izigame.me

TLDR: This is my favorite DnD-based game so far, even more than Baldur's Gate 3. Especially when you consider that it was made with a low budget, it delivers an excellent gameplay experience.
Below is a long and thorough breakdown.
Positives:
-You can build a party of 4 completely custom characters. Even BG3 doesn't let you do that on single-player mode.
-The plot and game mechanics are very accessible, even for newcomers to DnD.
-If you buy Solasta with the DLC, then it has a very deep and robust character creation system. (If you just buy the base game, it's much more limited.)
-Very intuitive, vivid, and easy-to-navigate menus.
-Very smooth and clear combat.
-Solid level design, in terms of both the physical layouts and the imagination/concepts.
-GREAT soundtrack. I almost never notice soundtracks tbh, but during big battles in Solasta I did notice and appreciate the music.
-The graphics are solid, but for some reason they're set to "Low" by default. So if the game looks last-gen to you, adjust the graphics settings.
-Solasta isn't too bloody. Baldur's Gate 3 has an EXTREMELY gruesome plot with a truly overwhelming amount of gore all the time. (Even druid wildshapes in BG3 use an explosion of guts when they transform. Like... why????) By contrast, Solasta has more of a "PG-13" level of violence.
-Even though each character is custom, you do get small origin story quests based off which profession/background you choose for yourself. That's a neat bit of worldbuilding.
-Very funny and relatable voicelines during combat. Characters will quip about what's happening, in a way that probably reflects how the player feels in real life. Like if an enemy keeps blocking attacks with magic, someone from your party will yell, "Stop DOING that!" It made me laugh, because I had indeed been thinking that exact same thing.
-There are really interesting game mechanics that I've never seen anywhere else. For example, you can make money off all the loot that you DIDN'T pick up during a quest. The game has a clan of Scavengers who will retrieve all the loot you left behind, sell it for you, and give you a cut. This saves you the trouble of looting the body of every random bandit. ALSO, whenever you loot a chest, the game shows you all loot available in like a 15-foot radius. So you can loot multiple sources at the same time, instead of having to individually select each chest.
-There are elements taken from XCOM and Oregon Trail. E.g. In combat, you can benefit a lot from cover and from setting up ambushes; and when you travel around the world map, you have some resource-management options.
-The final battle of the base game is fun and satisfying.
-The "Palace of Ice" DLC has a very heartfelt tone to it. It takes place after the plot of the main game, and it does a beautiful job of making you feel like you've earned a tougher adventure because of how you saved the world previously.
-The DLC also has a higher level cap than BG3. BG3's level cap is 12, while Solasta's DLC lets you go all the way to 16. You get way cooler spells/abilities at those higher levels.
Negatives:
This is an indie game that was obviously made on a much smaller budget than BG3. (For context, it literally had a Kickstarter campaign for some of its funding.) As a result, it has all kinds of unpolished quirks. If Solasta had been made with the budget of BG3, I think it would've been better than BG3 in many regards. (And it does give SPECTACULAR value for how indie the budget was.) As it is, although I do personally prefer Solasta over BG3, I recognize that BG3 is a much more polished game. Specific examples of how Solasta is unpolished:
-There are a lot of times when the subtitles don't match the spoken voicelines.
-You can't multi-class, unless you install a mod.
-The lore is very poorly explained because (I would assume) the studio didn't playtest the game enough. Solasta NPCs will often mention people or places that no one ever introduced or explained properly to the player. (I'm sure the writers had the story clearly organized inside their minds, but never checked to make sure it would be clear to anyone else.)
-The main story abruptly ends much sooner than you think it will. I suspect that the studio ran out of money during development, and had to skip to the finale earlier than they'd originally planned.
-You don't have nearly as much freedom of choice as in BG3. You can't interact much with the environment to stack crates into makeshift towers, or things like that. You also can't do creative things like casting Resurrection on dead NPCs to bring them back to life--you can only cast those spells on your party members. Even the few quests that have choices are very linear, where the choices rarely seem to matter and often lead to a similar result.
-The game's skill-tree is full of skills you can never use. No, really, the game literally has a warning system that alerts you when you're devoting skill points to something that has no effect on gameplay. It says (paraphrased): "We included this skill in our game because the skill exists in tabletop DnD, but it won't actually do anything for you here. There are no quests or game mechanics where the skill serves any function." I guess customizing the tabletop DnD system would have taken too much time and money.
-If you're not experienced with DnD, and you don't know how to make a well-rounded team of characters, then you might actually suffer from the freedom of being able to build a fully custom 4-person party. There are a lot of levels (especially boss fights) that will be brutally difficult if your team isn't strong.
-The game's loading screens are unusually long.
-The fast travel system is kind of obnoxious. Sometimes you have to manually walk across a long local area in order to reach a spot where you're allowed to finally enter the fast travel map.
-The DLC introduces a game mechanic where your characters are negatively affected by cold weather. It's annoying and arbitrary, and sometimes bugged.
-Like with the base game, the DLC has a kind of abrupt ending. Its villain comes from out of nowhere. (In general, the twists in this game are arbitrary with no clues/setup, and so they feel random and unearned.)
Overall I had a lot of fun playing this game, and will probably play it again later with a different party. (I think the ideal composition is Rogue/Cleric/Fighter/Wizard.) The sequel is in Early Access now, and I hope Solasta 2 will fix any issues and be even better than the first one!