Divine Divinity Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Divine Divinity is a great game.The best way to characterize it is 'Diablo II with a plot.'Your character goes up levels and chooses skills in a similar fashion as Diablo II, has the familiar 'life' and 'mana' counters, and even many of the graphics look similar (some are better and some are worse than Diablo II).But the Devil, they say, is in the details, and Divine Divinity gets many of them right and a few of them wrong.
Pros:
1)Lots of quests and character interaction.Instead of just having a few NPCs standing around for quests and shopkeeping, you have a wider world.
2)More real-world items.Unlike Diablo II, here you have plenty of items not in the 'Weapon', 'Armor', or 'Gem/Potion/Scroll' category.Lots of different types of foodstuffs scattered around the place, including homes and campsite, as well as bushes and shrubs, lend a bit of a 'Morrowind' or 'Gothic 2' feel to the game, despite the isometric character view.
3)Lots of clever, tricky quests.Many of the quests are quite challenging, and hidden caves, trapdoors, secret passages, and other thing abound to confound the player.
4)Humor.I often find myself grinning at books or parchments I pick up along the way, unlike Diablo II which is savagely unfunny.
Cons:
1)Somewhat uncertain gameplay.Gameplay is very similar to Diablo II but also allows you to pause the action and give orders (not a negative).However it also feels a bit less manageable than Diablo II.My character often swings almost at random, or tries to go after something it can't reach while being gnawed on by other things.You have to be quite precise with your control, which gets tricky when enemies pile up.
2)More danger.This could also be seen as a 'pro' but I'll put it here.Diablo II can get challenging at higher levels and difficulty settings (Divine Divinity also has different difficulty settings) but early on your character is unlikely to get eaten right away.That is emphatically not the case in Divine Divinity.What makes this worse is the wide range of armor qualities and weapons you can get.For example, in the very first village there's a sword that does over 100 damage (not that you have the stats to use it).Monsters are powered accordingly.So it's much harder to know whether something will kill you in a few hits, since the damage ranges are much wider.For example, I started a Fighter that had 200 hit points by level 8 or so, and still died in a few hits from a nearby orc chieftain.This degree of sudden murder was reserved on Diablo II mostly for end bosses or very high levels.Here, every critter could be your last..made harder by the fact that they're rarely alone.
3)The difficulty of the monsters would even out if they dropped appropriate loot, but they don't.Perhaps I've turned into a powergamer due to Diablo II or something, but I find the degree of goodies dropped by monsters to be exceedingly sparse.Most of the valuable items my characters get are from chests or just lying on the ground, rather than generated by monsters.There's nothing like killing an 11th level orc, nearly getting yourself done in in the process, only to get 2 gold pieces (if you're lucky).What happened to that enormous axe he was just hacking me with?
4)Teleporting stones.In an effort (successful I think) to ease gameplay, your character is almost instantly granted a pair of teleportation stones.These cleverly allow you to drop one and use the other to recall back to the first.This lets you travel around quickly between points.There are also waypoints.However I find it a bit odd that while I'm scrounging for a ruined dagger and a rope belt for equipment, I already have a pair of super powerful teleport stones.A minor gripe, yes, but frankly why anyone wouldn't sell them for a suit of platemail is beyond me.
5)The interface is a bit overwhelming.You can completely blanket the screen with subwindows if you're not careful.The minimap is very useful but is not translucent and instead takes up a chunk of the screen.You can move it around, which I inevitably do by accident instead of escaping when I'm trying to navigate a fight.
All in all, Divine Divinity has a lot going for it.It has a much better storyline and overall RPG feel than Diablo, but (perhaps necessarily in order to avoid lawsuits) gives up a bit on the adventuring aspects.It's definitely worth checking out if you've enjoyed Diablo or more RPG type games such as Baldur's Gate or Fallout/Fallout 2.

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Product Description:
You have been given a tiny piece of divine power, and must quest to reunite it with the other fragments! / RP: Rating Pending

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