A great party-based CRPG, but not for everyone.

Pros:
-Some of the most in-depth and challenging combat in the genre
-Detailed and specific difficulty settings
-Content rich (a huge game with many hours of content)
-Turn-based or real time combat with pause (both executed very well)

Potential Cons:
-A lot of reading (Not everything is voice acted or cut-scenes)
-Complexity (guides for builds on core and above difficulty are helpful)
-After Act 1 you manage a large campaign filled with battles, but be sure to use a mage or ranger general or you will be under powered (balance issues on this aspect are a big deal) You can skip this mode and wait for time to unlock areas, but I find it better to simply get a mage general and breeze through these sections.

If you enjoy games like Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity, this one is mechanically one of the best.

I've beaten the game now with every clan and at the highest covenant level (10) and I've seen all the content on offer.

If you're familiar with the first game and enjoyed it, I can't see you not enjoying this second installment.

At first, I felt like there was less content on offer, playing through the new game, with the new clans, battling the new bosses.

There is no variation of the bosses in the core game like you would've seen in the first, in terms of the two alternating ACT1-2 bosses. They still have diverse modifiers, but you'll always fight the core bosses in the same order.

Once you unlock all the clans and beat the game at its highest difficulty, you'll discover there is as much content, if not more, than the first game with it's DLC. You'll even be pleasantly surprised to find all of the original clans and cards are here for you to mix/match with the new clans.

All the new clans are well balanced and fun to play. There are now varying Pyres with special abilities and modifiers, as well as equipment, which can placed on your boarded allies.

This is my favorite Rogue-Like Card Battler. I own most of them and it's not even close. The game design around the combat is perfect balance between randomness and skill.

I really enjoy the rogue-lite version of the game. Think of it as a Divinity Original Sin style combat system mixed with rogue-lite mechanics, where your abilities and enemy areas are randomized, so players are forced to adapt and find synergies out of what they get.

The enemies always take their turns as the same time, which is a nice quality of life, although the frame rates do tend to tank a bit when there are a bunch of enemies. You should even expect these dips on 3000 series Nvidia Cards.

The difficulty scaling is pretty good, but at the highest difficulties it becomes more of an attack/move kite fest.

The narrative mode is less interesting and slower. It's worth purchasing just for the rogue-lite mode.

The graphics hold up well in 2024. I played it on 'hurt me plenty' and it was quite fast paced and a lot of fun. I believe I beat the entire game in around 8-9 hours but it didn't overstay its welcome. I think it was worth the price of $4 of whatever I paid for it on sale. I really enjoyed the music, stylized violence, and themes. It runs really well and I had a blast.

Solid turn-based combat with a quest hub to explore (The Abbey). The story telling and themes are a bit juvenile, but I enjoyed the wholesome superhero vibe and platonic relationships.

Each character has 8 abilities (cards) active at one time in their (deck), and these cards can be upgraded by combining them, modifying them. The heroes you bring on a mission get additional cards and rewards, are more likely available for evening hang outs.

The characters are designed well to *feel* as they should in combat. Spider Man is very nimble, moves around a lot, cleverly uses environmental advantages. Captain America is tanky, taunts enemies. Dr Strange brings back abilities played, moves enemies.

Each turn you get a random 5 our of the total 24 cards you get (8 from each of the 3 members of your party). The game gives you redraws and items you can craft, to overcome the potential of losing to unfair hands.

As you progress in power, you'll like all of your cards, and there is a difficulty slider that increases enemy damage and rewards, allowing each mission to be an adequate challenge.

After BG3 I returned to BG1 Enhanced Edition, which had unfortunately aged to a point where I could no longer enjoy its rudimentary combat and dated graphics.

I turned to Pillars of Eternity, a game I had played on release, but didn't have the attention span for the introduction, which is an exposition dump. The entire game is a bit text heavy, but the writing is really descriptive, so if you enjoy exposition you'll be at home. The story is also more dark than your typical CRPG fair.

The tactical, real time pause combat, really hits the spot on hard, as it's not even necessarily that hard, but it punishes you quickly for mistakes. You can quick save and quick load, so dying a few times isn't that big of a deal, food buffs, consumables, optimizing builds, make the higher difficulties more rewarding. There are 5 difficulty settings, with more detailed customization. I don't like inventory management, so there is infinite chest for that on my party.

I'm really enjoying my time with this game in 2024. It's what you remember about classic BG1, but properly updated, with a new combat system to enjoy, better graphics, better story telling, and improved quality of life.

My only gripe is that vanilla, you can't re-class your storied companions attributes, so they are inherently inferior to a silence mercenary, you can hire at Inns.

It's more Divinity Original Sin 2 than Baldur's Gate 2 in regards to combat.

The narrative is compelling, even more so after completing the game once. And the different choices and companions, viable class builds, and honor mode difficulties, allow for a lot of replay value.

On a third completion of the game, I have still discovered entirely new areas, encounters, and plot elements which I was not previously exposed to, just by mixing up my companions and choosing different responses than I had before.

It's one part tactical turn based combat, one part narrative sandbox.

The looting ui and trading is the only tedium I've encountered, that and the camera often has issues, which can cause you to fiddle with angles and zoom. The camera also removes player control when enemies and allies take their turns, which isn't executed in a consistently good way.

It's definitely my game of the year 2023. A game I could see myself playing, even a decade later, like BG2 before it.

Elden Ring is a mixed bag of extremes. Wonderfully in-depth action RPG combat, beautifully dark aesthetic, and an open world to explore filled with perils. The animations are excellent and the graphics are well optimized. Mastering the intense dance of each boss encounter can be frustrating, but the ability to level up or do something else makes it more approachable than any other From Software title.

Unfortunately, it is still a From Software title. They don't tell you very much jumping in. (example: don't agree with a woman, don't level. Hug a woman, receive a curse.) There is a bit of a level grind as well, so be aware of that. It doesn't hold your hand or necessarily respect your time. I recommend either going in blind and expecting to spend a lot of time in the world, curiously exploring, or if you're not patient, simply refer to guides so you don't end up wasting early skill points or overlooking unexplained core mechanics, overlooking important bosses, etc.

The more you learn about the game, the more enjoyable it is. I wish the controls were easier to hotkey on mouse/keyboard, in the way I want. It is somewhat of a lazy port control wise, not all the in game actions are articulated and some hot keys serve multiple purposes, whether you want them to or not.

All together, the highs overcome the lows.

The best in rogue-lite deck building combat ever designed, with brief sessions (8-9 battles), nuanced difficulty considerations that keep the challenge at your level and escalating, and diverse variations of card builds, which make every run fresh.

You beat it or die in 30 minutes - 1 hour, but as the difficulty scales with your level of play, every decision feels particularly weighted. The game also feels more fair than other deck builders. In Slay The Spire you could have a great deck, with a balanced defensive card representation, but still not draw a single defensive card when you need it most. The tiered train, allows the developers to scale these things best out of three turns, so defeat feels less like a single, unfair hand.

The expansion is also amazing, as it rewards you with new enhancements, even allowing players to combine units to make over powered hybrids, but as you take on these great buffs you also increase the difficulty. Accrue 100 difficulty currency (pact shards) from these new upgrades and get an especially difficult boss for a more absolute victory.

I do a full deconstruction of Monster Train here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKsV4w9DGzU&t=637s

Across The Obelisk is a party based card battler. Instead of one deck of abilities, players are allowed to curate 4 character decks and constitute an entire party. There are different tank/warrior, mage, rogue, and healer options, so there is some variation to be had.

There is a rogue-lite mode, with a fixed series of maps, where players accrue currency to gain further control and power level, allowing greater specificity to character roles (all heal cards on a healer for example). The bosses are interesting and even realm is characterized well.

There is also a rogue-like mode, where you pick from random bundles of cards, start with nothing, removing the progression system that gimps early runs in the rogue-lite version.

The combat is excellent and well balanced, but the later levels become more and more about debuff clearing. Can you remove bleeds? Can you remove poisons?

I found the later game difficulty spike being associated with clearing debuffs, debuffs that are inconsequential up until that point, to be quite tedious. I enjoyed the game quite a bit for the price and recommend it, but found the combat in games like Monster Train and Slay The Spire to be more rewarding in regards to mastery.