Not a jewel but worth playing
I just finished playing the Ancaria campaign as a Battle Mage, using no health potions, a lot of magic and almost no battle skill.
Bad things first: scrolling is uneven in an annoying way, finding passages can be exasperating despite the (vague) map, entering doors and passages can be a pixel-hunting exercise, pathfinding often fails and goes into a surreal dance, horses tend to die rather easily, there is a lot of back-and-forth boring travel, money is useless.
Now the good part: the world is open and you are free to meet most challenges in any order (e.g. to commit suicide by attacking a dragon while at level 1), the map is *huge* but does not feel randomly generated, there are a lot of secondary quests, some trivial, some hilarious (I don't think I discovered half of them), you can explore around for hours and often discover small hidden settlements or little surprises, some monsters require a bit more of tactics (especially for the first character levels), graphics are good and decently varied.
A problem: I don't know if I missed something here, but I couldn't export my character before the final battle: I found no way to type a name, clicking on available slots had no effect.
In short, not a great game but a nice pastime. I gave it four stars also because of its hypnotic quality: you find yourself saying "let's just play a few minutes" and end up having spent half an afternoon and completed a sizeable number of sub-quests.
5 gamers found this review helpful