So having played now for the better part of 4-6 hours or so, here's the juicy nuggets of gameplay feedback that I've managed to glean while running around with a bucket on my head shouting "I am the Lizard King! PHEAR ME!!"...
How does it look?
It's pretty. Very pretty. And more impressively runs almost as good on my Nvidia 450M laptop as my beefy GTX 980ti desktop PC. Both work fine (admittedly on different settings). The laptop can "handle" Ultra but the framerate is stuttery in areas. Dropping the preset down to Medium solved this for me and it runs smoothly enough. The game seems pretty well optimised. Thumbs up! All three of them!
I have only noticed one small bug - mainly when trying to wear a bucket on my head as a helmet. It ended up with the bucket between my legs and every last hair taken from my scalp.
How does it sound?
Quite frankly, gorgeous. I liked the additon of the various different lead instruments to the background music. Nice touch. I'm usually a gamer who chooses to switch off in-game music at the first opportunity, but in this game, I find myself loathe to do so. The music adds a really nice feel to the game. Perhaps when I get to multiplayer with TS etc this might be a necessity, but until then, play on MacDuff, play on...!
What are the other Characters like?
At the moment, this is hard to say. I quickly managed to form a party of four and get myself up and running - however, my party doesn't say a great deal to me of any interest - and when it comes to making pathway decisions, they all seem to have the exact same options - I would have hoped that when not controlled by a player, they would have at least a rudimentary AI that would make some sort of decision for themselves. In single player, I find myself forcing them to just agree with whatever decision I had made before.
In terms of skillsets, I'm slightly surprised to not discover any decent fighter / melee class (other than the scoundrel) for my party. I scoured the whole area, but no joy there. I don't mind, since my party is good on the DPS output, but a tank would really help in some fights.
So what about fighting then?
As expected, the combat in this game so far is awesome and even more fun when you have to make tactical decisions to survive stronger encounters. *Minor Spoiler alert* - in one fight with some particularly irksome guards, they were picking my party apart with their ranged atacks and I couldn't get near them in time... until I had the epiphany to create a huge smokescreen in front of my guys to force the opponents to attack instead of sitting back. Luvverly!
And Scoundrels? Are they viable yet? (After being so puny in DOS1)
Well, that's still a little hard to say at present, but I WILL say that their backstab and straight up dps output has impoved drammatically. They are fun (albeit still a little dull) with what they can do, but I'm not convinced a fighter wouldn't still be much more useful in your party.
And Rangers? Are they...?
No... just... no.
Don't....
