I was a little shocked when I saw this demo on xbox live last week whilst having my morning coffee. I had heard about Divinity II and read some of the European reviews many months ago, and told myself to keep an eye on it, as it seemed like my style of RPG (more action based, and more old school). I had completely forgotten about this, and it comes at a good time, a time when I have no other RPGs to play.

I downloaded it and played it for about 5 hours. At first, I found the engine to be visually jarring... That is, it freaked my eyes out. I found myself holding the left trigger button (over the shoulder view for targetting) most of the time because I found it to be smoother. I even felt a little nausea at first, something that only one other game had ever done to me (Killzone 2). I had to take a break and come back to the game later, but I eventually got used to it.

So, to start out with, yeah, the game does have some performance issues, akin to Sacred 2 and (not as bad as) Two Worlds. It's been ported from a PC game, and it shows because it's quite obvious that the game could have used more optimization. I couldn't believe it when I later read that the game was designed using GameBryo (the same engine that Bethesda used to develop Oblivion and Fallout 3). I would have never known.

Things I've noticed are dipping frame rates, screen tearing and clunky animations if you're a few feet away from an enemy or NPC (this is used to improve performance on a general scale, but it's usually done from further away). Also, the Field of View in the normal camera view seems unnatural (not sure if that's just me). I was a little disappointed at the lack of options, specifically for the camera / view settings. Your only choice to change the camera view is to hold left trigger as I mentioned previously, which gets tiring after a while.

Now obviously, you can tell that my initial impressions of the game were not good. Like many spoiled next-gen gamers used to AAA titles, I expected to be blown away visually, albeit on a subconscious level. While the game has it's fair share of nice visuals, the engine runs poorly on consoles. It really does. It's by no means ugly, but I definitely recommend downloading the demo and trying it out before purchasing, specially if graphics mean a lot to you.

Despite my initial urge to turn it off after 30 minutes, my love for RPGs told me to keep going and not give up. I'm glad I gave it a chance, because I ended up playing the demo for several hours and will end up buying the game on release day. It's already available in the US as of Dec 29th, but in Canada we must wait until the 5th of January, a delay that has been undoubtedly forcasted due to incessant storms, blizzards and polar bear attacks on the shipping crews and their vehicles.

Well, nove that I've talked about the bad stuff, now here's the good stuff...

I really like the game's combat, questing and leveling up system. Basically you can mold your own character using a mix of classes: Warrior, Ranger, Mage and Priest. You can focus on one or build upon them all. There are also other skills you can invest in, like mind reading, lock picking and passive skills to increase one handed / two handed effectiveness and so forth. I love that kind of freedom, the sort that allows you to royally f*&$ up a build or create an awesome one :)

Combat is done in real time, however you can pause the game at any point and re-target and strategize if need be. I found that to be a nice touch, because sometimes you can get overwhelmed easily, and one mistake in this game gets you killed. When you die, you have to reload a previous auto-save or a manual save; in typical old-school fashion, there's no continue or respawns.

The questing system is simple. NPCs will have a ! on their heads if they have quests to offer. You accept or deny, and then it's added to a quest log. Do the quest, come back and you can usually pick a reward of XP, gold or a selection of items. Note that there is very little hand holding, though. No nifty little arrows like in Oblivion / Fallout 3 telling you where you need to go. You'll need to pay attention and follow instructions. This may seem like a bad thing, but it isn't; personally I find this sort of system much more rewarding and it also prevents me from falling asleep during gameplay.

You have the freedom of moving the main quest along, or doing side quests, or running around in the environments, pillaging and killing if you want. There's plenty of locked chests, barrels and containers that hold random loots. I found that investing only one point in lock picking allowed me to open several of the locked chests, and I've managed to find a lot of neat items in them.

As far as equipment goes, you have your typical slots, chest, arms, legs, rings and earrings, and necklace (I may be forgetting one or two). Loot seems to have random twists a la Diablo; some swords can come inbued with magical properties and the like. I'm fairly certain some of the NPC vendor's loot they sell is randomized as well. ANother thing I love is the ability to insert charms (upgrades) in armor, weapons and jewelery. Charms do stuff like increase a certain stat, add damage or increase mana / hp regen rates, etc. Overall, combining all the equipment possibilities with the versatile class system makes for a very customizable experience, which is something I always look for in RPGs.

More on combat - obviously you can hack and slash with melee weapons, but you also have ranged attacks such as bows and magic. Bows do not require arrows, which is awesome. I find it tedious in games to always replenish arrow supplies, so this is a welcomed feature. Magic cast from the Mage pool of skills are quite powerful as well. Things like magic arrow, fireball (AoE and chance to knock down), a heal spell and magic / mana enhancing passives. The Priest skills focus more on summoning aid to your side, like undead that throw fireballs or offer aid with healing, or filling enemies with fear, invisibility, health to mana conversion, etc.

As you can tell, the game strays from typical RPG elements quite a bit. There's lots of little surprises and I especially enjoyed the story, but I don't want to spoil any of it. In conclusion, my impressions were very good and the demo convinced me to buy the game, but it was a slow start. Divinity II is something that will take you a few hours to get into, and I for one and hoping to see future patches that will address performance.