A familiar tale of heroes going after bad guys, but feels unbelievably fresh and engulfing. Addictive, difficult combat.
The combat is such that strategy is absolutely essential. Not intense military formations or anything, just having your teammates programmed to do exactly what you would want at specific times, and this is allowed to be done by a system of tactics that instruct your party to carry out certain actions under certain conditions. For example, having a heal spell casted when a character is under 25% health would be smart if you have a healer in your party.
You can have 4 in a party and each combination of three along with yourself offer different combinations of skills. They also offer different abilities, skills, relationships with NPCs and interactions amongst themselves when being used. The conversations can be quite amusing, but somewhat repetitive. Maybe because I die so much.
Oh yeah, the game is really tough. Really, really hard. Obviously the 40 year old RPG fanboys say "This was cake in my day" but for those of us who are used to the run-of-the-mill easy games alla Fable 2 or Mass Effect, this will prove to be a real challenge. In fact, I kind of beat the first boss on a fluke because I got lucky to find bombs in a chest I looted.
Strategy does not mean MMO strategy either, because if you have only one party member taking aggro (as I later learned) that means that the boss will likely do some sort of special move to the tank like picking him up, bashing him on the head a few times, and or crushing his body and throwing it. Either way, most likely your guy is dead.
Overall I recommend the game highly. Great even though typical story, interesting characters in a huge world and challenging combat make this game one that you will play for a long time.