world is a welcome change from the generic brown grittiness that has been popular over the last few years. The colour red symbolises things that you can interact with, and by colour coding the world like this it helps make your free running more fluid rather that stopping every five seconds to work out where to go next. Slightly unfortunately, the animated cutscenes just aren't as impressive looking as the game itself, which does detract slightly.

I did have some minor technical problems at one point, the game seeming to slow down drastically when the physics engine was turned on and multiple opponents were firing at me, but upon tweaking the settings to eliminate that it has been entirely stable.

Mirror's Edge isn't a perfect game, but its unique and fun take on the genre - if you are good at platforming games it's probably going to improve your experience as you'll be less likely to have to repeat sections as much as a platform fumbler like myself. I wouldn't recommend it at it's full original retail price, but if you can get it for as cheap as I did (or even a bit more!) it's definitely a worthwhile buy, even if just for the coolness of the sections when you are doing well.

Score: 74%

Game Toolsets

As I've concluded that I need to have some more focused practise in at various things (including but not limited to - modelling, texturing, 2D art, writing) I've decided to have a go fiddling around in the Dragon Age toolset which is supposedly quite comprehensive to try and adapt a particular story I have in mind.

Fortunatly there is a wiki to help things along, which helps (fumbling blindly in toolsets never tends to get anyone anywhere unless they are extremely lucky or extremely good) so I may actually get something done.

However, it might just be me, but I don't quite get why I always seem to come across things that requie loading files in other applications. In this case the first thing I decided to go for (the world map) requires muddling around in Excel. It might just be me, but surely it would make sense to integrate a basic spreadsheet program into the application itself that could work parralel to the actual editor?

Maybe I just don't get programming...

Review - Dragon Age: Origins

As anyone who has waded through my opinions of the subject before will know, I'm a great fan of Western RPGs. As such, first thing that particularly draws my attention to Dragon Age is the fact that it claims to be 'a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate'. This is a very bold statement to make in some ways (and I must make clear that I'm going to presume that this refers more to Baldur's Gate II, a vastly superior game to its predecessor) as even 9 years after its release, many still hold it as the pinnacle of the Western RPG. Pretty much all its competitors since are other Bioware games anyway.





With that out the way, I'm going to disagree with that previous claim to a certain degree. Dragon Age, mechanic wise seems in many ways more heavily infused with Bioware's other super critical darling - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. This is by no means a bad thing in a lot of ways, though presumably the main reason is to make it more accessible to casual gamers and console users. Having said that, the PC edition does include the ability to scroll out into an isometric-esque angle to relive those infinity engine glory days. However, despite my self professed love of those games, I actually found myself preferring to use the behind the character camera most of the time. Though 'isometric' is perhaps more functional, being closer to ground level makes the action more dynamic to watch.

The main lure of any Bioware game is the story and the characters, and Dragon Age doesn't disappoint. Perhaps one of the most interesting differences this time around is the titular 'Origins' which serve to make you invest more heavily in the setting. They are short enough so as not to outstay their welcome but long enough to give you more of a sense of place in the world. They also introduce characters which crop up in the main story later (and influence interactions with those characters) and function very well. This matches up with the Mass Effect approach - you aren't destined to anything per say, you just happen to be a particularly bad-ass member of society which in some ways is more interesting. There are six origins in all, two unique dwarf ones (commoner or noble) two unique elf ones (essentially nomadic elves or oppressed second class citizen city elves) and one unique human one (human noble) plus Mages which can apply to elf or human.

I personally decided to go Dwarf, and as the choice was apparently between poverty and wealth, I chose the latter. Furthermore I decided to be a rogue because mages are usually too much micro-management and there are plenty or interesting warriors available in the plot. My origin story consisted of me being second in line to the throne in the Dwarven capital, and the political wranglings that entailed. Not to spoil anything for future players, but there is a very good twist in this particular origin.


All origins however end in approximately the same way (though via varying routes) - you become a recruit of the 'Grey Wardens' to fight the 'Darkspawn' (the invading monster villains of the game) . This is another one of the things that gives the game its KotOR feel - the joining the legendary order of heroes does give it a bit of that vibe. The Grey Wardens are slightly more subtle in their means than the Jedi however, and they have neither neon weapons or any tangible pseudo-magical abilities. They are supposedly able to sense Darkspawn and see them in dreams, plus one other ability that only comes into play at the end of the game - beyond that their main abilities seem to be gained from being recruited from the most awesome of the awesome people they could find and then testing them to make sure they are just that bit more awesome. Fortunately you just happen to meet that criteria.


After a relatively short section, including a very non-jedi initiation ritual the main bulk of the game stretches out before you. You basically have to put together an army to stop the Darkspawn. There are four core groups to recruit - the Knights of a kindly Earl (or Arl as the game puts it - one of various medievalisms that creep in and give a nice bit of flavour the the setting) some wood elves, wizards and the dwarves (of my characters own former city). You can do these in any order you want and it makes no difference to the plots, though there are a couple of reasons which aren't mentioned in game that makes doing the wizards first a good idea.

As you go you gather a party, starting with Alistair, a fellow grey warden (who can be bizarrely immature) there are by my count ten characters in total. One of those however does not become available until near the end of the game. They are very much a Bioware cast of characters, with the usual range of varying eccentrics, however, for the most part they are probably more Baldur's Gate in tone than anything later, which have tended towards being slightly larger than life in a lot of cases. I found the most interesting to be the second character to join your team the most interesting - Morrigan, a witch who has lived in the wilderness her entire life who begins haughty but the better you get to know her the more that disappears to be replaced with being unsure with how to react to people being nice to her.

My one gripe about the characters however would be that of a world where dwarves and elves play a major part, they are only represented by one character each, and unfortunately I found them to be the two I found least interesting to have in my party.

I'll also make special note of two more characters. Firstly Shale - while technically downloadable content you get him free if you purchase the game first hand (there is a code on a slip of paper in the box). He is effectively this games' HK-47 (the popular assassin robot from KotOR who refers to people as 'meatbags') in that he is a morally dubious artificial being with humourous dialogue. Although I didn't have him in my party the first time round he definitely seems like it would be worth having him in the party for the dialogue alone on a second play through.

Secondly, we have the Dog, which I, on a whim named Orestes. Dogs seem to be in Western RPG vogue right now, with Fable 2 and Fallout 3 both offering their own versions. The Dragon Age dog is however great fun, and not only seemed to be the most hardy member of the party but there is some great interaction between it and the other characters. It is also integral to my favourite moment while playing, which involves a reaction to you saying you want your dog to represent you in a duel to decide what happens to a kingdom.

Unfortunately you can only have three of these characters with you at any one time, and as I found happened in KotOR, Jade Empire and Mass Effect you can never seem to fully explore all the characters, and with the characters that aren't constantly in your party they just seem to hit a wall where you've missed some point of interaction and run out of ability to explore their story or pursue romance plots, which is very frustrating. You can improve how much your companions like you with gift items that you find throughout the game but that only stretches so far. In fact, to my recollection, I've to date only managed to pursue one romance subplot in any Bioware game out of six games and three expansion packs completed. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong...

This is a good point to mention that this game is HARD, I'm not precisely a slouch when it comes to RPGs, but even on normal mode you are forced to be very tactical or you'll get massacred in even middle of the road fights. This is a definite throwback to Baldur's Gate, although unfortunately I no longer have 'cloudkill' and a shut door to do have cheap victories...

Graphically it isn't outstanding (it doesn't look as good as Mass Effect for example) but neither as some reviews have been suggesting is it an ugly game.

Technically speaking on my playthrough it has been very stable. There are some clipping issues with certain armours, and a lot of times arms don't seem to bend very well clipping with themselves. There are also some issues with selection boxes - during my playthrough I found that quite often you wouldn't be able to select something you could see because a piece of the scenery had its own box in the way. There is also a possible memory leak, and I've found that playing the game for a prolonged time means that loading areas seems to get slower after a while.

The fights are challenging and visually, but in certain sections can feel like a bit of a slog. There is also one thing which it lacks is that all the core story areas feel very enclosed, and in all but a few cases there is no interconectivity between the areas, which makes the world feel less unified. However, for getting knowledge about the world, there is a massive amount of information hidden in codecs throughout the game. The only other particular thing is personal preference, but the blood splatters present after combat can look a bit daft - it would probably improve it if they just removed the blood from faces after combat from earlier, you wouldn't tend to talk to someone with it all over your face, it might freak people out.

The plot has its moments, but suffers slightly from a lack of an exploration of the motives of the darkspawn or a 'mastermind' that can speak. This means that although there are some other villainous figures, they are unaffiliated with the Darkspawn, and in the end come off as misguided. It does benefit conversely that all characters except the darkspawn function in a more realistic set of shades of grey than the light side/dark side of KotOR or the D&D alignment systems. The replacement of any kind of morality measurement with individual party member influence does feel more organic, which is a definite step up from other Bioware games.

There are numerous complex moral problems, where neither is obviously right or wrong which give it a degree of sophistication usually lacking in games, although in one or two instances it can be frustrating to find that where as in real life I'd suggest a more nuanced compromise, that particular resolution is unavailable, which can be irritating.

The music is very good, although unfortunately not Planescape or Icewind Dale good, although certain parts do strongly resemble parts of Mask of the Betrayer, which although it was good music is slightly jarring when it already has connotations attached. The voice acting is generally great, with the game being fully voice acted (as far as I noticed) with actors such as Tim Curry, Claudia Black and Steve Blum being among the cast. It really adds together without being really obvious who is reading what (I'm looking at you Oblivion).

Overall, while not necessarily up to the standards of the Infinity engine forbears, its very close, and easily eclipses the entire Neverwinter Nights franchise, and is on par with the KotORs and Jade Empire. However, it's definitely a very worthy game, and in my view the best Western fantasy RPG of the last 7 years at least, so if you are at all interested in that, it's definitely worth picking up.

Score: 89%