Visually, they nailed the IE vibe – beautiful hand-painted backgrounds, the familiar feel, the old cursor, “gather your party before venturing forth”, etc. I’d say the art is way better than in IWD2, which I replayed last year so it’s more or less fresh in my memory.

The quests and dialogues are better, more mature than in BG and after the fucking horror that was Mass Effect, the dialogues and writing are like the breath of fresh air. There are stat-check and skill-checks, although some checks appear to be flavor only – you say your fancy line, the guy says something back, like ‘right on, bro, I hear you’ and then you go back to the same list of options.

There are Clever, Aggressive, Diplomatic, Rational, etc tags but I have no idea what they do and how they work. Flavor personality options? Then why does it say Minor next to them, implying that they can be raised? Do they go up with use? If you select Rational lines 10 times, would the invisible skill go up and become Medium? Inquiring mind wants to know.

I said earlier that "RTwP is real time that sucks. The pause is an honest admission that fast-paced, party vs party, real-time combat is too chaotic to be controlled on the fly and that AI is too retarded to be relied on, and thus you have to pause this interactive movie to issue some basic orders and show AI how it's done."

PoE combat illustrates it perfectly. It's very chaotic and it's hard to say what the fuck is going on. After fighting one battle I wasn't eager to fight another. Two characters died - pardon me, we don't say things like that in civilized society - they fell unconscious during the battle and promptly recovered after the fight was over. I vaguely recall something about two bars (stamina and health) and that the way Sawyer presented it during the KS kinda made sense but I can't say that I liked the implementation.

Replaying the same battle again, while micromanaging the entire party, resulted in a swift victory with zero temporary casualties. If it was an action RPG, I would have uninstalled it at this point. It may sound harsh but I do dislike RTwP and Obsidian failed (more like never intended) to rise above the built-in mediocrity of the system.