I bought this purely because of its premise: instead of being the traditional do-gooder, you play as a minion of an evil overlord who has already won. Plus I suppose that Obsidian has a good reputation when it comes to RPGs. Unfortunately I found this to be a middling game, too small and short for the scope of the story it wants to tell and bizarrely packed with features that feel rushed, out of place and ultimately pointless.

The story is that the overlord Kyros has already conquered most of the world through the use of powerful magical Edicts. However the Tiers, the region the game is set in, has risen up in rebellion and so you are sent to clean up the mess. The problem is that Kyros has two armies in the region: the disciplined and elite Disfavored, and the more numerous, savage Scarlet Chorus. Though supposedly on the same side, they are at odds at one another and treachery is suspected. Things become even more complicated when in the process of ending one of Kyros’ Edicts, the magic interacts with you and activates one of the ancient Spires that dot the land. The Spire acknowledges you as its master, marking you out as a power in your own right.

There’s a lot of backstory and world building in this game, all delivered by text. It’s neat in including a sort of encyclopedia system that allows you to click on links to get more information on the subject but be prepared to do a whole lot of reading, especially right at the beginning. As for the story itself, I love how the Archons who lead the armies derive their power at least partly from other people believing in their power. Unfortunately, I don’t think the game handles the minion of an overlord aspect of the story very well and you never really feel like you’re the tip of the spear of a whole imperial apparatus. It feels just like any other fantasy RPG where you’re the only one putting out all of the fires and everyone is more than happy to give you all manner of trivial tasks to accomplish.

What really puts me off this game however is the ruleset. This game uses the same engine as Pillars of Eternity but implements a completely different ruleset and I hate it. There are no classes and advancement is skill based but everything is just so unbalanced and stupid. For example, only one character in the party needs skills like Subterfuge and Athletics but the Lore skill is useful for everyone as it unlocks magical spells and so is far more important than everything else. Then there’s the fact that there’s no resource like mana or its equivalent so spells and ability use is limited only by their cooldowns. Between talents, spells, combos, items and even abilities unlocked by reputation gains, there is a bewildering array of them, so many that I can’t imagine not having something available always. For me, this means that combat consists solely of spamming special abilities and spells as much as possible when they are available, such that the basic auto attack is almost never used.

The magic system in here is incredibly intricate as you’re able to create your spells by combining different sigils. By stacking sigils, you’re able to create some incredibly potent spells but no one will ever be able to cast them as the Lore requirement gets too high very quickly. But that’s also why Lore is so important and why everyone needs it. Even fighter types can and should boost Lore to cast self-buffs that protect themselves better than any armor and heal themselves. It makes everything else feel pointless. To top it all off, since advancement is skill based and skills increase the more you use them, caster types advance faster than anyone else since there are so many sub-skills associated with magic. It just seems so poorly thought out and I ended up being so disgusted that I didn’t care about the builds at all and just wanted to get the game over with as soon as possible.

Plenty of other things in the game feel similarly half-baked. The wound system and resting to get rid of wounds is carried over from Pillars of Eternity but apart from the first act, there is no time limit in the game and given how powerful the resting bonus is in the Spires, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t just pop back to them to rest whenever you need to. There are upgrades to make at the Spires, retainers to hire and things to research but the game is so short that none of it really matters. You can pick up so many pieces of heavy armor in the game but you’ll never have anyone to wear them. Of the two fighter-type companions in the game, one comes with armor that he can’t take off and the other doesn’t wear any armor at all. You likely won’t even want your main character to wear it either as it increases your recovery time and you’d want that low to keep spamming all those spells and special abilities.

Combined with the small maps, a plot that moves way too quickly to be plausible, and other annoyances, this game is just underwhelming on every front. Why would extremely powerful beings who have being around for decades or even hundreds of years suddenly change allegiances in a matter of a couple of weeks? Why do these huge armies need you to do every little thing for them? Why have so complicated a reputation system yet in the end the result is scripted and locked depending on which faction you back? It tries too hard to feel as epic and as full featured as other modern fantasy RPGs without being actually so big. It’s ridiculous that so many missions involve you leading soldiers to assault enemy positions but the scale of the game engine allows only small numbers of combatants on the screen.

The game isn’t terrible per se. Combat can actually be quite challenging at anything above normal difficulty, forcing you to micromanage your party and use consumables but I once I understood the ruleset, I hated it so much I just powered through on normal difficulty. But there are much better games to spend your time on than a half-hearted effort like this. In particular, from a story perspective, I feel that the premise of playing a character who serves an evil overlord was much better handled by Jeff Vogel’s Avadon trilogy. It’s sad to say this as I have a lot of affection for Obsidian, but this one is a definite miss.