Beyond Divinity is a very good RPG and sequel to "Divine Divinity", which I've never played. You don't need to have played this game's predecessor however, everything you need to know is explained along the way. It begins with the rather novel premise that, after a great battle, a demon has soul-bound a Paladin and a Death Knight together - the only thing he could truly do to torture the Death Knight, in fact. Trapped in the Demon's dungeon, the first order of duty is to find a way to escape. Then it's a case of finding a way to break the soul-binding spell... if indeed this is even possible.

The first thing to mention, I suppose, is that since you're in a demon's dungeon, and this demon has a particularly nasty streak even for his species, the environment you're travelling through is often pretty gory and unpleasant (yeah I know... since when has a dungeon ever been "pleasant"?!?). If you're a bit squeamish or looking for a happy, smiley game with lots of hearts and cute animals, forget about it. There's quite a lot of the map on screen at once (underground though anything a long way from your character is going to be too dark to see very well) and the characters are quite small, so there's not too much detail on the gore, but it's still definitely there. The humour in the game is usually quite macabre too - again, this is fitting considering the surroundings and atmosphere of the game.

You start off with your two characters, the Paladin and Death Knight, who must both be kept alive as if one dies, the other will also. You can have a party of up to 6 later in the game including summoning "dolls" to fight for you. The magic system is quite good, with a lot of scope for doing different things but without being too complicated. Battling is usually just a case of clicking your mouse on the required enemy and making sure you use a health potion when necessary, but can get more complicated. This is reflected in the fact that there are slightly different game modes - Action, Strategy or Very Easy - depending on how you want to play the game. Even in Action mode you can pause the game and thus effectively play parts of it as a turn-based game if necessary.

You can control your party members as a group or individually - the latter is often necessary to solve some of the puzzles in the game. There is a good smattering of puzzles throughout, though more than anything the game depends on careful exploration in order to succeed. This is both a positive and negative aspect of the game - the game world is detailed and there are a lot of things to find, with a plethora of potions, food items, stat-enhancing artefacts, weapons, armour etc to be found. On the other hand if you happen to miss a key - keys are absolutely vital to the game - you might be required to painstakingly backtrack until you find it as there is only one way forward, and only openable via that particular key that you missed. The environment is interactive to a fairly high degree, and sometimes object can only be picked up when something in front of them is moved out of the way. Holding down the Alt key highlights potentially interesting items (though not if they're inside a chest, barrel etc), and you'll probably finding yourself holding this key down most of the time you're playing, just in case.

There are a good number of skills paths that you can develop, and overall the character abilities development feels fairly flexible. Generating your hero at the start is quick and easy, not very in-depth but that also allows you not to specialise too much straight away. There are a number of character classes as you would expect from any RPG. The basic game play is simple enough for anyone to pick up and play, but there is a lot of depth to the game for anyone wanting to probe deeper into it.

In addition to the basic game, you can also find keys to open up "battlefields", which are almost miniature games in themselves. There are merchants and quests aplenty there - great for boosting your XP and getting better equipment. One nice aspect of the game is that, quite apart from the main game, you can generate random battlefields if you want a different challenge.

The graphics are quite nicely done despite things being rather small in scale, and some of the effects are pretty good. The music is suitably moody, and the voice acting is sometimes good. Unfortunately, more often than not the voice acting is bad and sometimes it's truly terrible. The Death Knight seems to be in desperate need of some throat lozenges and that's the least of the grips with the voice cast. Overall this detracts from the game somewhat; it's not key to your enjoyment, but since one of the aspects that the game's packaging boats about is "over 600 fully voiced characters to speak to in the game", it's a shame that it doesn't exactly impress. Waking of speech, the conversation interface is very simple and easy to use, if perhaps it feels a little limited. The conversations themselves often help you to progress in the game and are frequently amusing, so they're not a total loss despite the poor voice acting.

Overall Beyond Divinity is a very satisfactory RPG, more suited to those who like the traditional style of role playing game. In many ways it reminded me of Sacred Plus, but Beyond Divinity is broader in its scope and has a more immersive game world. What both games share is an emphasis on gameplay, and lots of it - once you get stuck into this game, it'll keep you playing for a long, long time.


System Specs

OS: Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista
RAM: 256Mb
HDD Space: 2Gb
DirectX: 9.0 or above
GPU: 64Mb

Tested on: Packard Bell iMedia J2489 (Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 processor, 1Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce 7500LE graphics card)


Beyond Divinity is available as a budget re-release on the Xplosiv label. It's a DVD-ROM only release.

Developed by Larian Studios.

Age Rating: 12 (PEGI rating)


More RPGs:

The Bard's Tale
Sacred Plus
Might & Magic VII: For Blood and Honour
Might & Magic VIII: Day of the Destroyer
Might & Magic IX

Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords


Update

I've dropped my rating to 3 stars for this - although there's a lot of gameplay in there, I found that Igot bored of it and stopped playing fairly quickly.  If you get into it I think there's a lot here to reward you, but maybe it's not a game you can get into as easily as spme others.

Recommended: Yes