Review: Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition

Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition is a wonderful port of a Windows PC RPG on both current-gen consoles, but released at a woefully bad time. Just two weeks before Fallout 4, there’s every chance that this gem will go unnoticed. That’s a damn shame.

Divinity: Original Sin began life as a Kickstarter project and was partially funded on that platform before Focus Home Interactive picked it up for the console release. A CRPG (a term I was totally unfamiliar with before playing), Divinity: Original Sin features a sprawling fantasy world that becomes entirely open to you once you make your way through the opening tutorial section.

Players play as dual protagonists who are fully customisable. You’re free to choose their appearance, race, sex, name and even personality. While eventually you’ll be able to recruit more members to your party, these two, dubbed Source Hunters, are with you for the duration. What’s more, players will be able to get a mate to come over and take control of one of the characters. A dynamic split-screen system means that your buddy can go off and do whatever they like while you take care of business. The only downside is that they might not be there when you need them.

If you play alone, you’ll be in control of both characters at all times. This includes combat and conversations. Combat is a turn-based affair and will offer stat junkies something of a dream come true. Figuring out which elemental spell will change the plane of battle in your favour and thus let you do the most damage becomes an all too common occurrence, but one that keeps you engaged time and time again. Magic is of course not necessary if you prefer not to use it, but it’s so effective and so damaging that it feels wrong not to. Additionally, since you have two characters at your disposal, it makes sense to have wildly different, yet complimentary styles. Magic seriously goes with everything.

Being a PC port, unfortunately not everything works as smoothly as hoped. The controls have been mapped superbly to a control pad and moving around the world, finding quests, talking to NPCs and taking part in combat all work seamlessly, but the inventory and menu systems. My god. What a mess.  There are menus on top of menus on top of menus and each time you drill down another layer so much information comes at you you really begin to get lost. What’s more, I couldn’t find for the life of me, a way to switch between my two character’s inventories while in the menus. I had to manually exit out, switch who I was controlling, then dive back into the sea of menus. Hugely cumbersome and often times pace destroying.

Thankfully, as an RPG, Divinity is enormous and so the pace is glacial. Expect a huge quest log that will feel as though you’re never going to finish. If that’s your kind of thing, you’ll be in heaven.

Divinity: Original Sin Enhances Edition is definitely something for RPG fans to play. It’s high fantasy, often darkly humorous, at time insanely difficult and filled to the brim with stats, moral choices, lore and combat. If you aren’t into Fallout, but want an RPG then look no further. If you are into Fallout then maybe check this out too.

Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition was reviewed using a download code on Xbox One, as provided by the publisher.

 

Review: Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition