GB Feature: Divinity: Original Sin Review

After spending hundreds of hours with Larian Studios’ Divinity series over the years and well over the 100 hours necessary to explore everything that Divinity: Original Sin has to offer, our own Steven Carter has cranked out a full review of the latest installment. A couple of paragraphs to follow:

When your party gets close enough to a hostile creature, the game switches from real-time exploring to turn-based combat, where the initiative of each character is used to determine their order in the round. Characters get a certain number of action points to use, and unlike games like King’s Bounty or XCOM: Enemy Unknown, you can do more than just move and attack during your turn. Each action costs a certain number of points, and you can perform as many of these actions as you have the points for. You can also delay your turn until the end of the current round, or you can end your turn without spending all of your points, which carries the points over (up to a maximum number determined by your constitution) to your next turn.

The combat in Original Sin is interesting and also frustrating. This is due to elemental effects, which combine together in numerous ways. As an example, if you call down a rain storm to make everybody wet, and hit your enemies with a chain lightning spell, then you have a chance to stun them for multiple turns, which is great. The problem is that if your party is close enough to the enemies, or if your party is standing in a puddle of water connected to the enemies, then they might get stunned as well, which is annoying. You can also combine fire and water together to form steam (which reduces visibility), fire and poison together to cause an explosion (damaging everybody nearby), or fire and water and electricity together to form an electrical storm (which again stuns everybody). It takes a while to work these things out and also figure out what you can do to damage your enemies without damaging yourself, and so there is a learning curve to the game.