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I wanted to like this game. I seriously did - since Event Horizon showed that they could do interesting combat scenarios with Tower of Time, but this... it just falls apart after the first hour or so. Between the bland level design, unbalanced combat, uninteresting story and bugginess of the game, it's disappointing.
First, the level design - gone are the interesting levels from Tower of Time that have lots of nooks and crannies to explore. They're replaced with square-ish rooms connected by long hallways. Outside of two levels in the game, there aren't any puzzles to solve, no interesting side content, no real reason to explore the full breadth of an area outside of gathering more materials. It also doesn't help that the areas are littered with traps and other hazards (such as explosive barrels) that aren't really positioned in a way that they can be utilized in combat (as most are situated outside of combat arenas). They end up being more of a nuisance more than anything else, as your characters have a very bad tendency to wander into them, despite having an option to prevent such a thing from happening (more on that later). Every area is just wandering from one room to the next to get into yet another combat scenario where you can witness how unbalanced classes are.
In Dark Envoy, not all DPS classes are made equal - far, far from it. I had one of the two main characters set up as a Blademaster, which absolutely outpaced every single other DPS character I had by miles. This was only compounded by the fact that it was extremely easy to get said character up to 100% critical hit rate and an attack speed that was hilarious in comparison to what other classes could do. It got to the point where I was resolving most combat scenarios in record time - and this included the final boss, who I took out in roughly 30 seconds despite their huge health pool. I did like the fact that you could only bring 5 skills into combat for each character and that you can pretty much respec your point distribution at any time. However, once you really get an idea for what you want each character to do, there really wasn't any incentive to put points into anything else, so for the last handful of levels, I was just randomly distributing them. Stats also felt like they were contributing very little to my party's combat prowess after a while, considering how strong gear can get.
The equipment you find in this game is rather boring - granted, I did like how the different types (Elven vs. Imperial, etc.) affected the stats, but the differences tended to be rather minute, so I mainly stuck with Elven gear for its mana regen. The real power came from the additional effects that could roll during item crafting - and the enchantment system. These proved to be the breaking point, since it was easy to craft gear that was far more powerful than you could find, making exploration nigh useless after you get enough materials for a tier to freely craft whatever you need. For instance, it was easier to craft gear that pushed your skill power to ridiculous levels, which made the Elementalist specialty far more powerful than any other mage specialization. Which brings me to my next point... the hazards.
Many of the magic spells in this game leave a DoT damage field on the ground after the initial effect - which is normally all fine and dandy. But the major exception to this is if you have the "avoid hazards" pathfinding option on - which doesn't work outside of combat, but becomes a major crutch in combat scenarios. You see, even if it's a damage field that ultimately doesn't hurt your party members (as it's one that's cast by your own party member), your characters will find the longest path around to avoid them, sometimes traveling the entire circumference of an arena to do so. So most of the time, you're having to wrangle your party members into more advantageous positions, except the autonomous setups (that aren't really configurable, by the way) you can set will override your decision almost immediately and they'll be back on their leisurely 5 mile jog while your weaker party members get pummeled. I wouldn't have much problem with all this if it was in service of a better story.
You see, this game has a really, really bad habit of making your party the errand boy for the vast majority of the game. Instead of finding interesting ways to piecemeal out plot information, your party, more often than not just goes "Well, let's go see what other errands we can run for these two groups that absolutely hate our guts." I literally screamed after a certain point when, after a major plot point was revealed, instead of going "we should follow up on that", Malakai was all "let's see what other errands we can run!" It's frustrating, since the story did not feel like it was in service of a game as long as this one. It felt more like they sat down and said, "Okay, we're making a 30 hour RPG" first and foremost without thinking of a plot that could fill in that time. Plus the amount of times the game teases you with a plot twist only to go "sorry, but I can't tell you about that right now" is numerous. Gah! The story lets you make a lot of potential choices throughout, but they all carry very little weight, as only a handful have any impact on the plot and who your last party member is. Plus there's ties back into Tower of Time, but they all feel very superficial and only there as a wink and a nod. Now, even with a weak story and weak gameplay, I can still sometimes wrangle some enjoyment out of a game, but the instability of this game brought it low.
It became a common occurrence for me to run this with the task manager on my second monitor, as the game had a real bad habit of hard locking and refusing to go underneath any other program I had open. There was no real rhyme or reason to when these hard locks occurred, but they happened frequently enough that I dreaded playing more than 1-2 hours at a time. It also doesn't help that this game takes a couple minutes to initially load, even off of a higher end SSD. Plus it had a bad habit of not properly rendering the skin on characters with full-faced helmets on in scenes where their helmets aren't displayed (like the party selection screen), leaving them to be a solid grey husk. There was also an issue with a character showing up in cutscenes with glowing swords glued to their hands.
For this verison being a "Director's Cut", it certainly could have used a bit more time in the oven. I hope that if Event Horizon makes a third RPG, they can take some lessons from this and Tower of Time and make something more in line with ToT than this.