Dark Envoy Review (Accidental Teamplay)
Introduction
For context, I started off as an engineer/adept combo, as that had worked really well for me in the demo. Long before I was done with the game I noticed I wasn't enjoying it, but that the game seemed to allow some builds I might just really enjoy, so I just kept playing to populate my mental wiki to plan my next playthrough.
I started over on the highest difficulty as two warriors, intending to play as three tanks and a healer with the enchantments that make you deal constant AoE damage based on your armor. The first thing to know here is that you spend a significant amount of time before you are actually able to enchant anything (in this case it took me 9½ hours of playtime on my savegame, not counting time lost to reloads), and most of that time you spend as only the two starting characters. I had some major hurdles to clear.
Now, for this part of the game I actually have great praise, despite my downvote. Playing as two warriors you might think it was just autoattacks and praying for good RNG and dreaming about bigger swords, but no, the battles have great tactical depth. You have four abilities, each with its own oomph, plus an environment with LoS objects and area effects that affect both you and enemies. You are limited by mana, so you can't just run from everything using abilities on cooldown, because you won't afford many abilities like that (plus mobs will of course shoot you), given you have a passive that gives you mana regen for actually hitting things. I had some very satisfying victories in the early game.
Anyway, I got the enchants, I crafted some sweet gear and enchanted it and found that the playstyle I had in mind did indeed work, and I beat the game with few major challenges. But, downvote. Why?
Reinforcements aren't fun
You engage some monsters, some red walls enclose the intended fighting area, and as you kill monsters, more spawn until you beat the encounter. This quickly gets tiresome, and I probably wouldn't have praised the early game if not for the fact there weren't many reinforcements to fight through there. Which also means, I wouldn't have enjoyed the lategame playing it like the early game either.
The worst part is the generous range of things. There are so many enemies hitting you from two screens away, which makes it annoying to gather and tank mobs. I would have much preferred a single group of enemies, no reinforcements, and a longer battle with them, all fitting nicely on my screen where I can act and react without wondering which continent I am getting shelled from. This is why I wasn't enjoying my first playthrough (I want mobs to be on my tank) but found the second one way more palatable (three tanks just throwing chains to pull all mobs to them).
The two almosts
Pausing the game almost pauses it. I don't mean the slowdown option, I mean it takes a few frames before it actually pauses, while animations smoothly freeze. It was a cool idea, good on you for exploring it, bad on you for deciding to keep it. Pause now means pause now.
Hold position doesn't actually hold position. Characters will still take a few steps to engage something. This is bad when there's some AoE effect you want the enemy to be in but not you, or vice versa. I had a particularly difficult battle in the early game that I nearly lost after fifteen minutes of tactical challenges because one of my characters decided hold position means almost hold position.
Optimizing gets exhausting
There are events that restock merchants and spawn random dungeons for you to explore, and you don't want to miss out on them, but that means constantly checking if you did trigger such an event (USUALLY it's just starting a new main story quest) and then reaping its rewards lest you overwrite them by triggering another. I once had a bonus dungeon despawn because I accepted a companion's quest.
Also, the random stats on gear. Now, I'm going to say biased RNG and you're going to say all the things I myself say to people who say biased RNG. So, in fact, I'll not say it, and just let you decide for yourself if all affixes have an equal chance of being randomed on crafted jewelry. Try to get an attribute bonus. I'd say get a specific attribute bonus, to make it worse, but actually the game design makes it fine to just get any attribute that is interesting to you and just move your points around to compensate. I can end on that good note - the game really benefits from how we can freely move stat points around (and skill points, for that matter).