Well overall a very good if not great game. Thank you for the hard work Larian (obviously you made it with a small crew).

Good points:

Music--This was fabulous
Epic--Long large adventure if you follow every nook and cranny and try out lots of characters and skills.
Graphics--Overall nice graphical feel.
Visceral--Fun visceral hack and slash with alot of skill variety
Quests--Tons of quests, from poor quality to great quality
Detailed world--Lots of little corners and details not part of the main quest. Much like Ultima. This and the music really transported you.
Humor--I thought alot of the humor was only so so, but a few bits really tickled me, like the lovefest between Theylron and his minions. Great! And the larian studios dungeon.
Voice acting--In the review I read of the US version the reviewer said "unbelievably bad voice acting." Well at times it was pretty good, but often unbelievably bad indeed. HOWEVER, the ok acting was ok, and the bad was hilarious! My personal howlers were the soldier who said "Hello Doctor Elrath. How is the cure for the plague going?" Just an unforgettable bad voice. And, the line by the angry elf in the village, where the text said "pig-like humans" but the voice actor said "human-like pigs"!

Bad points:

Voice acting--See above. Though often unintentionally funny, the poor voice overs really broke the mood. Larian, you should hire the company that does Bioware/Blizzard voice acting.
Broken/Unbalanced Skills--Quite a few skills don't even work, others are way too powerful or way too weak.
Too Easy--Even on hard I found the game very easy.
Unstrategic--Though the skills and whatnot allow for some occasional fun strategy, the game really pales compared, say, to BG2. On hard, bosses too hard while everything else too weak. The only real challenge was the occasional "boss" creature that could kill you in one hit.
Lack of Weapon/Armor graphics--This was very dissapointing. No matter how nice of a 2h axe you found, your character always swung the same boring woodcutter axe. Each character only had 3 changes of appearance or so. Need more variety of visuals in such an equipment based game.
Repetative areas--This was my major gripe. Some areas were very repetitious, fighting the same monsters over and over for a very long time. Iona's dungeon (how many millions of liches can you kill) and wasteland (Huge area killing the same demons/imps over and over and over). Epic dungeons/fights are great, but its very important to inject lots of variety in them.
Weapon Imbalance--Swords far more powerful/variety than other weapons.
Stealth--Stealth/thieving powers were weakly implemented.



Other minor quibbles such as the Demon of Lies being way too easy, but overall well done.

That's about it for my overall review. A fine game thank you.

PART2 Skill Review

Here I will talk about many of the skills. I tried them all and had lots of fun experimenting.

(1)OVERPOWERED--These skills were too strong in my opinion and I had to avoid them to give the game a challenge:

DEADLY GIFT SCORPIONS--These were VERY annoying. Little 10 gold piece scorpions, easily found, could on their lonesome destroy armies of orcs! Why didn't the farmers just use these to take over the world? High offense or strong poison would have been ok IF they died very easily. That would of been fun then. I'm quite sure a lv1 steel scorpion could have killed the Demon of lies without too much trouble. Someone at Larian must have a scorpion fetish. =P

CURSE--Stacking resist reduction. Spam this a few times on any monster followed by spammed life leech and the toughest monster becomes a 1 hit point wonder. Even if they started with 100 spirit resist. Would be fine if you could not stack it. People say Josephina is a challenge. She is dead in seconds with this combo.

ENERGY CAGE--Freezes any monster. Unresistable

FREEZE--Not as bad since some things resist it, but still makes you mostly invincible.

FREEZE ON WEAPON--Not a skill, but frost weapons are unresistable and make the game very easy.

POISON WEAPON--Great to have powerful poison, but this was TOO powerful. At least it did not effect some creatures, but still made things very easy.

BURNING WALL--Set this up and run circles and you can wipe out an army with the greatest of ease.

(2)FUN--Some of these skills were close to overpowered, some too weak, but worked well and were fun in my opinion.

FLASH ATTACK--My favorite skill in the game. I just loved this at rank 5, you become a blink assassin! If you have not played DD with flash attack, try another round with a flashing warrior. Would otherwise come too late, but bug makes your stamina recycle from lv2 up, so its fine.

DEATH STRIKE--Not too useful since too many creatures have high spirit resist, but screen shaking fun when they don't!

STUN--Great skill, perfect balance.

RESSURECT/AURA OF COMMAND--You lose some experience, but very fun to play the game with a constantly changing army of minions. You can ressurect anything, so very fun to experiment. At one point I had a 5 creature army of Cybe the assassin, a Troll King, Quentas Nivelrond the Demon, Greyface, and a Lizard Archmage.

REPEL ARROWS--Kind of silly, but fun to reflect all range attacks. If you have the overpowered poison weapon combined with it, your reflections become poison charged!

SKELETAL WALL/DEMONIC AIDE/TRANSFER POWERS/MASTER SUMMONER--All fun and balanced spells. They are potent without being too strong and wall is a must for mage characters to distract attention from them. Transfer powers and Master summon make them quite tough, stunning, deathstriking minions! Transfer powers also works on Ressurected creatures too.

ELEMENTAL HAIL--Great AE spell. Spam it on a big crowd for effective fireworks.

HELLSPIKES--Unresistable nice AE spell.

EXPLODING ARROWS--Best archer power. Turns you into a lizard fanatic. Quite powerful too. Fast low mana fireballs.

KNOW CREATURE--Only moderately useful until lv5, but at lv5 resists are displayed which is often the key to successful battles. Most creatures in DD have one glaring weakness. If you are a mage and cant melee, you need to know it. Of course trial and error may be enough.

LIFE LEECH--Overpowered if used with curse, but ok otherwise as many bosses resist. Fun way to fight and leech it back like a vampire. More fun than plain restoration in my opinion.

WITHERING CURSE--Great graphic. Useful, though resisted alot.

LIMBS OF LEAD--Very useful for mage/archers, and not so cheesy as freeze/energy cage. Unresistable.

FADE FROM VIEW--Great spell to explore/flee from battle, even with 1 point. A must for mages.

ALCHEMY--1 point a must to combine for restoration potions. Restoration absurdly effective compared to healing/mana potions.


TRANSLOCATE--Fun Divine power. Use SHIFT key and zoom anywhere on map instantly.

CHAIN LIGHTNING--Fun Divine power, but comes too late to be useful. Most creatures have high lightning resist once you get it.

DIVINE DEATH--Great fun against the right enemies. Quick way to dispose of powerful 600 hitting imp chieftans.

(3)WEAK/BROKEN POWERS--These need help or fixing.

HAMMER MASTERY--Deathblow does not work and breaks weapons with built in deathblow to boot

LIGHTNING/FIRE/POISON DAMAGE--I never got these to work

TRUESHOT--Never worked for me

SUMMON SKELETON/VERMIN--Vermin not bad for distraction, but too weak. Why summon one weak skeleton when you get 5 tough ones with wall?

ENERGY DISCS--Dumb graphic, and very hard to use effectively.

PICKPOCKET--Way too high chance of Failure, even while invisible.

SHIELD BASH--Never worked for me.

BOOMERANG--Could be good, but misses too much and too slow.

(4)OTHER SKILLS--The rest of the skills are either fine in my opinion, I did not try enough to decide, or I forgot about. I'm sure I forgot about some nice ones or broken ones.

Well thanks for reading and for being helpful on this forum the few times I got stuck. Enjoy your gaming!

((Applause for Larian and the excellent helpful folks in this forum))