Your default run speed is just slow enough to be thoroughly irritating from the first moment to the last, and for some reason there's a walk button but no sprint.

If only getting around weren't such a huge pain. While large portions of the map can feel a bit samey – a lot of it is just hilly green woodland – it's also packed with little lore tidbits like discarded notes and history tomes that were entertaining to paw through. Zooming in on individual units reveals a lot of depth and detail, especially on some of the bigger monsters, and I particularly liked how increasing a squad's veterancy would spiff up their equipment visually as well. However, they've gone with an art direction that's just stylized enough it didn't bother me all that often. Compared to even a six-year-old game like The Witcher 3, it comes up short. The graphics are a bit dated-looking, especially with the lighting, creature animations, and some of the faces. That's a bit of a shame, because the fantasy world 1C has put together is pretty slick for a project this size. It feels very by-the-numbers, like all of the heart went into building out the setting and very little into the cast and story.

There were a couple of surprises that felt worth the wait, but in general the motives of the various leaders and factions were always presented with so little nuance that nothing that happened left much of an emotional impact. And those moments detract from the worldbuilding.Ĭharacters are introduced very abruptly, just like everything else in the story, and you're sent ping-ponging from one clue to the next with little room for anybody to develop relationships with others, much less as individuals. But some of the random NPCs scattered throughout the world sound more like they’d just grabbed someone who hadn't been in front of a mic before and handed them a script, if the distractingly bad performances are anything to go by.

The sorceress Katherine, one of the three playable characters and the one I spent the most time with over 40 hours of adventuring, has a pleasing timbre with a haughty, aristocratic delivery. The voice acting, for one thing, is very inconsistent.

Kinemac 2 review