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While the concept seems pretty solid, this game fails to amount to anything of note very early on, and keeps it that way.
The game's overhead view is the core of the game play. It is also I think the most significant failure. The biggest problem with the storyline in this game is that it is told from the same overhead perspective. The problem here is that this is not the way we humans view the world, each other, or events. As a result, you never feel any connection to any of the characters or any of the plot lines. The whole thing is presented with an overhead viewpoint where you are looking down, unmoved and uncaring, on the world that you are supposed to be saving. There is nothing wrong with the story, aside from the characters not being very well introduced. But the fact remains that you will care absolutely nothing for the story or anyone involved and I firmly believe this is due primarily to the vantage point from which you view the events.
The weapons, armor and gear in this game are (I believe) randomly generated. This is another interesting idea that succeeds only in failing miserably. For starters, the stats on things are floating point, not integers. This means that you may have one weapon with damage 22.5 and find another weapon with damage 22.7. This is ridiculous, pointless, and annoying. Since it is randomly generated, you may find tons of different gear with multiple stats in this kind of range, leaving you to flip back and forth endlessly to determine if what you just looted is actually better than what you are currently using. What's worse, the gear is utterly pointless except to keep the challenge level the exact same. After hours of playing through 3 chapters and multiple missions and levels, the same grunt character takes exactly two swings to defeat, the same number of swings it took to defeat that grunt 22 levels earlier. That's progress.
The graphics in this game are fine. The fighting and casting and battle mechanics are fine. The story is probably pretty good. But the storytelling vantage point is wrong. The gear management is wrong. The balance and combat effectiveness of weapons is wrong. The floating point stats are very wrong. The save mechanism and UI is wrong. This was the killer for me. After achieving a much needed checkpoint, I decided to quit the game and come back later. However, when I returned, I found that checkpoints aren't actually saved except to recall your last point of death during a session. In other words, having not saved, I lost probably 3 hours of progress. The most annoying part of this was that the UI never prompted me to save before quitting. It never told me that I was about to lose everything or that my checkpoint would be lost by quitting. After this blow I quit playing and send the game back to Gamefly.
Overall, this game is a solid concept that suffered from very poor choices in execution. It was a rental for me and it should be no more than a rental for you.
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