izigame.me

For me, this game is a bit of a contradictory experience, as if it did not necessarily knew what it wanted to be.

1) For an Obsidian's attempt at making their own TES-like game, it lacks crucial systems which made TES great series while stubbornly following the parts which made the old TES games such as Morrowind, frustrating:
- combat system has nothing to do with skill (ex. managing to get a headshot with a bow) but all with gear which needs to be constantly upgraded (while game provides us too few means to do so). After each zone, you need a new gear - but you are given enough resources and money (even with fully explored zone and all side quests done) to upgrade fully by the end of the zone... which means that you are mostly undergeared for most zone experience (which your companions are kind to point out) - but at the time you are finally DONE with gearing up, you move to the next zone. Good news are that resources do respawn, so if you enjoy the grind, you can probably get the full gear upgrade before being done with zone - but that's not that fun for me.
- it has no morality system. You cannot kill unimportant NPCs, steal, pickpocket - and then deal with the consequences of your own actions (Jailtime yaaay!) which is something I did miss a lot. The story gives you these heavy, shady experiences - but when you are out in the open world, you are not given any of them. It feels like window-dressing (ex. NPCs will point out your choices done during quest for three zones in advance BUT steal a literal weapon used for murder in front of a guard or break a wall in the middle of a city - and you face no repercussions. As long as stuff is not a part of the quest - and there's not that many of them- your Envoy can do whatever they want... that is if a game allows them to).
- there is no hunt system. You cannot kill animals - but you can cook a piece of meat found in the middle of untouched ruins. So... there's that. But shooting a chicken with an arrow? No, Sir. No.
- the combat system is praised for its flexibility and many options - but for me, it is a simplified version of what any TES game offered. A lot of skills (and spells) depends on the type of weapon you use, instead of being linked to what you learn (and you sure can learn -some- of them if you feel like wasting an ability point on that). A lot of combat, exciting as it is at first, gets repetitive fast.
2) An RPG where only some choices matter:
- So far the story does seem to be relatively impactful - but I will see how impactful they truly are once I reach an end. At this stage, I cannot say if the end will be actually offering me some awarding experience for all my efforts throughout, or a linear ME3 three-color ending that leaves very little wiggle room and reflection on what I've actually done throughout the story
- as said above, some things are impactful but what you do in the world has no impact at all (you take these heavy decisions during quests via dialogue choices with NPCs, but if you come upon a murder victim in open world and steal the murder weapon right in front of a guard, no one literally bats an eye and rarely do they even tell you off which for me broke immersion A LOT)
3) A dark storyline with a painfully colourful cover:
- The game tries to throw you into a world full of intrigue, heavily moral choices and unknown, mysterious influences within the first hour of a gameplay. Yet the art of the game looks like a drug-fuelled attempt at artists trying to revisit Shivering Isles (the Mania part specifically) while failing to convey what made the Oblivion DLC so special.
- it seems to take Hogwarts Legacy idea of re-using three different enemy times ad nauseam and make it worse. They are only getting a re-skin in new zones which are meant to be a 'completely new ecosystem' - and in reality, make me wonder if the whole world they tried to depict is just not very scarce on fauna diversity (while its flora does feel very diverse).
4) An RPG with no character romance, with characters obsessed over romance and sexuality
- This one is a bit of tongue-in-cheek point of mine, but I am adding it as the very morality of the game bothers me to an extent. I don't care if an RPG has a romance system or not, as long as it's a good game. But, for a game that purposefully did not introduce any system like that, I find the companions' sheer obsession with topics of love (mostly sex), discussions on 'happy endings' and kinks bordering sexual deviancy to be really uncomfortable.
- It put me off from interacting with certain NPCs and companions.
- It also feels a bit off that even random NPCs are so keen on gossiping about each other's sexual lives. It feels... (might be a cultural thing) very infantile for me, to see characters meant to be mature act like they are re-living their high school days. Like, people... there are bigger problems. Why do you all act like horny teenagers?
I will probably update this review once I finish the story. I want to see how it ends... but I doubt it will be a game I will replay or one that will be memorable enough for me to care about its lore as much as I did for TES series.
UPDATE: I finished the game with pretty much everything completed but two side-missions I could not be bothered with and some hunt jobs (which mean just killing a repetitive boss for money).
My final additions:
- plot twist and end story were very predictable. I kind of find it an insult to one's intelligence that writers forced the main character to act surprised by the revelation - and that the whole story at end felt very railroaded and you -needed- to make these reveals via quests instead of there being a way to trust player's intelligence and maybe put things together a bit earlier
- Marius' storyline felt a bit naive, from my view. The way it was presented narratively did not seem to hold much together and the whole amnesia angle was in my view presented rather poorlty.
- the ending felt a bit streamlined and well, once again. Railroaded. The events progressed very quickly, you suddenly got a LOT of upgrade materials that, before in previous zones were rather scarce. It almost felt like devs wanted to be done with the game - and so should you.

The final judgment, I think would be that it is a game with potential, potential that has been sadly squandered. It will be one of few RPGs in my library I won't intend to replay - but it made me reinstall TES V: Skyrim, so there's that. Silver linings...