Overwhelming because it's a party based Campaign and I'd want to create the 4 adopted orphans of the "Colwall" family all at once - (It's just a lot to do at the very beggining and I'm not the biggest fan of having to slot into an adventure where I have 3 siblings and a whole family backstory thing going on. I mean it's challenging enough for me to find a single Character that I can get into, but then having to do that again and again feels like a bit much lol. I just ended up using 3 of their presets for the rest of the team cause I got impatient).
Underwhelming because the options for the heads and such felt pretty limited, so I feel like I'm fighting against the available presets to get something interesting. The phenotypes are bare bones, the cosmetic options are alright I suppose, but I expected more from a game using 2025 Unreal. Also the default method for selecting a head is to "blend" 3 different head models together, which just feels a bit weird and unecessarily tedius to me, though I started to get something going eventually. Basically there are 12 heads to choose from for each gender, and then you can get a couple in between by blending those. It's hard to go back and change the head model though, once you're into the nitty gritty, since everything keys off those initial selections. The advanced option for Char creation can also be a bit of a chore, since it's not always obvious when you've selected all your bonuses and such. Usually I missed something and then have to backtrack. The hair is ok, nothing to write home about really. There are 20 some odd hairstyles to choose from, but most are shorter or helmet hair cuts in the styling hehe. I guess it works for an EA demo type thing, but again I was hoping to be wowed a bit more. Lvl 4 cap. Right now there are 4 voices to choose from, two for each one high and one low, English-ish and Scottish-ish. They're serviceable I suppose, but it just gives me flashbacks to the BG3 EA where they did the same thing with the voices. Here the issue is more pronounced though since it's a party of 4 being created. I was annoyed by the lack of options for what's probably the most important choice in a game like this, a good compelling set of barks!
Once I finished all that and launched into the Tutorial/Prologue section, I quickly determined that the cinematic delivery for dialog and story information is not really knocking my socks off here at the very start. Solasta II is definitely better than Crown of the Magister in that regard, but stills falls short of the BG3 EA even back in 2020, so that was a little disappointing. The models feel kinda wooden, arms at the side, not terribly emmotive, the lips when characters are speaking, that sort of thing. It just makes me wonder why try to pull off the cinemascope here if it's just going to look sorta jank calibre. By comparison the animations in-game during exploration look much better, so I almost wish there was a way to keep the camera just zoomed out in the iso god mode for everything, rather than being subjected to cutscene delivery lol.
Gameplay felt smooth though and it looked nicer once we were on the move. I enjoyed running around for a little while, since the controls felt familiar and a welcome relief from the BG3 chain thing that I struggled with for so long, but then I flamed out cause I just didn't care enough about any of the characters I created lol.
I'll probably give it another go tomorrow and see how it feels once the actual story picks up. I'm more excited for whatever toolset type thing may eventually come of it, since I imagine the promise would be for a series of quicker adventures.
Fun beating up on the Kobolds though!
