Divine Divinity was made for people who enjoy these types of gameplay. It is an action RPG with a large world to explore, lots of great loot, hordes of enemies, and an interesting storyline to boot.

Call to Adventure
Your first step is to create a character. You can choose from three different classes: Warrior, Mage, and Survivor (read: Thief). Each class has a male and female version. Your class determines your relative strengths and weaknesses. Warriors are great fighters: they start with more strength, get more hit points, get more offense and do more damage, and have a spinning attack special ability that attacks all enemies in range. Mages are master magic users: they get many more spell points than either of the other two classes at the expense of hit points, attack, and defense; they also have a special ability which lets them swap positions with any target. Survivors are masters of stealth and surivial: they get the best defense while only average hit points and mana, but do barely more damage than a wizard; they also have a special ability which lets them move stealthily, often unseen by others. You can also choose a male or female character of each class, which determines your starting skills. Each class/sex combination has a unique look and voice acting for the character.

I chose a male Survivor as my first character, and started with the abilities Assassin’s Kiss (a critical hit ability), and Trader’s Tongue (an ability which reduces prices). I wanted good defense against enemies, and the stealth special ability would be useful when I wanted to take items that weren’t mine!

Supernatural Aid
The game mechanics are fairly standard. You get experience points from killing enemies and solving quests. After accumulating a certain amount, these experience points give you levels. As you gain levels you can increase four basic statistics, which determine the values of other statistics. For example, Agility determines your offense (base chance to hit) and defense (base chance to avoid being hit). You also get skill points to spend; you gain one per level, except for every fifth level you gain 2 skill points.

Skills are what give your character flavor. There are three groups of skills, roughly grouped by classes, although any class can learn any ability. Warrior skills focus on enhancing damage for the larger weapons and innate abilities. Mage skills are spells which allow you to do amazing things in exchange for spending mana. Survivor skills are a mixed bag of abilities ranging from traditional thief stealth and deception abilities to trading abilities to special “divine” abilities which are only available at the end of the game. Each group has 32 individual skills your character can learn, allowing for a great deal of character customization.

Each skill is ranked from 0 to 5, with 0 indicating no skill and 5 indicating maximum skills. Each level in a skill gives you additional abilities. For example, the Assassin’s Kiss skill has a 10% chance to inflict double damage on a dagger attack at level 1. Each additional level adds 10% to the chance, up to level 5 where you have 50% each strike to do double damage. There are often minimum character level requirements for each skill, limiting how much power you can have initially.

Mage spells are special, in that you can find spellbooks that will give you a free level in the spell, up to the maximum. These are incredibly handy, since skill points are one of the most rare resources in the game.

Magical items will often give bonuses to your statistics and skills. Part of the fun is optimizing your character so that you get the best bonuses to your character based on the items you find. There are also temporary magical objects, such as potions, that can be used. Potions can heal hit points, restore magic points, increase your strength, etc. Food can also be used to temporarily increase your stats. Again, this is fairly standard for action RPGs.

The game’s mechanics are mostly visible to the player. Opening your character statistic sheet and you can mouse over to see exactly how many bonus hit points you get from your stamina, for example. You can also see your base chance to hit and how much damage you do with various weapons.

Crossing the Threshold
The first thing that happens is a cut scene showing some people being attacked by strange balls of light in the forest. Your character is one of the people attacked, but a strange cat seems to be helping those that were attacked.

The game starts out a bit slow and predictable. You wake up with amnesia in a strange village full of healers. This time is for getting used to the controls, which are pretty typical for an action RPG. You click on the ground to move, click on an enemy once to start attacking it, click on a townsperson to talk to him or her, etc. You can also click and drag some objects, such as chest, to move them around or even into your inventory, if you can handle the weight. You can also hover the mouse pointer over items to get more information; for example, you can see how many items are in an unlocked chest. The alt key also allows you to see items on the ground, which can often be hard to see in the detailed outdoors areas.

You run into the town’s characters and can solve various quests. Most of them involve careful reading and exploring. The first major quest you get is to heal the insanity of the main healer, Mardaneus. This requires finding and fighting through a dungeon in town. After this first quest, the game becomes a lot more interesting and you get the opportunity to explore the wide world outside the gates of the small initial town.

Once outside, it takes a little while to realize exactly how BIG the world is. There are countless quests to solve, monsters to kill, and people to meet. You can keep track of your quests in an automatically updated journal to remind yourself of your obligations. One of the more interesting game mechanics involves your reputation. As you solve quests in ways that help other people, you will gain reputation. Your reputation affects the default attitudes that characters have toward you. NPC reactions range from -100 (hostile) to 100 (admiring); reactions start at 0 if you have no reputation modifier, and can be increased or decreased by specific actions you take that affect the individual. For example, shopping with a particular merchant will increase his or her attitude toward your character. However, if you get caught shoplifting from that merchant, his attitude will quickly decrease, potentially becoming hostile toward you or calling the guards. Reaction is important, because the more a character likes you, the more information you get and the better the prices offered by shopkeepers.

Shopkeepers are also very interesting. All trading is done by barter; if you wish to sell something but the shopkeeper does not have enough money, you can trade for items of roughly equivalent value. Or, you can choose to take item(s) of less value in exchange for your high-priced items in order to sway the shopkeeper’s attitude to be more favorable, allowing you to get more favorable treatment for future transactions.

Belly of the Whale
As mentioned above, the game is BIG. There are two huge outdoor areas two explore, in addition to two separate city areas, and underground sewer complex, and multiple dungeons. The map tracks your movements, uncovering the dark “fog” covering the map as you explore. Personally, I love exploring games like these and uncovering all the locations I can. The game rewards you for this behavior, tucking little secrets into the world for you to stumble upon. For example, you can find a wishing well that will grant you a wish if you act properly. There are several little areas like this, including a hidden treasure cave that is revealed on four different treasure maps scattered in the world. You will not feel restricted in travel for the most part.

The game also has some nice elements that allow you to avoid excessive travel time. You can activate teleporters in various locations if you have the proper scroll obtained from NPCs. This allows you to travel to a previously visited area without too much hassle. In addition, you have a pair of teleportation pyramids given to you at the beginning of the game. These allow you to teleport between the pyramids. For example, you could leave one pyramid next to a place to heal and sell items. If you’re exploring an area or down in a dungeon, you can drop your other pyramid and use it to return to the first pyramid. Once you are done selling and healing, you can use nearby pyramid to teleport back to the location you were exploring and fighting. You can also use the pyramids in interesting ways by “throwing” one pyramid into a restricted area then using the other pyramid to teleport into that area. This is useful for getting past obstacles; for example, I used it to get past the dwarves guarding the king in the Dwarven Halls so that I did not have to temporarily surrender all my carefully sorted items to the nosy guard standing outside. These teleportation abilities let you return to the exciting parts of the game without requiring that you run through large empty areas.

The world is also very interactive. You can move objects around and even drag some of them into your inventory if they are not too heavy. For example, some doors are hidden behind piles of other objects, such as crates or barrels. By moving these crates or barrels, you can expose the doorway and open up hidden areas. You can also place items inside of a chest and move it around, even putting it next to your “home base” near your dropped teleporter pyramid. There are a few other interesting ways to use the environment as well. You can create a pile of straw by using a bundle of straw. Combining this pile of straw with another bundle of straw results a hay bed, allowing you to sleep and recover your hit points and magic points.

Road of Trials
As you search the world and interact with people, you begin to learn about problems in the world. A wizard has to protect you from a vicious attack from a dragon rider. The often noble but savage orcs are attacking human lands for no apparent reason. The elves and the dwarves are at each other’s throats over thefts of important items. This is a high fantasy game, so there has to be some sort of mastermind behind it all! Of course, you have some special part in all this as an important part of the plot. That attack at the beginning of the game couldn’t have been a coincidence!

The game as a lot of quests, and the great thing about the quests is that multiple quests are often related and are part of a story arc. For example, a pair of teamsters asks you to help them repair their broken wagon. As you return with a wagon wheel to repair the wagon, you find that they were attacked and the goods were stolen. In a seemingly unrelated group of quests, there seems to be a black market merchant that has a suspicious supply of goods he’s selling. Are they really as unrelated as they first seem? Many quests tie together, so you will soon lose the feeling that you’re just a glorified package delivery service once you start seeing some of the depth to the quests that the game has to offer.

The quests eventually lead you to the local Duke’s castle. (Warning: do not enter the Duke’s castle until you have accomplished most of the tasks you want to on the outside. There is a rather long and difficult dungeon awaiting which you cannot easily escape.) The young Duke seems… unusual for a 12 year old, even if he didn’t use adorable phrases like “yo-yo bloomered little tramp” to describe his girlfriend. Eventually, you discover the real reason behind the little Duke’s strange behavior and must gather together the representatives of the various races to perform a ceremony to make you into a divinity. After this ritual, you will visit the final area with additional powers and face off against the group that caused all the chaos in the land. Don’t let my brief description here fool you: the story is actually fairly deep and engrossing even if it is a bit clichй in some parts. I am trying to avoid giving away too many spoilers about the game for those that wish to enjoy the story.

Meeting the Goddess
In all, the game is really, really fun if you enjoy action RPGs. The world is large and full of things to explore. The mechanics are fun to play with, allowing you to tweak your character and get the best bonuses. The quests and stories are interesting and meaningful, and they work together wonderfully.

Perhaps the most incredible thing is the attention to detail. Given the scope of the world, it is easy to believe that little things would get overlooked, but the attention to detail is to be admired. There are several fleshed-out characters with interesting stories and motivations all over the game. Many characters have a surprising amount of depth to them considering the sheer number of characters in the game. Some will help you, some will hinder you, and some will betray you. In addition to the characters, you find a lot of attention to detail in the locations as well. The poor section of town has garbage strewn all over, a nice change of pace compared to the super-clean cities found in other games. Even the Duke’s castle has a pile of garbage off to one side. Sometimes these piles of garbage will be hiding goodies that you can pick up and use yourself.

Abduction
Even though the game took a lot of my time and was really fun, it is unfortunately not perfect. There are a few annoying parts to the game. Even after patching, the game crashed twice. Given the hours upon hours I was playing the game, I would not consider this a frequent occurrence. However, I got used to quicksaving the game after important events.

The game also encourages heavy (ab)use of saving and loading. By saving just before collecting certain treasures, you can often try to get a more powerful object. So, saving the game right before you kill a major enemy will allow you to reload the game multiple times trying to get a good item to drop. I say the game encourages this behavior because the items dropped are very inconsistent; one time the powerful monster might dropped a nearly worthless weapon you can’t properly use and other times it gives you an incredibly powerful item that boggles the mind. In addition, the only way to recover from death is to reload the game from a previous save, which means that if you do not save often you run the risk of losing a lot of work if you run into an overwhelmingly powerful enemy by accident.

The game is also not very well balanced. For example, the strength and agility statistics are much more important than constitution or intelligence. Both strength and agility affect your combat ability as well as the equipment you can equip, as many pieces require a minimum level of strength or agility to use the items. While constitution and intelligence affect hit points and magic points, it is often easier to find equipment with large raw hit point or magic point bonuses compared to finding items with stat bonuses that could provide that many additional hit points or magic points.

In addition, some skills are overwhelmingly more powerful than others. For example, the scorpion traps you can place with the “Deadly Gift” skill are incredibly powerful, even at level 1. I was able to easily defeat a monster I could barely hit by setting down about six level 1 scorpion traps and letting them attack the monster. Other skills, such as Heaven’s Gift which creates a random item on the ground nearby, is fairly useless by the time you can put significant points into it. You can easily “waste” points on skills that aren’t very good at all, and there are other skills that are just too useful to pass up, such as Telekinesis which allowed you to grab treasure at a distance.

I also didn’t see much benefit in ranged weapons over melee weapons. The area of sight was small enough that monsters could quickly reach you by the time you could attack them with a ranged weapon. Using a bow and arrow also did not allow you to use a shield; some of the high-powered magical shields had very nice bonuses you don’t want to give up.

The interface was also had some flaws. If treasure appeared next to a wall that faces away from your player perspective, holding down the alt key did not make a label appear like it does for most other items. You have to manually move your cursor over the area to find the item hidden by the wall. It is easy to lose track of items in these situations, which can be frustrating when you have to fight near the walls for whatever reason. The interface also made it hard to switch weapons, especially between melee and ranged weapons. Your equipped shield would often not be considered equipped after switching from a ranged weapon to a melee weapon; as mentioned above, the shield can be quite powerful.

Finally, the section of the game that starts with your entering the Duke’s castle was very annoying for me. You lose your teleporter pyramids due to a rather goofy plot element, and you are forced to stay in the Duke’s castle. Afterwards, you are trapped in a long and rather difficult dungeon. I was rather frustrated, as I could not easily leave the dungeon to heal, sell off excess items, and restock my potions. I wish there had been more foreshadowing about the situation so that I could have made a more informed decision. It would have been more enjoyable had I been better prepared. Even when you escape, you do not regain your teleporter pyramids until you do a long sequence of quests and fight a few very tough enemies.

Dragon Battle
In the end, though, the game is about combat. Let’s face it, the primary way to earn experience and gain levels is by killing enemies. You can only sneak past so many enemies before you’ll get caught, anyway. So, let us look at combat as a separate part of the game.

In the beginning of the game, combat is fairly simplistic. Your skills are limited, and you don’t have the very good weapons or armor available to you. You usually have to rely on a single tactic to get you through most of the battles.

In the middle parts of the game, you start to see more options open up as you spend more skill points. You get more abilities and can develop interesting strategies. However, it is easy to over-specialize in a single type of weapon. I focused many points into Assassin’s Kiss, which only works with dagger-type weapons. Finding a magical mace, for example, meant that points spent on Assassin’s Kiss would go unused if I used that weapon instead.

It is also easy to stumble into combat that is too powerful for your meager character during the middle part of the game. Enemies that my character could easily handle one-on-one would murder me if three or four of them were able to surround me. I also often wandered into areas where the monsters were much higher level than I was, leading to rather painful endings. Since your base chance to hit and dodge is affected by the difference in levels between your character and the enemy, running into a much higher level enemy often meant that you spent a lot of time missing and getting smacked around.

It is also easy to underestimate the power of various bonuses on your first time through. A level or two of a different type of damage on a weapon can make a tremendous difference. Having Spiritual Damage (2) can actually add considerable damage to the weapon when fighting certain types of monsters. This is one case where the mechanics are not very clear.

Near the end of the game, your character is fairly fleshed out. You have a number of winning strategies that have worked through most of the game. This can cause combat to get rather repetitive. However, this stage is perhaps where combat is most fun since you have enough power and options to handle most situations that are thrown at you.

It is also very easy to have an overwhelming advantage near the end of the game. For example, you will run into situations that are too easy for you since the enemies are so low level, which can get boring; worse, you will get no experience points from defeating an enemy that is too far below your level! You can also have equipment that gives a tremendous advantage, such as a weapon that does frost damage can freeze enemies in place, making them unable to retaliate. Or, some attack spells can be cast as fast as you can click the mouse button. Having a level 5 in such an attack spell can be a tremendous advantage over enemies.

The end of the game is also very combat-centric, so it is best to be in that frame of mind by the time you get there. There are, unfortunately, very few of the quests that made the earlier parts of the game really fun and interesting in the final area. In fact, the final dungeon is essentially one long endurance fight to the end where you will face the main enemy that has been causing all the trouble.

All things considered, the combat is fairly fun throughout the game. Getting new types of equipment with new powers is always fun, even if basic combat is a bit repetitive in places. The sheer variety of skills means that you can customize your character in unique ways, adding more excitement to the game.

Ultimate Boon
Overall, the game is quite fun, and I spent many hours playing it and enjoying it. There were a few flaws with the game, but they don’t detract from the game enough to ruin the fun.

Graphics: The graphics are very good. The art is clear and detailed, with lots of attention to detail which makes the game very fun. The 3D isometric perspective did get in the way a bit, especially when items were hidden behind a wall from the player perspective. The graphics generally added to the game experience.

Sound: In a word: amazing. The music was absolutely superb, with unique songs that fit the different areas. The sound was also very good, with ambient noises that fit the locations. I especially like the bar sounds, which added to the immersive feel of the locations. Divine Divinity has done one of the best jobs in using sound effectively in the game. About the only aspect that was less than spectacular is the voice acting, which I consider merely average.

Gameplay: The gameplay is pretty good. There are a lot of options for developing your character, with 96 different skills to choose from. The randomized loot is very cool, allowing you to get some cool equipment. However, the game isn’t very well balanced, with the game being perhaps a bit too hard at the beginning and a bit too easy at the end. There are some powers and abilities that are very powerful, and other that are not worth the time.

Control: The control for the game was average. I experienced the typical problems of moving when I accidentally missed and clicked besides the moving monster I wanted to attack. The addition of the alt key to find items was a big help, however, and made the control scheme much more enjoyable.

Story: I thought the story was pretty good, even though some parts were a bit painfully clichй. Of course, I’ve played a lot of RPGs, so your experience may be different. There are a lot of characters, and most of them are very well-done and add to the immersive nature of the game and the living feel to the game world.

Replayability: Replayability seems fairly high. There are a wide variety of character templates you could make, but I imagine most people will have limited interest in replaying the same quests again immediately. I’ll probably play this again sometime in the future.

Overall: The game is great fun, and I highly recommended it to people that like RPG-type games. You will get many hours of entertainment out of the game.

Reviewer’s System:
Toshiba Satellite laptop computer with:

1. 16” screen
2. Pentium4 2.53 GHz
3. 512 MB RAM
4. GeForce4 440 Go 32 MB video card
5. Built-in speakers
6. Windows XP Home (with latest patches as of July 2004)
7. Optical Mouse