Played a few hours (about 3 hours or so) of Sword Coast Legends last night. Some thoughts.
If you like the fast pace of Diablo games; liked the DAO and NWN 1 & 2 play-style (control a whole party of 4 and you have BioWare-style strategic pause); are okay with them doing different things with the D&D Ruleset and not entirely sticking strictly to it (i.e. we're using cool-downs here for skills and magic, not mana); and liked Icewind Dale (this game is very combat-based and the game also does feel quite at times linear, even though they do have mini side-quests all over the place) - yeah, you'll like this.
If you want to make it more turn-based - well, go into the rules and change Pause settings. The game can auto-pause at numerous different times, if you want to. Seriously, you can set it to auto-Pause (for tactics purposes) for all kinds of reasons. So many boxes to tick or not tick, to tailor-make the pausing for to you. You could set it to pause when you find a trap/hidden area, find enemies, after you take any hit, enemy takes any hit, when you're close to knock-out/death, when an enemy is close to knock-out/death, when you get knocked out/die, when an enemy gets knocked-out/dies, a queued up skill ends its session, when you lose a tactic from your queue b/c of an interrupt, and all kinds of stuff. If you enable everything, you can really turn this game into a turn-based game, pretty much. Me, I pretty much have it set on both close-to-death and when enemies die for both sides - as I want to keep, for the most part, that NWN series type of feel and also don't feel like jamming on pause at those times in these type of games when I always normally hit pause.
You can set your character's alignment, looks, skills (some of them), give it a set background (i.e. pirate, noble, criminal, etc), and even write in more on the background when you create your character. Feels very old-school, like the older RPG's, TBH. What you decide for background, race, and traits can give you special bonuses, weaknesses, and/or trade-offs.
When questing, sometimes you'll be given a choice and/or a stat-check on your stats, skills, and/or whatever else. It doesn't seem like some choices really cause any results to be too much different in the game's path and/or game-world, at least so far. A lot of the choices seem often unimportant to what the main story is shaping to and/or how the game shapes the path of main quest - but might cause a NPC to not be around; you might cause some enemies who don't get along w/ other enemies to...well, go to battle; and/or other things that don't seem to matter that match in the actual main story. Nothing truly spectacular so far, on that front. Some choices and dialogues don't even seem to matter much, TBH - your choice might not even matter and you get the same response, no matter what; so at least the choice of illusion is there, I guess, right?
The graphics get the job down, more or less. There are some cool cut-scenes, but they are mostly done in the old-school NWN and BG style of cut-scenes. Don't expect close-ups, lip-syncing, or stuff of that sort to be special - this game is very old school in style, like BG series and NWN1. They graphics are decent, for this type of game. Things look decent here - but this game feels like it could've and should've launched a few years ago, which was certainly a complaint many had when NWN came out. Not a big deal, though - as we've got more Indie games and games of this old-school ilk and style coming out. Performance on my GTX 970 with everything maxed-out at 1440p is pretty much 60FPS w/ no hits when in-doors and anywhere from 45-55 frames when outdoors. It's running fine IMHO, basically.
I have to say, what really stands out here to me is the music and voice-acting. Inon Zur's score is fantastic and epic as can be, as you might expect from him, given his pedigree. The voice-acting, dialogue, writing, and banter b/t party members also has tons of personality, character, charm, and comedy and this stuff is very good to excellent...even despite how dark this game can be with its story & character stuff. It doesn't seem like the story is anything spectacular or special or deep - but if you're familiar with a lot of traditional fantasy, it certainly won't be unwelcome; it'll feel, more or less, like a homecoming.
SCL feels like a homecoming to me with the few modern-day twists thrown in (i.e. cool-downs instead of mana and newer graphics, despite using old-style of Infintie Engine & NWN gameplay). This feels like a return to the classic style of Icewind Dale, NWN1&2, and a mix of Diablo (if you keep the game's combat at a fast pace by not throwing all of the Pause settings on). While it might not be as great as those games b/c those games before it really set a high bar and high standard back then - well, here's the thing: the game's definitely a solid game, from what I've played so far. If you love those kind of games, then you'll probably at least actually like this.
I do need to give it more time, but this seem like a a steal at $5 if this game doesn't fall apart later on. So far, I'm enjoying this one quite a bit.
ing crap on moblie.
