Divine Divinity

"A good RPG, but far too conventional..."

This game is a first time effort from Larian, an European-base company. Although it offers plenty of varied quests to accomplish, a fairly large world to explore and fun combat, all those elements are dragged down by some issues that spoiled the game a little for me.

Graphics 7/10
This game looks really good. The environments can offer quite a lot of details. The animations of characters (running, walking, attacking, doing magic) aren't anything special, except that certain look a little goofy (especially the running). There are not a lot of magical spells in the game (I spent almost the entire game with the same), but most of them are good looking, with vibrant colors.

The thing that bugs me though is more the variety of the environments than the graphics themselves. You have villages (with 3 different types of house : poor, normal, rich), one kind of forest, a over-used (both in the game and overall RPGs) dark underground setting, cemetery and tombs, desert and the mandatory final setting, which looks the best. The monsters look good also, but the lack of variety is apparent also. You'll find Skeletons in the beginning and finding others with different colors and names (Insane Skeleton? Come on!), along with all the others (orcs, ghosts, corpses and way too many bees, wolves, spiders and beetles for my taste). These elements add to the feeling of lack of originality of this game.

Sound-Music 8/10
Music is a very important element of a game (at least to me) and this game doesn't disappoint in that department. Although in lot of occasions there's no music at all (and wishing there was), when there is, it's always fitting the setting perfectly, with a handful of excellent compositions. You will most likely hum the song as they go...:)

The sound is another matter though. Hearing the same dying sound over and over can get tiresome, with the except of the growl of lizards (it's really fun to hear :)). The voice acting is average, some characters have fitting voices, but some others have voices that can't possibly come out of a human being. And your character says the most stupid thing over and over and over and over again when pulling a lever : ''I'm not entirely sure what that just did.'' (Even though the door next to it clearly UNLOCKED! Most annoying sentence ever...)

Gameplay 7/10
The gameplay is where the game both shines and sucks at the same time. There's definitely a lot of quests to accomplish, but not an infinite amount as in Morrowind. They are, most of the time, fun to do and don't always range in the ''fetch-me-an-item'' category.

You can choose from 3 starting classes (6 actually, but the others are the female versions with different names), but it only affects your starting stats. As you level up, you can distribute points to four stats (strength, dexterity, intelligence and constitution, well ain't that something?) and also distribute one point (or two, depending of ''luck'') to various skills from the Thief (or Survivor here), Mage and Warrior. Each have 4 categories. So you can pretty much to whatever you want, it's not a branching-tree like in Diablo, but you can distribute points in whatever skills you want, depending only on your level. I prefer it this way, it gives more liberty in creating your character, although I found a lot of skills to be useless.

One last thing that really pissed me about gameplay is that, according to the manual, you could be good, bad and neutral, but in the game, there's only place for the good guy. I don't think there's even one quest that requires you to be evil, except for a couple of ones where the consequence was failure of the quest if you did something bad. I thought it would be like Fallout 2, but it was far from that...You can always attack guards and NPCs if you want too, but it doesn't affect anything, except from you reputation.

Story 7/10
The story is nothing really original. You discover that your character is a Marked One and people of evil are after you and you have to figure out what's going out and kill it. It comes pretty close of copying other stories, mainly because of a certain ring that contains the soul of a lost demon (what's this reminding me of?).
It's pretty straightforward and the main story would be very short if it wasn't for the numerous side quests. But it's entertaining and there's humor in the dialogues like : ''Thank God you're here, I have lost my cat and...Just kidding.''

Overall 7/10
Well, 7 covers it all. It means it's a good game, but average in almost all the categories. If you like the hack-and-slash of Diablo, there's plenty of that here. If you like more elaborate quests with multiples steps and objectives, you will like this game. But the lack of originality really hurts this game (elves, dwarves and orcs...won't they just disappear??) and prevents me from giving it a better score. But if the downsides don't bother you, go ahead and buy this unknown game if you want a PC RPG fix...:)

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/22/03, Updated 02/22/03