It may have been utterly outshone by Dragon Age: Origins, but that doesn't really insult Divinity II: Ego Draconis in any way. After all, the competition was something beyond normal opponents. Still, Larian Studios managed to create a very interesting, role-playing game. Ego Draconis is part of the Divinity series, with previous installments like the first Divine Divinity and its direct sequel, Beyond Divinity. It's an action RPG set in a mystical world, where dragons, an ancient race, are taking thier final breath.

The game has several standard RPG elements, but has certain distinct features as well. You get your moderate character customization, like gender, face and hair style, but these can be changed along the way. Known for getting into trouble a lot, Dragon Slayers often make use of the service of an illusionist to change their appearance, and even though we are told that these minor modifications will get us out of a lot of otherwise tricky situations, we are warned that changing our sex may have unforeseen consequences. And we can imagine quite a few ourselves.

Other than that, the game lets you start your journey down three paths, that of the warrior, the ranger and the mage, but these are not the distinct paths that one might expect. During the tutorial, you are told that you must choose a path and you are given one skill out of each specialization to try out against some low-level foes. When leaving your initiation ritual, you can only have one of the three possible class skills assigned, so you would assume that this is your class choice, but it's not. All skills from all classes are available to you, to no obvious detriment. You can choose the path of the warrior and, from there on, invest all you skills in archery, or magic. The character is build completely without restrictions.

As for the rest of the game, things seem pretty good. The story is decent enough, and even promises more as you advance through the title. The side quests are nice and most of them involve multiple ways by which you can solve them. There's also a moral choice involved with most of them, but there are no obvious consequences involved. The quest rewards, as well as all the other loot, are completely random, so it's not like siding with one faction of the quest will guarantee you a sought-after reward. Of course, this makes item hunting very exciting, and you'll find yourself often reloading the game, only to defeat a boss once more, in hopes of better loot.

The game has a nice dose of humor, with a lot of snappy comebacks and witty, snake-tongued dialog options. A very nice feature of the title is the mind reading, by which you can extract additional information from NPC. This is not strictly used to advance quest plots, as you can use it to learn the location of secret caches and the passwords to access them. It can also offer no actual reward, except for the voyeuristic pleasure of invading someone's privacy. However, mind reading doesn't come for free, and every time you peer into someone's inner thoughts, it costs you some of your experience.

The combat is a little bit chaotic, and you can win or lose a fight just as easily, without any apparent reason. The skills that are made available to you are also pretty unbalanced, and aren't at all as efficient as you might think. A maxed-out weapon mastery offers little bonuses, and some skills seem completely useless. For a good portion of the game, you'll come across all sorts of items that will fill your limited inventory space, even though you can't really use them for anything.

Eventually, it's revealed to you that, somewhere along the story, you will gain access to artisans that can use them to produce weapon enchantments, alchemical potions and an undead combat companion, but these things could have been explained earlier. Even after some ten hours of gameplay, I am just about near the point of getting these things, so I can't offer too much information about them. But I'm bound to sink several more hours into the game today, so I'll have more details for you by this time tomorrow.