Developed by: Big Blue Box | Published By: Microsoft | Played: 11/29/04

Reason for not finishing: Failed to live up to the hype. Too disappointing

+

Very detailed and high end graphics. The amount of detail in the textures is so great... there's just so much of it. It's cool just to watch yourself walk around and fight guys.

Soundtrack done pretty well. It has a sort of hero on an adventure, english medieval feel to it and it uses many orchestrated instruments in a professional way.

The characters have the Peter Molyneux quirky style to them. The personality that that brings to the game improves the overall feel very well. The social interactions help with this. It can be very entertaining to watch how people react depending on your alignment, renoun, and what they say when you fart at them.

The gameplay is simple, straightforward, well-balanced, and has very natural and easy to get used to controls.

The one thing best about this game is the rich detail of the environment, history of the work, and options you have for how you interact with the people and things around you.

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The game fails to bring the player into a dramatic, emotionally involving experience, which all RPGs should do these days. I do not feel emotionally connected to the characters and certainly do not feel as though I care about what happens to them. This game is more like a hero doing quests 'n' stuff and learning abilities rather than an engrossing, immersive experience. I think RPGs should excell in doing the latter. The very lackluster story also fails to bring the player into the world. KOTOR has the good\evil thing too, but it does a much better job of brining the player into the world.

The english medieval quest soundtrack seems kind of cheesy.

The beginning of the game bombards you with little tutorial missions and explanations of how all the mechanics work. The player spends the first three to four hours of the game focused on learning how everything works. The game tries to explain too much too quickly, and the focus is on learning the system rather than doing things that get you into the game like story development and missions that use your simple abilities.

Frame rate gets choppy way too often.

The gameplay at its core is very basic and uninspiring. Sure, there are all the little extra things you can do with social interactions, alignment, and so on, but those are more like novelties instead of core gameplay. The core gameplay is just hack and slash and generic-looking monsters and thugs.