At first, I was struggling a bit, but I was nostalgic. Then I learned to enjoy the gameplay but saw some other problems. Now I'm missing only 2 achievements and by God, I can't wait for it to be over.
The first problem I have that was really bothering me: stability issues. When I look at ProtonDB, other people don't seem to have them as much as I do, so YMMV, but for me, these were definitely quite annoying. I had the game freeze to a complete halt over a dozen times, which really doesn't make a run on Extreme difficulty enjoyable, especially with the autosave system.
Said autosave system, in conjunction with the cutscenes, is the next part I have to moan about. You never get an autosave mid cutscene (neither do you get the opportunity to save manually mid cutscene), you don't always get an autosave right before one, and you frequently get an autosave immediately after cutscenes. Some cutscenes can be quite long, too. At the same time, you only have a single autosave slot, which means that a new autosave will overwrite the previous one. All of this together makes for a very annoying combo that is a bit tough to work around if you don't already know exactly which cutscenes trigger when. Want to explore all dialogue options but didn't save before? Welp, you'll have to either redo some fights or are just SOL. Missed an item or an achievement? Same thing.
This is less annoying if you aren't trying to get all achievements in a single run and do your first run on easy difficulty, so that you can familiarise yourself with the game properly, but the fact that this is a problem at all, when it could've been solved quite easily in several different ways is certainly not speaking for this game. Still, though, it can be very annoying to, for example, fail in the final phase of the final fight and then have to redo the two phases right before because there's neither an autosave nor the opportunity to manually save inbetween these phases.
Another thing that isn't speaking for this game is the graphics. This is a game from 2012, so obviously it's not going to look the best by modern standards, but I think this game looks worse than Skyrim (2011), BioShock (2007), and even Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005).
The textures are fine, but I find the very heavy recycling of assets to be quite distracting (For example: 3 different mages have the same head, 2 completely unrelated story characters in the first chapter have the same head, and one of the big antagonists has the same head as another story character from the first chapter). I've noticed a ton of clipping issues, even in cutscenes. Weapons just hover behind Orcs and character animations in cutscenes are often meh, sometimes really weird.
Hard to tell to which extend this one is a Linux/Proton issue: Shadows look rough when they work correctly, the draw distance limitation for shadows is *very* visible, and they don't work correctly on some characters' faces. What I'm sure is not so much a Linux issue is lighting. I cranked brightness up to the max and there were still some sections where I barely saw anything, while my eyes were stabbed by blooming light in other sections.
I'm also not very fond of how, of the relatively few women in this game, shading weirdly highlights their breasts or their breasts are just almost half exposed for no reason. Not particularly unsurprising for a game from 2012, but that doesn't make it better.
Other gripes I have with this game include that you can't customise your controls almost at all (again, games already did this better before 2012), sometimes enemies can hit you from a weird distance, world geometry is iffy at times (which can sometimes ♥♥♥♥ you up, and can sometimes ♥♥♥♥ enemy AI up), character pathfinding sometimes just doesn't work, the two playable characters can body block each other and make no automatic effort to pass each other (which can be especially fun mid battle), ...
Oh, and you can also make fights literally unwinnable, at least on the higher difficulties. There is no way to respec your characters, and some encounters are simply unfair on the highest difficulty. It feels to me like this game just wasn't balanced around Extreme at all.
I'm running out of energy to rant, lol
One important note: While this game also has some issues for a casual playthrough, if you don't plan on 100%-ing this game, I think it can still be worth getting this game on sale. I got it at 90% off, and I don't think the money's poorly spent. Despite my frustrations, I still had fun for the most part, and while the writing can be a bit meh at times, I did enjoy some of the plot points and character dynamics quite a lot.
Honestly, if I had never touched Extreme difficulty to 100% this game, I probably would've had a pretty decent time and not nearly that much to complain about. I mean, the visual problems are still there, but I would probably be much more forgiving about them if the other problems weren't there, or at least substantially less annoying.
If you're only interested in a casual playthrough, I think getting this game at >80% off can be perfectly worth it. If you're looking to have a fun time 100%-ing a game, though, I recommend you don't spend a single cent on this game.
