Solasta II Reviews

This game is great. It plays with the DnD ruleset and I like the slow moving adventure. To be honest, it reminds me of the 1st Baldur's Gate instead of the 3rd. 5E sucks anyway, I wish they would bring Alignment back but I don't see that happening anytime soon. I also wish more background interactions existed in the city. The tavern is bland and you can't interact with the background character's walking around. I hope they add the pickpocket mechanic and more stuff to interact with. It's cool so far and leaves me wanting more especially with the lack of store inventory. Worth a try, I say buy.

I remember the day when the game companies would pay YOU to beta test their games. Now we pay THEM. I realize they tell you it is an early release, but this is seriously starting to make me think i am stupid. Imagine working at a job that you pay them to work at! This is the 3rd game i purchased for early release. Pantheon is another. So i pay them to beta test and then wait what, 1, 2, maybe 3 years for the final game to come out?! Pantheon is another review coming, but seriously they're doing a server wipe for things they should have figured out before they even pre released it!! I will hear some say, "Well they're a small team!" Well my response to that is i can think of two companies (from France in particular) who put out excellent games with a small team! ITs like get your sh$t together!! It seems like they just keep stringing us along. An example, "Ok in this update, 2 months later, you can move the eyebrows!" Anyway enough ranting, i am done buying early releases. Maybe if they offered a closed beta and they actually give you the game without paying to test it i might do that if it looks worth it. Otherwise i am going to wait until they release the final game!

very good game very similar vibes to baldurs gate 3 but honestly feel more like actual dungeons and dragons; def still a lot of bugs that need fixing idk if theres somewhere i can bug report lol but great game nonetheless really enjoying so far

I was really getting into it when I finished this early access, so I'm looking forward to the full game. It feels very promising. The character models still look a bit off, but that's understandable for an ea release. The gameplay and mechanics are already a lot of fun. The story also shows potential, but, since they've grown up together, I expected their bond to feel stronger from the start. In the Early Access build, their interactions sometimes felt a bit detached. That may well develop later in the story, but at this stage I hadn't quite bought into them as a close-knit family yet.

People arent remembering that bg3 did the same thing. they released an early access and then took a while to finish the game, then delivered. This game as it is now has a lot of promise and potential, they added character languages, better graphics, better ui. You can tell that they want to make a good game. You make all your party members like the first game and they are in the cinematics. Theres way more character customization, and even more backstory built into the game. The game is a breath of fresh air in a sea of disappointment. Taking the good parts of the first game and cranking it up to 11.

A little disappointed after 3 months. I still get stuck when heavy-crossbow-push a basilisk(keeps playing push-back animation). AND Ghosts stuck in terrain never end their turn. AND +1 DEX (from lv4 feat) becomes +1 STR for no reason after playing around for a while. AND crashes when save\auto-save in bandits' campsite at the corner of map. These bugs are obviously terrible for game experience, at least frustrate me a lot.

Played through available levels (1-4) There were things to love & to see the potential in, but there are foundational issues with the characterization & story: What deity does my cleric serve? In an (already voice-acted) cutscene he acts indifferent about faith. He's devoted his life to serving a god but never mentions religion. There are general feats that mention the creeds of different gods, but they're each just bland ability score buffs, one god for each ability. Only 6-7 gods and 2 of them are gods of justice/law for some reason. No "evil" gods, no nature gods, all just shades of paladin beige. Upon being transported by a god to a land we've never seen before, we start out by ambushing some plant people for some reason. No negotiation attempted, no apparent way to sneak around. I guess they were the wrong type of humanoid. Bad luck for them. Speaking of humanoids, those weird golems we killed earlier are called Siklas & they ARE people? The ones we don't kill on sight & instead welcome into our city as quirky neighbors glow slightly differently. Our sister just stormed off after denouncing her god to it's face, but everyone we talk to acts like they've known her for years and that she's just like, some nice lady. Making her name be a common one in a distant land our characters never heard of is a confusing choice of plot point. I wouldn't recommend buying it yet unless you just want to support early development. Not quite ready for EA.

*IN CURRENT STATE IT'S 50/50* Monumental caveat that this is Early Access and several of my gripes would be solved with higher levels unlocked perhaps - but this goes to show what should and shouldn't be in early access. Overall, huge improvement graphically over the first game. Characters are still a little funky looking but far less egregious than last game. Some of the voice acting is decent, some is awful, annoying and flippant - if I had to attempt to suffer a whole game of the way my rogue speaks I wouldn't bother. What is frustrating - as previously mentioned which may be solved by higher levelling - are some of the encounters which totally lack nuance in scaling and some locked in events. The basilisks are a slog, the entire design of the encounter is awful. You can sneak and collect what you want but you HAVE to fight them and even if your party is split you can't get back up the ledge you use to get in? Needlessly contrived to force people in an RPG to go the combat route and essentially have 1 party member running around alone to destroy the nests which when destroyed still kick out an extra enemy. Who thought that was a good idea? Then after one of the main quests, I leave and rest, only to be ambushed - fine - by hunters and terror birds. To a max level 4 party the hunters do a lot of damage but are mostly manageable (except the guy who kicks off the round and two shots my rogue), terror birds are fine to fight but taking them all out is a decent combat. Suddenly I have to chase the final hunter and lo-and-behold 4 fresh terror birds are spawned in (on replay 5 were spawned) with most of my party running low. This is my main issue with the games current state. It's made great strides but some of the encounter design is very much all or nothing, like the designers one trick is to suddenly chuck a load of extra enemies in at the end to make it 'harder' which is either ridiculous or tedious. If it stays that way much of the roleplay will be lost and it'll turn into a boring min-maxxer fest.

The upvote is conditional, as there are points about the game that I really dig but there are others that annoy me mightily. Combat is good, perhaps even superior to BG3 in that features like Ready Action are available. Might not seem like much, but it opens a range of tactical options that were missing from previous titles in the genre. The other strong point, and a point that struck me as old school AD&Dish, came up at level 3 when a sand lion decided to run. It was the last critter left in the pride and it had seen enough, so it pulled a morale failure and it sprinted. The only thing that can improve on that is an option on whether or not to give chase. I would not have, but it was either that or sit and do nothing while it got away. Poor kitty. The things that rub me center around some design and some aesthetic issues. By design, I mean that 1) You are cast into a fixed family dynamic and a cattle-chute sort of plot. Not deal breakers, but certainly limiting and 2) I really cannot justify giving a voice that could compete with James Earl Jones to a gnome, even if he is an elder or a boss or a Poobah or something in a nomad tribe of hippies who talk like they spend every waking moment in a state of glorious stonery. Sorry. I can suspend disbelief when a gnome has a voice deep enough to belong to a medium sized human, fine. But when he could have credibly auditioned to voice-act Darth Vader my immersion goes *pop* and I become irritated. This game has a long road ahead of it, but it can become great when it is fully developed and you know that the modding community will make it amazing.

I see a lot of comments about this game trying way too hard to be BG3 but, isn't that the point we're trying to get to with games development here? Having a studio take the time and effort to craft something to the best of their collective ability instead of just throw out slop with a cash shop and hope that'll tide players over until the next content drop? Whatever... tangent aside, the game takes everything from the first game and throws some spit and polish on it and delivers it to you, the player. Current early access does NOT contain all the races and classes, but there's more than enough here to get a feel for the final product. The take away here is that if you liked the first one, you'll like this one for the most part. There ARE some changes, mostly to how some of the spells work to make them more CRPG friendly (in particular, I noticed the True Strike spell wasn't absolute garbage anymore.. still kind of trash, but not completely worthless). The sound design is fairly on point for this genre and the overall UI feels like an improvement from the first game. The character creation tool at the launch of EA was a bloated, cumbersome, beast of a thing, but that has been mostly brought to heel at the time of this review as well. It's still pretty robust and can be a bugbear at times, but it's much more user friendly now. Now for the bad. Obviously it's early access so there will be hiccups here and there. The animations are obviously not 100% done (I hope). Most of it is there, but the finer details to character animations aren't there yet. There's a lot of clipping going on during cut scenes and chopping hand motions galore. Character voice overs got some polish from the first game but there are still some points that it feels like someone reading a script from a sound booth rather than organically interacting with the scene at hand. It's not as pronounced as the first game, but there is still some. Overall there's really just not much I can complain about that I can't simply attribute to early access at this point. There's only a handful of races and classes and you can only advance to level 4 at the time of this review, but that's more of an observation on the current state of the game than its' quality. Overall, if you like the first one, you'll likely get some mileage out of this one. If the cons I mentioned are a deal breaker for you THEN DO NOT GET IT IN EARLY ACCESS! If you can look past the ugly duckling to see the potential swan beneath, then give it a go. More to come as they throw on more polish and elbow grease.