Divinity: Original Sin: Shiver me Timbers and Slither me Eels.

There are some games you just can’t avoid the hype for. Try as I might to distance myself from the fervor that surrounded Divinity: Original Sin it was hard not to notice the weeks it spent at Steams top sellers chart and the numerous glowing reviews that came from both professional outlets and players alike. My somewhat aggressive review schedule precluded me from giving it enough time to really judge it properly however, that was until I managed to churn through a game quickly in one weekend. So I’ve been playing Divinity: Original Sin on and off over the past 2 weeks, seeing if the game can live up to the hype it has generated.

You are a Source Hunter, duty bound to rid the world of all foul magic that plagues the world. You and your companion have been summoned to the town of Cyseal, a coastal province that’s been under siege by orcs and the undead for quite some time. However your quarry isn’t with them, no instead you’ve been summoned at the request of the town’s mayor in order to investigate the death of one of the town’s nobles. This routine investigate quickly escalates far beyond finding out who the killer is and you find yourself in the midst of nearly all the town’s affairs. Some of these are simple matters, others could have impacts on the very fabric of reality itself.

Graphically Divinity: Original Sin is very easy on the eyes with the environments brimming with detail and ambient effects galore. The developers have done a great job of making the world feel alive, especially in the main town of Cyseal where there’s a constant hubbub of people going about their daily business. Even the dungeons and outdoor areas have the same feel with creatures scurrying about and enemies never being too far from your path. Even with all the settings turned up to max my now 3 year old PC was able to keep up with it, even in busy combat scenes where there were effects flying everywhere. I do think that was a the limit of my system however as all the fans routinely spun up during some of my longer sessions.

Divinity: Original Sin takes its inspiration from the RPG games of old with it’s almost innumerable features and giant gobs of text to drive the narrative forward. Whilst your base character starts off with a class it’s not hard set, allowing you to customize your abilities as you see fit. This means that any piece of gear or skillbook is readily usable by any member of your party who has the required stats giving you an incredible amount of freedom in moulding yourself into the ultimate warrior.This also extends to your base character attributes, allowing you to further specialize down a specific tree. In all honesty there’s so much going on in Divinity: Original Sin that it’s really hard to give you a good overview of it in a single paragraph but those who are familiar with the RPGs of old will likely find it very familiar.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of turn based combat as I feel it more often pulls me out of the game rather than drawing me further in. Divinity: Original Sin does a decent job of making the combat feel a bit more interactive however the sometimes slow back and forth between you and your enemies can get tiresome. This is probably a function of the fact that you’ll likely be reloading the same encounter multiple times over as executing a combo wrong or forgetting to do something can often mean the end of your party. Indeed the whole of Divinity: Original Sin feels like it’s making a point of not holding your hand through the experience, instead expecting you to suck it up and keep on like the trooper you are.

Now I get that idea, and can’t fault the developers for creating an experience that caters towards players who are seeking that out, but I feel that there’s a difference between holding the players hand and removing things that are, put simply, frustrating as hell. For the first section everything seems to flow well, the game introduces mechanics and explains them to you. However after reaching Cyseal things start to get horrendously convoluted as you’re thrown half a dozen quests and then left to figure out what to do. If you do what I did and try to follow one quest to completion you quickly find out that it’s not really possible as many of them involve trudging past mobs that are several levels above you, preventing you from completing. Considering these quests are handed to you within the first couple hours you’d expect to be able to finish them shortly afterwards however that’s simply not the case.

Indeed the whole of Divinity: Original Sin seems to have some horrendous pacing issues, making levelling a rather irritating rather than enjoyable experience. The ramp up in difficulty often doesn’t come from giving you different enemies that you have to figure out, no instead they just throw more and more of them at you, forcing you into strategies that rely on exploiting the retarded AI. There was one battle where I was faced with no less than 10 undead where the only way to complete it was to hide behind a wall and wait for all of them to group up so I could put a puddle at their feet and stun them continuously. Whilst I applaud the mechanics being deep enough to support things like that it was, frankly, utterly boring and not something I enjoyed having to repeat dozens of times over just to be able to get one more level.

This is just made all the worse by the fact that Divinity: Original Sin is still suffering from crashes and glitches even 2 months after its release date. There’s one particular quest where you have to read pages of a book in order to pass a quiz from a ghost but if you go to read it the pages are blank. The text is in the game files so it’s there but the developers still haven’t fixed the display issue. I didn’t get far enough into the game to experience any of the other “beneficial” glitches which apparently make fights trivial but in all honesty I don’t think that would’ve improved my impression of Divinity: Original Sin at all.

I had high hopes for the story in the beginning, especially considering that it seemed like it was fully voiced acted. Instead I was disappointed to see that much of it was presented in the wall of text style that’s guaranteed to make me tune out, especially when every NPC in the world seems to have gobs of useless information to throw at you. The story itself is also pretty mediocre, starting off with strong roots but just failing to capitalize on it. Maybe it develops better as you manage to churn through some of the quests but honestly if a game isn’t grabbing me after 10 hours it won’t after any amount of time.

Divinity: Original Sin was a game I wanted to like as I had heard so many positive things about it from so many different sources. Unfortunately though its turn based combat, combined with horrendous pacing and lacklustre story, meant that I couldn’t find much to enjoy during my time with it. I fully admit that this is partly due to my bias away from games of this nature but I’ve proven in the past that I can look past genre if the game itself is good. Divinity: Original Sin unfortunately just doesn’t have anything in it that I feel I could point to and say “This is why you should play it”. I’m sure fans of the genre will find a lot to like within it however for this writer I can’t really recommend it.

Rating: 5/10

Divinity: Original Sin is available on PC right now for $39.99. Total play time was 10 hours with 6% of the achievements unlocked.