If your character happens to be magic focused, there’s another piece of the crafting system that deals solely in spells. The spell system is based on cards that carry attributes. For instance, you may have a fire card and combine it with a projectile card. Instant fireball. But now you stack in a ricochet card and that fireball suddenly bounces between enemies. There’s a whole range of modifiers and base types here to play with to create spells to your heart’s content - modifiers based on properties like fire, earth, water, air, life and death. Each spell goes into an amulet, and at any time you can have up to three amulets active.
If all this wasn’t enough customization there’s an addictive alchemy system as well. Just about every enemy has some sort of raw element yanked from its smouldering corpse - whether it’s a baboon tongue, wolf claw, etc., it can somehow be used to create a potion. You’ll want to combine these things with the plants found within the world to give you bonuses like +20% to strength, or heal 500 HP. Putting these items together in a cauldron creates a new potion (and recipe) for you to use. While there seems to be infinite combinations, combining objects that have multiple effects doesn’t automatically create a potion that takes on all of those properties. There’s a fair amount of trial and error.
As with any good Action/RPG, the meat of the game is the quests themselves. While there’s nothing terribly exciting here other than your normal “kill this guy”, “fetch that item” type of thing - there is a lot to do. The manner in which these are presented are mostly light hearted - like taking someone’s severed head to a necromancer - so it’s safe to call them interesting. One problem I kept having, however, was figuring out just what I’m supposed to do, combine this with a poor interface for the quest log and I felt like I had a lot of downtime. To make matters worse, I managed to kill my first horse within 15 minutes of riding it (who put that cliff there?) - so getting from place to place became a real chore.
The combat itself is a strange mix of incredibly satisfying and horribly boring. The satisfying part comes from the nice variety of spells, moves and options you have in combat combined with the ability to switch weapon sets on the fly. I loved being able to fire double arrows on some enemies and as they charge quickly switch up to a shield and sword and take them down. However, it can take the upwards of two minutes to take down an enemy, continually pulling the trigger over and over - it basically feels like you are whacking a stone. That’s the boring aspect.