I would not give this game even a 7 out of 10. 6 if your a fan of midevil history like I am. It fails at every attempt it makes to be an rpg.
The story is scripted and can not turn out differently no matter what choices you make. Combat is like halo with a sword and shield. Your armor is basically for show and something to waste the thousands of silver groshen you will collect. While in combat you use stamina and when your stamina runs out you start taking health damage no matter how good your armor is. Just like master chiefs shield. There is even a potion that gives you a 50% larger stamina shield. The first time I used one it reminded me of overshield.
The leveling system is a copy of skyrim with a cap at 20. Even with the cap you will be able to get every available perk except those that are locked out by other perks that you choose. The perks that force you to make a choice you quickly decipher that they will only hinder you by the end of the leveling system so they are just wasted opportunities to actually implement useful perks. This makes every play through basically the same. And yes the game was designed to be repeated multiple times it is that short.
The side quest are short fetch this from the other side of the map quests either by stealing it or killing someone to get said item. The most interesting and eventful quests takes a full in game week to play out and gives you three possible endings. Two of which involve killing your friends instead of being able to talk them out of a very stupid plan to rob an armed escort of gaurds for a pitiful amount of money. They are wearing more money than they steal in armor and weapons during the quest it is quite ironic to be honest.
If your looking for realism then this is as close as your going to get. You have to eat or drink potions to prevent starvation. You have to sleep or drink potions to prevent exhaustion. When you skip time or go to jail you have to watch the clock. You dress in layers of armor just like real armor. You can sharpen your swords and axes on a grinding wheel but those are the only two weapon types you can repair that way.
This game will constantly remind you that you are playing a game unlike most AAA games that have the crafting systems working and the rendering problems fixed. If you have a high end PC it might be better for the graphics anyway. For consoles they fixed most of the quest bugs and save corruption bugs and called it done.
They put out a half finished version of the first 2 parts of the game and then patched the things that where completely game breaking. Such as NPC’s disappearing from the game and there quest markers pointing you off the map preventing you from finishing main story missions. People still get bugs where main story missions won’t complete or advance forcing players to reload previous saves and sometimes forcing complete restarts.
It is fun and enjoyable when it is working right. If your unlucky and find something that did not get fixed it can turn into a frustrating mess. You can get a copy for consoles with all the dlc for less than 20 dollars so it is worth that for all of the content alone. I don’t know what they want for the PC Royal Edition so I can’t comment on that.
