Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga Reviews

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Written by Brother None on April 18th, 2011

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Unfortunately, choosing which skills to train in can be a rather difficult and frustrating matter. While the interface is clean and the descriptions of each ability are excellent, it's not easy to discern just how useful each ability actually is. The Curse skill, for example, professes to reduce the damage dealt by all enemies in a fairly large radius, a potent defensive skill to be sure. What it fails to mention, however, is that it usually fails to affect bosses and leaders, the most powerful opponents that you'd most likely want to weaken. Other skills have similar weaknesses, and it's quite easy to create a build that makes the game extremely difficult to play. A way does exist to redistribute your skill points, but it's prohibitively expensive and players can't expect to reasonably do it more than two or three times in any give playthrough.

Divinity II's dragon form, a much-hyped feature of the game, is also plagued with problems. The effects of a character's level don't play into the abilities of the dragon form, instead only being modified by the limited amount of dragon equipment that can be found. The end result is that the dragon form, which is supposed to feel significantly more powerful than the Dragon Knight's human form, is actually a lot weaker and more vulnerable. To top it off, the dragon form doesn't even become available until the final third of the game, and disappears entirely for the Flames of Vengeance expansion, reappearing at the very end for an extremely frustrating escort mission. Despite being heavily promoted, the dragon form is actually one of Divinity's weakest links.

When Ego Draconis was released, I was disappointed by how the game was presented the environment was awful looking, character models were pixelated, and poor frame rates seriously hurt the gameplay. Thanks to the good efforts of Larian Studios, Dragon Knight Saga fixed all of these problems, making the game feel new to me. In the remastered edition, the graphics look sharper, the environment looks more detailed, and the frame rate has been improved. For players who played Ego Draconis, the improvements that Larian Studios made will be noticeable right away.

The combat itself is where the game is somewhat lacking. You can map certain attacks and skills to the face buttons. Your standard attack will suffice for the early battles, but you will soon find out that you'll need to use strategy and task management to win later encounters. The game allows the player to pause time, much like Dragon Age, and order commands to your character without fear of getting damaged. The problem isn't the actual combat, but the encounters that you run into. Early on in the game, you will run into maybe 2 or 3 trolls. You can take them out no problem. Eventually, you will have a big team of them to take on. It's not too difficult, but will add a relatively decent challenge. Then, you will suddenly begin to run into bigger and stronger enemies that will completely destroy you, not to mention that they travel in packs of 4 or 5 at a time. You can't take on that many enemies without getting killed.

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