After playing the demo the game feels a lot like the Dungeon Siege series and the Fable series had a baby, and miraculously the baby had none of the crippling genetic defects that the Fable games have. I mean all of this in a good way. And then Dragon Age/Mass Effect came in and gave the baby a crib with the conversation system.
The combat (played the 360 demo) was very similar to Fable with lots of pointing the stick in the direction of the enemy and mashing buttons at them. However, the game has more abilities than Fable or Dungeon Siege.
The set up for the controls is nice: you have three active, and they are activated by pressing X, Y or B. Holding L lets you use defensive abilities, and holding R lets you use souped-up versions of the otherwise mapped abilities that use powers. Doing this uses up a power slot, which are recharged by whacking enemies. That part is almost exactly the same as the powers from DS2, except that they are powerful versions of otherwise existing abilities. I like it! It's mindless actiony enough like the original but with just enough strategy.
Elements of the controls took a little bit getting used to, like RB being the "use/action" button. Never seen that before! But no matter.
Items and equipment wise it's same old DS looting system. Items and gold fly out of chests and enemies like always.
Graphics are nice, reminiscent of Fable again, but I like them. Dungeon Siege games have always had pretty interesting environments.
Skill & RPG elements are very different. Gone are the four skill bars of Melee, Ranged, Nature M. and Combat M. Instead there's a three-step process in leveling. First, you pick a new ability. Second, you upgrade an ability in one of two ways. And then third, you upgrade some passive effects. Over all it's nice and effective. Both of the two characters you can play have totally different skill trees.
Also of note are the different stances. Seems like every character has two different playstyles. Lucas has a sword-n-board style which is defensive and has lots of incapacitating skills, and then a two-hander stance which has aoe and had a lot of damaging skills.
What I didn't like were:
The voice acting and character models for the two playable main characters sucked. Both of their voice acting were as stiff as boards. And Lucas looked like some kind of emo kid. I really, really hope character models are customizable.
Also, the frame rate was crappy, especially in town. I'll have to see if that's any better on the PS3 demo (which is what I'd likely buy the game for.)
