The game doesn’t blatantly give everything away, though there are always hints when you look long and hard enough. Some quests and dungeons contain puzzle elements which will challenge you, or at the very least put your brain in gear. To give some examples, take these quest titles: “Red Ore Alert”, “The Temple of Doom” and “Ghostbuster”. The quests in Divinity 2 are varied, and some of them are obvious references to other games or series. I absolutely loved this, as I normally suffer from ‘chronic re-rolling’ of characters in any RPG. Later in the game you get the ability to reset all skills for the sum of 5,000 gold, allowing you to rebuild your character in a more appropriate way. The explosive arrow is particularly enjoyable, and does exactly what it says on the tin: cause (a lot of) AoE damage on impact. You can complement this with anything you wish – in my case I initially went for the Summon Ghost ability, which allows you to summon a ghost which casts healing spells on your character. Poison arrows, stun arrows and passive dps increase make for a pretty powerful ranged character. Personally, I went mainly down the ‘Ranger’ path as archery is very satisfying in Divinity 2. The system as a whole is incredibly flexible and allows you to build pretty much any type of character you wish. The nice thing about this system is that the abilities you unlock at the start of the game still have merit much later on as well as they scale very well with your level and the power of your opponents. Each skill initially has up to 5 ranks, but as you progress through the game this limit can be increased much further. Each skill, as well as skill ranks, have a specific level requirement which ensures you unlock the more powerful abilities later in the game. The game doesn’t really follow the standard class format of most RPGs rather it lets the player choose from all the skills in the game, in all different class trees at any point in time. Suffice it to say, the story involves Dragons and you will be heavily involved with these powerful creatures. I don’t want to give away too much as the story is very entertaining and has a few excellent plot twists along the way. It’s a very enjoyable area which explains that you are a Dragon Slayer in pursuit of slaying the last of the Dragon Knights.

This section sets the tone for the story and lets you experiment with some of the basic gameplay before being thrown into the game in earnest.

The game starts in what most would describe as a ‘tutorial village’, which isn’t very large.

Divinity 2 engine tutorial