Planescape: Torment

The Good
First of all, the game has an incredible storyline. The only others that rival it are Baldur's Gate, The Longest Journey, and Deus Ex. It has deep, insightful dialogue, and the choices you make actually affect the outcome of the game.

The game is a tad more focused than Baldur's Gate, which means there's not miles and miles of terrain to explore. Much of the game takes place in Sigil, the City of Doors, center of the known multiverse. Your character is the Nameless One, a battered, bruised and scarred shadow-of-a-man who wakes up in a mortuary with no idea who he is or where he came from. Along with your trusty sidekick Morte, a talking skull, must find out your identity and unlock the secrets to your immortality.

The game's graphics are also pretty schweet, sporting some of the coolest spell effects in any Infinity-engine game thus far. The environments are beautifully crafted, creating an eerie and creepy atmosphere. The art and architecture of Sigil really make the city come alive.

I could just go on and on all day about this game, but the bottom line is that if you get it, you certainly won't regret it.

A+ -- A must-buy.

The Bad
There's no sequel!!! Other than that, not a thing.

The Bottom Line
The game is dirt cheap, so you have no excuse not to get it!!

The Good
Never before have I stumbled upon any similar game to this one. This one is strong enough to define a new dimension of adventure and role-playing genre by itself, as it borders with so many similarities to as-we-know-them isometric hack & slash RPGs (by simply being played throughout such a viewport), and with royal 3rd-person point and click adventure genre (as it has more dialogues than in any pure adventure genre I know, more text that in some pure text-only adventure, too). So what's so special about this game in general and why is it worthy spending couple of months playing it (and that's bare minimum you'll need of your time), let's see...

You're playing a big, muscled character, who simply cannot remember his name. Awaking in the mortuary, on a slab pushed here by some mindless zombie drone, you find your only help to be a babbling skull, Morte's the name. For some strange reason you yet need to discover, you are immortal (at least in general), and your wounds heal very quickly. However, your body does look like you've pased through some serious series of battles and got skewered and hacked quite a lot. Yet another thing is making you a drawback in this game, your memory. You've seen to lost it. As a matter of fact, you seem to lost a part of it every time you die. So, that's all you find out from the story epilogue, but it gets more and more complicated as you progress, with a series of sub-stories aside as well.

A typical mark of an RPG is a character skill level upgrading system. Well, here you have all the needed, charisma, which improves your look and help you when talking to strangers, or at least they're more pleasant. Wisdom, which helps you regain your memory faster, and makes you smarter, or should I say, wiser, so you get more options in dialogues with everyone. Intelligence whih can be good if you decide to orient your character into a mage. Dexterity which comes in handy for thief's hands, raw strength for a warrior class, and so on. Or, you can try making a ballance of them all, and have good part of all, but none to be the best.

Dialogues are really enlarged and I bet the script for this game was at least twice the size of some encyclopedia, but the fact is that the text isn't just babbling in the wind, it actually makes sense, all of it (well, most of it), and is funny, sad, annoying, ordinarily, and basically resembles the situation of the game to fit it in its own style. Battle system is also nicely done, especially when you have to control all six of your characters, it work efficient, more or less. Dunno if it could be done any better (except for the speed). Music is very nice to listen in the background, but isn't the stronger side of the game, especially since it's rare and you won't remember hearing more than just a couple of different songs throughout the whole game, even though your music directory on your hard will tell you otherwise.

I dunno what's happening nowadays, either we're getting too much or horror games out there, or is the graphic just getting better? Anyway, I don't think some "Ghost 'n' Goblins" or "Castlevania" or even "Alone in the Dark" could scare anyone, but today's games, hehe, man, that works even too good. Must've been the graphic and the bigger power our machines can achieve. Well, the thing I mention these is not because this game's a horror, it's most certainly not! But comes to think of it, if all those things you'll encounter by playing this game, and all things that'll be described or heard in the dialogues would be done a bit better visually, or at all, "Phantasmagoria" would seem like a child's toy comparing to the level of yuckness this game could achieve. Why am I saying this under the 'good' section? Well, because you won't get a feeling you're in some gruesome place at all, hehe, it's all so well made to show such nonesense not a bit. It really sticks to story instead of the atmosphere, and they achieved that quite wonderful, I must say.

The Bad
So, is there anything bad about this game? Well of course there is, and no, don't just tell me "every game has bad things", because that doesn't have to be true in every case, and every player can count at least two games that have no flaws in his/her eyes.

I) All dialogues (99,99999% of them) is not done by voice-acting at all, which begs to ask, why employing such a known people for voice-acting when there's barely something you may hear. Only speech you hear is when you try to take someone's armour or a weapon off, or the first sentence in their dialogue with you. And yet, game is on 4CDs, but this really looks terrible. I mean, once you hear them talking, and next 100 paragraphs you must read yourself, and not to mention there are as many descriptive talks as actual parts of conversation. I mean, Sierra did make their "Phantasmagoria" in 16 colors only just because the FMV took 7CDs, but if they removed speech, they'd at least spare one more CD on that game, too.

II) Game that comes on 4CDs and barely has any animations and speech is doing something wrong. Even though game has so many paths you can finish it, play it, and do certain things in it, should fit on one or two CDs. And as much as it may seem big, it is not. That small map you see at the start is the entire territory of the game, and all those planes that are mentioned in the game are just a few you will be, and can be at. The game is smaller in places than "Revenant" or maybe even "Nox", which both come on a single CD only, and yet both of them have more animations than this one. Not to mention fully speech. And they're all made pretty at close distance to each other, so comparing can be allowed and fair.

III) This game is dragging its butt like a wild boar who was shot with a sleeping injection. It's so slow that it's intolerable. As soon as some magic is used, or more enemies comes to the screen, it almost looks as it'll crash. The fact that this game is released three years ago, and that I was playing it on 1GHz processor with 384MB of RAM is very bad to accept. I mean, back in 1999 even best computers weren't this strong, so for who did they make that game? Or maybe they made it be equally slow on 30GHz CPU or some old 486 just as well.

IV) The entire sound and music quantity in this game is terrible. Of course, this is all shadowed by the story, but it's terrible if you focus on that thing, only. Also, if you battle, and the music is fast and furious, and then you go talking to someone, you may end up talking for half an hour, while having same annoying fast attacking song in the background. Sometimes, my only choice is to switch to some radio station until I'm through reading some dialogue. Man, how would it only be if this game WOULD have speech ;)

V) The game is too filled with bugs, as if they rushed its release before some serious must-testing. Since game constantly fills its 'temp' directory with infos about all the rooms and places you were onto, it may slow down every now and then, and that happens rather too often to neglect. Or sometimes you may just end up wihtout seeing your mouse cursor or selection lines and windowses.

I could say a few more annoyances, but I could also say a few more good things about this game, and I'm bordered with the size of this post, so this should suffice as general pointer.

The Bottom Line
This is one of those games that manages to fascinate you with its creativity level to being unbelievably good. However, no matter how much you may like it, it also gives you an open view to all of its downfalls, so you can either choose to neglect them, and keep being angry inside yourself, or you can shift your opinion about this game all the time, going from "whow, what a treasure" to "ah crap, is there anything good about this game". The thing is, that no matter how deep this story may seem at first, second or ever at fourthyfifth attempt, it is a cover for a simple story in which your main nemesis is your own life, nothing we didn't see in many other games before it, but the fact is that this game separated your life from you, so it can be shown as a physical battle, not just a battle of good and evil inside someone's mind and body.

Unless you're determined to finish this game without any subquests, and do the only things you must to finish it, you'll need couple more months for it, and being on four CDs should speak for itself about the game's length, especially since there's not much of a voice-acting in it, all text, vast army of letters. It has quite a balance of story, adventuring, strategy and action, but how well is the game balanced between thee, it's up for everyone to decide on their own. Truth is that I enjoyed immensely at some part of this game, considering it the best game ever... but then I got over it, as soon as it showed me how annoying it can be sometimes, and patience was never my virtue, unfortunately. But then again, it's hard not to like a game which gives you so many questions, is it not? ;) Find out for yourself, I can't say anything that would attract or repel you to this game. It's great, buy it. It's a crap, toss it away if you get it as a present. Nope, nothing solid like this can I offer you, nothing but to say, 'try it'.

The Good
The Pros:
* A non-linear storyline where every decision you make affects someone's life, whether it is a friend's, a foe's, your own, or even others.
* Moral, but not preachy. Evil, yet understandably so. PS:T showcases every branch of the AD&D alignment scale somewhere, and excellently so. You may freely choose from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil, and any way you choose, is the right way, demonstrating both the benefits and drawbacks of any viewpoint. Like both Arcanum and Fallout, your decisions truly become your own, and you have to live with the decisions you have made.
* Unique teammates. Where else are you going to get from a wisecracking floating skull to a chaste succubus as your party?
* Beautifully written plot. If you love to read, this game is definitely for you, as it is one of the most verbose games I have ever played (and that includes text adventures and IF games as well). In addition, it is truly a unique plot, with more well placed twists and turns than "a maze of twisty little passages".
* Excellent voice acting. Including Jennifer Hale (of KotOR fame), Charlie Adler (Buster Bunny from Tiny Toons, Red Guy from Cow and Chicken, Fallout), John De Lancie (Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation), Sheena Easton (musician), Dan Castelleneta (The Simpsons), and Tony Jay (Fallout, inXile's The Bard's Tale, Shere Khan from Tail Spin), among others, there is a good number of excellent voice actors who deliver their lines superbly.
*Unique environment. It is a step away from both Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It is a location all unto its own, taking place on the Outer Planes in the AD&D universe.
* Ingenious puzzles. Some of them are simply mindboggling, yet entirely logical. Others are very simple, but brought to a whole new light.
* Old-School quality. In this day and age of everything being First-Person perspective, Real-Time, (Massively) Multiplayer, and all-action/no-thought, it is an excellent game that embraces everything good about RPGs from 10-20 years ago.

All in all, it is an emotional rollercoaster ride, worthy of a top spot in any gamer's collection.

The Bad
Cons:
* A little buggy. Make sure you patch your copy to fully enjoy the game.
* Not enough voice acting. While the game is perfect as-is, it would've been an extra helping of icing on the cake to have more dialogue voiced-over.

There are very few things that make this game not worth playing.

The Bottom Line
You find yourself awakening on a slab in a morgue. You have no idea who you are, where you've been, why you're so scarred and tattooed, and why you can't seem to die. Your companion, a floating skull named Morte reads you a list of instructions tattooed on your back... and from there your adventure starts.

Planescape: Torment is a thinking man's RPG, where every problem has a solution- however, whether that solution involves running an errand, figuring out how something works, literally hoping and praying, or hacking and slashing everything in sight, is entirely up to you. Every situation you come across has a good number of ways to solve it, and every decision you make affects your character, as and the world around him.

PS:T is based on the Planescape AD&D setting using 2nd Edition rules, using Real-Time-with-Pause combat, and begins in the town of Sigil. You can have a wide variety of companions, and there is a good number of places to visit.

There is one all-important question that requires an answer: "What can change the nature of a man?" Truly, the answer is Planescape: Torment. It will forever redefine what an RPG is to whomever plays it.