Divine Divinity 2: Ego Draconis

DIVINE DIVINITY 2: EGO... (X360)

News

Articles

Screens

Video

Cheats

FAQ

Files

Forum

6.4

DIVINE DIVINITY 2: EGO DRACONIS

We review Divine Divinity 2 for Xbox 360.

Posted by Jon Wills on Nov 24, 2009 16:04 (114 days ago)

Divine Divinity is a game which sets you in the heart of Rivellion, another post-war countryside setting where random enemies start coming at you, sledgehammers blazing. You play a Dragon Slayer who as he or she kills more enemies, gains more skill points, and becomes the Dragon Lord. It’s nothing new, nothing exciting, and nothing good.

When you do first start the game, you get the Two Worlds feel. The environments are quite dotty and turning the camera round causes a little bit of lag. This can become infuriating when you are trying to move your character and they always pause every second. The start of the game doesn’t tell you where you are meant to go, so hope that following the path will take you there.

The game is free-play meaning that you are constantly on a mission. Meet a character and hope they will offer you training, or an exciting change to the story. Your first mission involves training to be a slayer, but then you board the ship and move to another location to actually start your quest. As you walk down the path, several 4 legged animals will pounce at you, but when you replay the mission, which is rare, they all come from the same place at the same time showing a linear code process. Your job is to basically smack the living daylight out these over-powered-for-their-size enemies and claim some pointless gold. Notice how all this happens before you start a mission, like Far Cry 2 after the tutorial. It drives you mad when you keep getting slaughtered by enemies who know you are coming from miles away even when looking the other way.

As you progress, you unlock some new cool stuff like better swords and safe houses where you can replicate enemies to use for advantage over an opponent, but it is a very detached follow-that-path story which we don’t expect to see in this current generation. This also means there are no side quests, and with the game being built around single-player replay value does lack.

There are speech options available in the game, which means that you don’t speak but you can choose one line of five to change the dialogue. This is usually well implanted in many games, however this has no moral values at all, and you end up just pressing the A button to get through them as quickly as possible. The voiceover guys appear to be quite bored, which also does not help the matter.

If you are a fan of RPG’s you will get some satisfaction out of this but there are no upgrades, it is all done via AI so does make the game a dash more disappointing. In terms of the actual gameplay, apart from the lag, it does play very fast and you can get some fun, but with the same enemies coming at you constantly in strikingly similar environments, there is a bit of disappointment to be found.

Divine Divinity isn’t that divine. It is littered with lag issues, repetitive environments and boring and pointless story mode. The post-war enemies are out of place in the setting looking so clean from a game like Fable 2. It’s not well thought out and it’s not well done, which is unfortunate really.

Our Rating for Divine Divinity 2: Ego Draconis
4.0	Story A form of story progression, but very boring with no replay value.
7.5	Lastability Not bad, but very repetitive
7.5	Playability Ignore the lag, and you got an alright game
6.0	Originality There is nothing that makes this game stick out from others in the same genre.
7.5	Graphics The graphics are a bit hit and miss.
6.0	Sound Dull dialogue choices, with random coded enemies prove disappointing.
6.4	Overall Divine 2 is quite a disappointing RPG, there is no real feel of progression for your character and the presentation is quite poor. RPG fans may like it, but there are better games out there.

Interaction

Rating:

8.0

Share

URL Snag

Comments

Post Comment

Comment Rules

No advertisments, flooding or spamming
All comments should be on topic
Use proper language to express yourself: no cursing or swear words

You may not post comments as a guest. Please register or login to your account.

Username:

Password:

Create a new account?

Forgot your password?

Dec 30, 2009 00:02:45 (78 days ago)

Chojiro

This review has many incorrect statements! The main quest line is just a small part of the game, there are tons of side quests which requires thorough exploring. This also means even if you are thorough, chances are you can come across new things in a new game. Plus you might want to raise the difficulty. Sounds strange for a game "with no replay value." I do not understand what "enemies randomly coded" means. It does not make sense. As for performance issues, you are exaggerating, otherwise there is something wrong with your XBox. Repetitiveness is a problem in many games. Constantly finding new items, quests and places to explore makes this differ from a hack and slash game.
Speech options can change the rewards for quests or even cancel quests, so ignoring the dialogue which had effort put into it is not how you want to play the game. I am actually surprised the scorings given by the author were not lower, because it sounded as if this game lacked a lot of vital elements for even a half decent RPG.