This is a spoilerfree review of an entire playthrough of the game including pretty much every sidefart you could let.


First of all if you are just looking for a clue if this contains shadowrun returns: it doesn't.

Damn this was great. It's really been a while since I got as immersed in a story and this game manages to tell its story without any shiny cutscenes. The main characters are all memorable, at least if you had the option to talk to them a bit more. I only kind of discovered you could actually unlock sidemissions by talking to your team shortly before the end. So I just spam-talked myself to all the missions and they make some of the characters a lot more interesting.

If you know XCOM then you pretty much know the combat system but to those who don't: you have a certain percentage of hit chance and critical chance and different forms of cover. The entire thing is turn-based and everyone has a certain amount of actions they can perform in a single round. That also means that walking distance is restriced. One thing I dont like about this is that the game has the habbit of missing an unbelievable amount of 95% hit-chance hits. And no there is not a decent amount of hits despite low percentage to balance that.

The sidemissions are pretty much all interesting and you dont have to be a die-hard completionist to happily have done about 90% of what the game has to offer.

Another thing I like is that you dont get XP for kills. You get XP when you finish a mission and somtimes when you for example do something important on some machine or something then you also get XP in a mission. The lack of kill-XP however means you actually look for ways to avoid a fight. Usually a game says "there is a lot of them there, better go around that" and the reaction would be "and give up extra XP? aw hell no!" but here you actually do it to not waste another medkit.

I played the game on normal difficulty and I cant say I ever really got stuck in a fight. barely ever even used a medkit. I played a troll street samurai focused on melle combat. and by focused I mean that I shot less than 20 times throughout all combats together. I made a giant machine of doom covered in armor and strong enough to break apart anything in my way. This of course means I had no magic or hacking capabilities of any sort and also wasnt very charismatic or smart. But while sometimes you might have to pay extra for an information you cant charm out of someone in the end there isnt to much you miss when focusing on combat only, as long as you have a crewmember do all the hacking.

Money also isnt to much of a problem, sometimes you will need to do another mission beofre you can buy that thing you want so badly, but in the end I had so much money when going on my last run that there really wasnt anything left for me to buy. Then again I never really bothered buying equipment for anyone other than myself since everyone else automatically goes into each mission with their stuff.


All together this is pretty much 26 hours of fun and that is a lot more than I can say for many games that I played.

Divinity is, in many ways, the ideal RPG.

The requirement for this in my eyes is a rich fantasy story with plentiful characters and deep customization of your playstyle.

The combat is turnbased and gives you a limited amount of actions per round, with attacks movement and abilities taking up varying amounts of actions. Enemies tend to hurt a lot if you let them, so a large part of the strategy is using status effects to skip their turns outright or raising your defences and healing up. And there is a LOT of status effects that can be applied. A different game might limit you by saying no you cant just stunlock the primordial megakraken but in here noone is immune to everything so you very much can do that. Just knockdown god if you feel like it. The AI is also ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing about 95 % of the time (the other 5% running into cursed fire and taking lethal fire damage trying to get to a better position). They will use all the abilities given to them to their best effect. For example fireballing their allies when you froze them to trade some damage for the opportunity to hurt you more, or by linking their health with yours then hitting themselves.
There is also an elements system of sorts, ground can be frozen on fire etc and there is many combinations. For example you shot a guy and now he is bleeding all over the place so you use a lightning spell on the pool of blood to stun everyone standing in it.
My main complaint with both this as well as the first part is that the balance can be wonky especially in the beginning.
You can get revive scrolls as the only way to bring back dead party members but in the beginnng you cant really afford them so every death is a huge issue. This doesnt mean the magic crocodiles casting bolders in your face care though so the most brutal fights of the early parts feel almost unfairly punishing since it feels like there is no way to not at least lose one or two guys. (Though with the tactical depth offered there is most likely ALWAYS a way to not lose companions if you are good enough). And lateron sometimes there is specific fights usually in hidden sidequests and areas that are way more brutal than anything else you will find in the area. The final boss is a counterexample and with the stuff you went through pretty much a pushover in comparison.

The abilities themselves can be switched at any time and mixed in any way you see fit. You want to be a dude with a big axe but you also really like necromancy? You can totally do that and if you dont like it just become a dude with a crossbow who turns enemies into chicken the next moment.
The difficulty of the fights makes you seek more power throughout the entire game, you always need that bigger boom against the bigger baddies and for the most part the high end of your skillschool feels like proper ultimate abilities.
In a similar sense you always want that better equipment and always need that gold for equipment and skillbooks. You are naturally motivated to do any quest you can to get as much as possible and never end up with seemingly infinite power and money and nothing to do with it.

The areas look pretty nice, as nice as a topdown perspective game of this style can look i guess. More importantly though the maps are not only huge but they dont waste any space either. Seemingly every square inch is filled with encounters npcs hidden treasure sidequests etc. It is no open world that just ends up empty.

A very bog mention absolutely needs to go to the voiceacting. Not only is there naturally a huge amount of text in this it is also fully voiceacted instead of just acting the first few lines and then being text. And if you decide to gain the skill to speek with animals thats a whole new chunk of voiceacted dialogues that you could just completely miss out on. Its even whole new quests sometimes. The quality is also solid it doesnt feel like a handful of people doing everything but rather like a huge roster of different people. Sometimes i even found myself not skipping ahead after reading faster than they talk simply to enjoy certain performances, from villains for example.

The final point that lifts this game above even many non RPG games is the multiplayer options. There is absolutely zero difference wether you play coop with others or play on your own simply because you have full control of all characters anyway and multiplayer is just handing that control to someone else in part.
And you can just naturally play throughout the entire campaign which is around 90 hours with someone else. The deep fights and the story decisions you will be forced to make also make for great planning and interacting together.
I really really want more games where you can have a huge story experience for multiple people with no issues.

I could gush over way more details in way more depth but i tend to clash with steams character limit when i review things.
So to sum it up, its a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great rpg and game in general and currently one of very few big singleplayer games that can be played with others. This is one of the only games id buy even at this high of a full price.