When I left off last time, I had just finished Chapter 5. Chapter 6 was a jaunt through a tomb trying to obtain the Crystal Skull Skull of Shadows. The most interesting thing in here was a slew of really slow moving zombies. They were relatively easy to deal with, due to their slow moving nature, but they had one very annoying ability: a poison spray. Poison is definitely something I think DM did wrong... basically when you get poisoned, you slowly lose hit points until you get down to 5. While you can use an antidote to remove it, if you are fighting batches of mobs that can all poison you (it wasn't uncommon to have 10+ zombie packs), it quickly becomes pretty pointless. I basically played all of Chapter 6 at 5 health because it was just a waste of time to keep healing myself and keep getting poisoned.
Chapter 6 ended with "the big reveal" where you wake up from what seemed like certain death to find all your gear gone and that you now have some demonic powers. While it was pretty obvious that the developers intended you to use these demonic powers quite extensively, I found them useful for the 5 minutes it took me to get from where I woke up to where I got my gear back. Perhaps I underestimated their usefulness, but I REALLY don't think I did... they are only usable at melee range, you take damage while using them (refillable by killing mobs), and you don't seem to have any good blocking abilities. I dubbed them a waste of my time and moved on.
Chapter 7 was my escape from the temple and island, and was a relatively uneventful run through goblins and orcs. I did, however, happen to find one piece of new gear in a deep pool of water: the Lightning Shield.
Remember how I was complaining about the combat being ridiculously difficult? The Lightning Shield makes the combat easier... game-breakingly easier. Basically, if you have a shield equipped, you can use the right mouse button to pull it up and block. It blocks every attack. The normal shields are balanced by the fact that they have a set durability... they take took much damage and they break. If the Lightning Shield was only unbreakable, it would have been an amazing shield... but no, any enemy that attacks while you are blocking take lightning damage which temporarily stuns them. This shield made fighting so easy it almost stopped being fun. New combat steps:
1) Find enemies
2) Block
3) Kill them or disarm them with a single power swing while laughing at how stupid they are for attacking a shield with a lightning aura
4) Finish them off if necessary
5) Repeat
With my lightning shield in hand, I entered Chapter 8: a trip into the necromancer stronghold. This area introduced what was supposed to be a rather difficult new melee enemy, which turned out to be trivially easy due to my new shield. At the end of the area, I found out that the sexy niece, Leanna, was not actually dead! (I don't think there is a scale in all the world that could measure my level of unsurprise.) I was then given the first "moral" choice in the game... save her or not. I decided to save her as I figured that doing so would probably grant skill points (it did). I then fought a relatively easy spider boss, found the journal I was looking for (the VERY large book on a pedestal label "Arantir's Journal") and escaped.
Chapter 9 was my trip through town to get to the necropolis where Arantir (the evil necromancer) was apparently wreaking some sort of havoc or something. At this point, the designers seemed to have realized that combat was probably getting easy so they started throwing ridiculously large numbers of everything at me. Right off the bat I found myself fighting numerous ghouls simultaneously. This continued throughout this rest relatively short chapter. The only thing of particular note was the other "moral" choice I could make here... I could either cleanse myself of the demon taint that I had (those worthless demon powers I mentioned) or not. Cleansing myself also granted me access to all the most powerful weapons in the game. Even though those powers were VERY amazing, I chose the cleansing route. The new weapons were quite awesome. Coupled with my game breaking shield, I made short work of the rest of the chapter.
The final chapter was the Epilogue... even though it was a full chapter in and of itself. This had me fighting through the necropolis (more undead made trivial by my lightning shield and blessed sword) to get to Arantir. I did pull out my new blessed bow and use it a fair amount in here (I had raised my bow skill when I ran out of things to spend skill points on) and it was actually quite devastating... almost enough to make me want to try to play the game through entirely as a ranged character.
Anyway, the final battle with Arantir was pretty easy. I fought him for a bit, then he summoned a bone dragon (hooray for my blessed bow!), then I fought him, then he resummoned the dragon, and so forth. Afterward, the final "moral" choice to either free the bad guy or stop him (both of which you can do regardless of your previous decisions). I dropped a save point and tried both... they were equally disappointing.
My next post will be a full set of what I liked/didn't liked items, but I'll give you a small taste now: was this a great game? No... it wasn't. Was it entertaining and worth playing? Definitely.
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