Recent reviews by Madmail

+Excellent, deep turn-based combat that provides room for emergent gameplay and different strategies. There are no random encounters and each fight is deliberately crafted by the developers. Despite playing D:OS for over 100 hours, I never once found the combat repetitive or tedious, which is an impressive feat considering the tendency in turn-based games for the player to develop a methodical, unexciting approach to most fights.

+Long campaign that can last 100+ hours and heavily rewards exploration. Most quests are interesting; no generic fetch quests. There is minimal handholding and you will have to talk to NPCs, read everything and search everywhere to have an idea of what to do next.

+Well implemented "morality" system where choices are not clear-cut black and white, and where most decisions have meaningful consequences. For example, you can kill almost anybody in the game and steal almost anything, but you will have to deal with the repercussions of that character's death or getting caught. Most quests are very open-ended and there are multiple ways to resolve each one.

+Playing on Hard, I found the difficulty to be challenging but fair. The enemies generally have access to the same abilities as you, and at no point did I feel that the computer was being cheap. Generally speaking, most of the classes are well balanced, and while some are stronger earlier in the game, other builds become more useful later on. You will have a better experience if you try to role-play and not powergame, i.e. don't try to min-max optimize your characters and builds and in return the fights will be more fun and more rewarding. I would have liked for the bosses to be a bit more difficult, though. I found that only two or three were significantly more difficult than the normal enemy encounters.


-Despite my earlier comment, some game mechanics are poorly balanced or implemented, which can lead to exploitable/ annoying situations. Because the class system is so flexible, there is no real need to specialize (unless roleplaying) and there isn't much replay value as a result.

-The item mechanics in this game aren't that good. The inventory system is clunky, especially if you have a tendency to hoard crafting ingredients and consumables, like I do. Not a fan of the randomized loot. Some chests will be guaranteed to give some high level loot, but the stats on those items will be randomized, meaning you can get a crap rare item or an excellent one from the same chest on 2 different occasions. More unique items would have been better. In addition, aside from a few recipes, the crafting system is a bit gimmicky.

-Story was interesting at first, but it changes in scope too quickly for my tests, and I could not empathize with the characters after a certain point. Some people disliked the light-hearted writing; I personally did not have an issue with it but it is worth pointing out that the writing has more of a humorous tone than a serious one.


Overall I would rate this game 5/5 (not implying it is perfect). This was one of the best games to come out of 2014 and it was a great addition to my library. If you're a fan of "classic" style RPGs, I would highly recommend this game.