I tried so hard to like this game, but my list of grievances grew far too long that I just couldn't recommend it. This review is a (long) expression of that frustration. I played on classic mode and made it through to early act 4.
The first two attempts at playing were co-op at the behest of friends already familiar with it. Do not do this. It is a terrible way to learn the mechanics, follow the story, or immerse in the world. It might be better if none of you know it, but given it is possible to progress dialog without other players present to read it, I doubt it.
Once I was able to start progressing through Fort Joy, with a little guidance, it started growing on me. The art, music and voice acting are all great. The characters and the world are compelling, but hampered by the slow progress of the game. Between the main story, your party's character arcs, pop up events, act-spanning quests, and side quests, there's a lot going on at any one time, but none of it is delivered in an ordered fashion. Inevitably you cannot follow a quest through to completion because you either can't access the next step yet, or you need to level up and come back later to progress, by which time you can't remember where you were at or why you were doing it. This also sees you seeking alternate quests to get enough XP such that you end up with tons of concurrent quests, compounding the problem.
The journal should help with this but the dot-point notes paint an inadequate picture. The unread flags are unreliable, often seeming to appear when no new information is on offer. Updates often appear in the middle of an interaction or fight, by the time you read the journal it can be unclear what it was connected to, and when a quest gets completed (or invalidated), often unexpectedly, it is immediately moved to a long list of archived quests without an unread flag. The quest notes are often too vague, as well. "Something bad happened here. Find out what".
As a result, I couldn't completely follow what was going on. Paladins, magisters, witches, gods, god king, voidwoken, divine, lucian, black ring... pretty much everyone/thing seemingly wants your head, but their motivations (and yours) are hard to discern. A jumbled mess of power, chaos and destruction, everyone seems to either want to end the world, or gain the power of a god. There seems to be very little 'good' in the world. Even those that help you (or you help) seem to be shady and selfish with ulterior motives, which leaves you always expecting it to come back to haunt you.
Loot, crafting and inventory management is basically hell. There is a lot of stuff to pick up... dozens of books, notes, scrolls, foodstuffs, reagents, runes, keys... most of which give no information on what might make them useful. You can find and learn recipes by looting and reading *everything* but usually few and too late to be useful. You can discover them by crafting trial and error, but even logical attempts usually result in invalid combinations. Even when you learn a recipe, there's no tooltip in the crafting pane for the item's effect.
Each character in your party has a bag, that can contain other bags you pick up, presumably to help you organise things, but it requires a lot of manual manipulation to keep in check. It doesn't seem to matter as any character can use anything from any bag, except you soon discover weight limits are connected to Strength, so one Strength stacking character ends up holding almost everything. There is no item search. There is only autosort, which, as items get used, still leaves gaps that newly acquired items will fill... good luck finding them. Items you pick up also automatically flood your action bars, even when locked.
At one point in Act 3 I looted a quest item long before I had any sort of quest pointer that might have told I needed it or what it was for. By the time I did, it was lost in my inventory, and the game gave no suggestion that it might even be something I already had.
The pick up and add to wares (to sell) function, and sell all wares function, were certainly useful as you come across tons of items to sell while seeking out the spells, recipes and objectives you need to progress. To the point where I never felt limited by gold, which made bartering skills and levelling up with merchants feel pointless (particular when I couldn't return to those merchants).
When you finish a quest you are sometimes presented with options to loot, but you can only take one. you can compare loot with your current character, but you can't swap characters and you can't get out of the dialog without choosing a piece of loot.
Combat. The two words I would use to describe it are 'unfair' and 'cheese'. It's not that it isn't beatable, it's that you need to know the fight is coming, and what you're in for, in order to have a fighting chance. So many fights start unexpectedly with your party grouped up, only to have them obliterated in a mass of higher initiative AoE. You're supposed to come prepared with certain specs, items, split your party, and sneak to pre-position, which frankly is one of the least fun mechanics I've encountered in any game.
Action points are extremely limited, and eaten by movement, items, or even changing gear. And with the constant ground effects, you gotta move, or suffer the incoming CC/damage combos around which the combat is heavily oriented. The opponents meanwhile seem to have no problem casting 4 abilities every turn, some insanely strong. You are constantly on fire, and often silenced, rooted, charmed or decayed, making healing ineffective. This all tips the scales against certain builds/spells. Much is made of gaining the ability to use source magic, which does seem powerful, but then becomes a issue of never having enough source to use them.
When I got stuck and reluctantly looked for advice, I found it basically comes in two forms. Firstly, relying on cheesy 'clever use of game mechanic' tactics like out of combat long distance height advantage kills, teleporting, thievery, deathfog and so forth. The second is preparation. You have the wrong items, the wrong build. You should use these builds, go back to the mirror and respec. From what I've read this is all contingent on the armor and resistance aspects of the fights. This reveals the actual lack of freedom you have in playing the game the way you thought you could.
Early game felt punishing without knowing where to acquire certain spells and items. As you progress, that feeling inverts as you end up with tons of spells and items, more than you could reasonably utilise, leaving some choice paralysis. I picked character archetypes and built to that, only to later find that my choices had hindered me. Again the intention seems to be to respec to utilise fight appropriate spells/items and devastating environmental combos. Succesful combat seems to be heavily indebted to knowing what is coming, and so the combat feels secondary to the build. That is contrary to how I wanted to play.
Once I hit that realisation, I stopped enjoying any aspect of combat, and my desire to continue moved increasingly from fun to sunk cost. Experiencing the first few fights of act 4, and reading that it only gets worse from there, was enough for me.
Overall it seems like a game whose enjoyment is somewhat dependent on presumed knowledge, that might be suited to a multiple playthrough model but is too long and does not have enough variation to be appealing to any but die hard genre fans. A rare abandon.
