The biggest disappointment in my (small) collection. Get another RPG.
First of all: The game is jumping after almost every move, it feels like I'm going through the world at 3 frames a second.
The controls are horrible, why would anyone move a character using 2 sticks? One for walking and one for turning? It feels forced and is, at times, highly annoying. The menus are bad to navigate through because the game seemingly intends to do everything differently from other games when it comes to controls. No button will have the effect you may be used to from other games. Not even the menu is accessed via, for example, start. No, it's on B! While attacking somehow moved to the triggers to make your fingers bleed. The map? Hard to navigate through because of the very same thing. It tries to teach the player completely different controls from any other game that end up just being weird and very unfortunate. There is a reason most games have similar controls: They work!
Combat is chunky, the views(you can choose between first person and third person) are both imperfect and the third person view makes it especially hard to navigate and fight(for me as a fan of third person views a nono), caves are too dark(you can only use a torch when you are not fighting), the world boring. It's huge but it seems like I'm going through the same, empty area 10 times in a row before getting to a town with dull NPCs that got, wait for it: fetch quests for me!
So while the game tries to be unique in it's controls, the rest is the complete opposite. It's a generic game with a generic story, bland world and emotionless characters. You can customize your character like in few others games(but don't waste too much time on it, it's impossible to create a character that is not ugly, the developers themselves didn't manage to do it, as shown by the NPCs) but an emotional connection to any character or the story itself is never created. There is no development.
One of the main aspects of the game is an illusion of freedom. But the real freedom only effects things that are not related to the main story and the choice of character class. Leveling up gives you the freedom to waste your work on attributes that are useless for your class or spend them in the one way that makes sense. Still think character development is unique?
Actions also don't seem to have consequences. You get thrown in jail, but as soon as you're out everybody seems to have forgotten your actions.
Another thing that struck me as just impossible in a game created by professionals are the bugs I encountered with character dialogues. Sometimes the characters will talk, sometimes there will be only text from the same characters. Sometimes the text randomly decides to always skip to the next part by itself after a second, not even enough to read half of it. Other times one half of it is translated into the local language(in my case German) and the other half remains English. I don't know if that is a bug or very, very lazy translators.
The graphics are ok but the animations horrid and the sound is what you'd expect from a typical RPG.
But the game is not all bad. My disappointment comes from the amount of praise the game has gotten. Of which it deserves none. It does have a big world with lots to do in and some parts(especially caves) CAN be atmospherical, but it never ever comes even close to being an incredible game. I was bored of it after 2 hours. Actually I was bored after 30 minutes but continued playing, hoping for it to get better.
So I will go back to playing Gothic 2. Because that is a truly good open world RPG. And being 4 or so years older it doesn't even look that bad compared to this mess. It takes the same idea of an open world RPG but makes it feel vivid and real.