Beyond divinity pc game

The story carries on from the original, with you once more taking charge of the Chosen One in his continuing battle against the Lord Of Chaos. This time, however, you don't start off battered and bruised in a quaint village, but emaciated and imprisoned in another dimension, your soul bound to the fortunes of an evil Templar.

He's fallen foul of the same demon that's taken a dislike to you, a situation neither you nor your Death Knight chum are particularly chuffed about. Basically, if one of you cops a fatal blow, the other buys it too. This state of affairs is perhaps the most interesting feature of Beyond Divinity, and the one that distinguishes it most clearly from its predecessor.

Previously, your only playable character was a sickeningly righteous teacher's pet type, and the addition of a malevolent warrior makes for a much more interesting story. In fact, it's essentially a fantasy take on the Hollywood buddy movie, as both characters bond through shared danger, earn the grudging respect of the other and end up slapping each other's buttcheeks in a steamy changing room.

Of course, since the game takes considerably longer to plough through than the entire Lethal Weapon series, the premise is dragged out far longer than is necessary; but it makes a nice change from your usual party of drab off-the-shelf adventurers. Aside from the new story and the eventual ability to dally between various dimensions as you strive to master the 'lost art of riftrunning', the gameplay remains fundamentally unchanged.

The most obvious difference is that with two characters to control, there's more scope to explore the bewildering number of skills, both old and new. The Death Knight is a natural 'tank' character and an obvious candidate to take the warrior role, leaving your divine other free to follow the way of the Wizard or thief-like Survivor.

But this being Divinity, the dynamics of the skill system make your choice of class largely irrelevant, as any class can pursue pretty much any skill path. Together with the albeit expensive option to unlearn skills, this lends the game unrivalled scope to experiment.

In some ways, this open character system actually hindered the replayability of the first title, but here the developer has made amends with the new Battlefields system. Basically, this allows you to take your avatars away from the main campaign into a series of random dungeons. Here, you can gain experience and equipment to bring back to the main quest. It's a great way to release tension when you're struggling to locate some elusive key or other, and because the whole game is based around alternative dimensions, it doesn't feel like a cheat's way out either.

As with its predecessor, Beyond Divinity stands above its peers in offering an excellent level of optional detail, both in terms of background material and interactivity. You can read the various texts found lying about on bookshelves, or make use of innocuous items like pots, rotten food and plant life.

Moreover, there's a subtle yet powerful system whereby you can unintentionally upset the various NPCs just by ending a conversion prematurely, the result being that their aid is offered at a higher price. If you shut them up a number of times, they may even blank you from then on. It's a nice touch that adds some degree of believability to the game world. The fact is that of all the fantasy games out there, there are none that are as accessible as this series, while still offering such huge scope to explore the environment, the story and the characters themselves.

The graphics are decidedly old-skool and the combat isn't nearly as tactical or as spectacular as the developer claims I feel Larian should drop the Diablo -style combat entirely.

However, with BioWare moving ever more mainstream, the Divinity series could well take over from where Baldur's Gate left off. There's still some way to go until that happens, but Beyond Divinity definitely shows Larian Studios progressing very slowly in the right direction. Bring on Divinity 2. Despite a small graphical makeover, Beyond Divinity retains a few hangover issues from the first game. The skewed isometric view makes a return of course, which is not something that bothers us particularly.

Such combinations are ideal for fending off the game's legions of powerful, but typically none-too-intelligent, foes. Beyond Divinity also offers four different difficulty settings, presented only when you first begin play. The game itself doesn't tell you what the specific differences between these settings are, but suffice it to say that less experienced players should gravitate toward the easier-sounding settings without feeling guilty, because Beyond Divinity is a hard game.

The initial escape sequence, which is a lengthy dungeon crawl through a decidedly perilous dungeon, will introduce you to this game's unabashed tendency to kill you suddenly, often by the inopportune springing of traps, but also at the hands of numerous strong, hardy foes.

This is one of those games where even the loading screens encourage you to save your progress often. There's a convenient quick-save option, but it's not as convenient as it could be since saving your progress in Beyond Divinity takes a few disruptive seconds.

Yet, if you don't routinely save your game, you'll get that much more frustrated when you eventually get killed. It's "game over" if either the hero or the death knight runs out of hit points.

Thankfully, you can pause the action instantly and at any time by pressing the space bar, and while paused, you can designate new targets, quaff potions that instantly restore your health or magic power, and so on. You can also set your characters to auto-attack any hostiles in the vicinity. Without the pause feature the game would have been pretty much unmanageable; with the pause feature, the game is tactical and often challenging without being sluggish.

The pacing can take some getting used to, but considering how much ground there is to cover in this game, you'll ultimately appreciate that the combat is nice and fast. Get used to having the death knight around. He may have a foul temper, but he's your lifeline, and you're his. Questing in Beyond Divinity is fairly conventional. Characters will ask you to perform various errands for them, which are sometimes simple two-step processes, but other times they are a lot more elaborate.

There's a fairly decent quest log to help you keep track of all of what you're supposed to be doing, and there's also an onscreen minimap and a full-screen map that's annotated with places of interest to keep you from getting too lost.

The interface generally works well, though one aspect of it that's quite cumbersome is the inventory, which is a big mishmash of all the junk you've amassed on your journey. Good luck looking for smaller items like magic rings in there. Granted, this is probably an appropriate simulation of what it must be like trying to find a small trinket in a huge backpack full of crossbows, potions, spears, helmets, fruit, and books and such.

What's impressive about Beyond Divinity, like its predecessor, is the sheer volume of stuff in the game--from the physical items you'll find and equip to all the places you'll go, things you'll fight, and people you'll meet.

Like Divine Divinity, this game has some very large, multilevel areas for you to explore, and important details can be hidden anywhere, demanding you to be observant. Fortunately, among the interface features retained from the previous game are the abilities to highlight any onscreen items that can be picked up by holding the Alt key and to automatically target the enemy closest to your cursor by holding Ctrl when left-clicking. These helpful interface features prevent Beyond Divinity from devolving into a game that's all about fishing for places to click.

Beyond Divinity's open-ended structure means it's possible to run into enemies that are much too powerful for you. Since your characters do become appreciably stronger as they level up, you'll always be on the lookout for the easier things to fight so that you can gain and maintain an edge in combat.

One new option to achieve this is the battlefields--areas that become instantly accessible from each of the game's main acts--once you find the appropriate magic artifact that lets you teleport there, that is.

The battlefields contain merchants who'll buy or sell stuff as well as send you on fetch quests or kill quests into yonder wilderness, or specifically, into yonder dungeons in yonder wilderness. These battlefield sequences are optional and are much more transparent as a pure hack-and-slash grind than most of the game's other sequences. But since Beyond Divinity works well from a mechanical standpoint, and since it is addictive to play between all the fighting, leveling up, and finding new stuff, the battlefields can be a good diversion.

They're also there just to help prevent you from ever getting too stuck. Being a hero or death knight isn't easy.

Create potions! Obtained some vile-smelling poison? Daub it on your blade or arrow tips: your foes won't know what hit 'em! See all. Customer reviews. Overall Reviews:.

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