These are my impressions of the game which I finished today. Clocking a linear playthrough of just over twenty eight hours on normal difficulty. With a total play time approaching thirty five hours. These are important facts, because the game could be shorter for other players if they chose to go with the easy difficulty, or were constantly using guides, strategies, or FAQs. Bottom line take this review as someone who did not streamline the experience. Believe the reviewers this game clocks in around twenty five hours. Much less on Normal difficulty, and failure is almost a certainty. Your characters will have inadequate level, and more to the point you will probably not have the resources on hand to make it through that epic last stretch.
Infinite Undiscovery is more of a hybrid in the same vein as Mass Effect. There is definitely an element of use it or ignore it in the game design. The game has a massive amount of role playing elements perhaps unfortunately you can get by with using less then ten percent of them. All the player need do is buy new basic equipment at the shop, and keep themselves well stocked on healing potions. The player is not even required to use group commands given that the games artificial intelligence does a decent job of management. Bottom line the party members which you have minimal control over to begin with will probably do the right thing when the need arrises. That is not to say the elements are not useful or useable, but you can most definitely work your way through the game with no major downside. At most you will need to level more, or use more healing potions then you would like to.
That brings the discussion to what the game is really about the action. Non stop combat with and an insane amount of button mashing. With an adequate mixture of objectives, and the occasional difficult boss battle. Which is usually decided by target prioritization, and avoiding dangerous power moves. Pretty straight forward, and often enough pretty fun. To further cement this fact certain areas and events have situation bonuses for doing something in a particular way. With a mixture of puzzle elements. It is basically a chain of dungeons with the occasional pit stop along the way.
Basically you have a game with a lot to do, and no pressing need to do most of it. All you need to do is run through the environments kill everything with one button, use a secondary buttoon if your swarmed, and use another button to call for healing. Which in the later boss battles is almost always the most used button. You will never go into your inventory unless its absolutely necessary during combat, and more to the point it is really a desperation move usually brought on, because your healer is overtaxed, or has gone down. This is obviously a concession to the action based nature of the game. The game does not stop for the menu instead it rolls right along. However you can see the point to this. Were it not the case you would never lose. With a carrying capacity of upwards of five hundred healing potions, and magic based healing its safe to say that as long as you had potions you would never die.
This all said the game has some annoying flaws. The first of which is lost in translation or never presented. You will often be told to go somewhere, but nobody in the group tells you exactly where to go. So you will spend a lot of time edging around the map looking for a path into another area of the world. You will find items in your creation list, or in your inventory that have no rational explanation as to use. Even the achievements are vague, and I am not entirely sure why a situation bonus is never dictated at the beginning as to what to do. What use after all is a challenge if it is hidden and random.
However the biggest flaw is pit stop placement. Which are random and cruel. Sometimes you will march out of a city spending every fol you have on equipment only to arrive at another city in less then fifteen minutes, but at another point you will be run through four dungeons in a row, and have two massive boss battles at the end. This alone cost me many hours of play time. I simply ran out of supplies, and had to forfeit three hours of gameplay. Which is a real tragedy, because I was in the final battle, and that is when my supply of miraculous medicine ran out. Which meant once my healer went down the game was over.
Overall there is nothing offensive about this game. There is nothing that negatively affects gameplay. The controls are solid. The music is decent. The story is long, and has the expected twists. Shocking as it seems this game has well over an hour of cutscenes. Probably closer to two hours. There is a lot of exposition. That means the game comes off as more epic then it actually happens to be. You will find yourself thinking its been ages since that scene you saw just five hours ago. All it all well worth playing, and worthy of being played again.
Overall average 7/10
The Good
Engaging action fun, easily accessible, well paced
The Bad
Unecessary mechanics, short, thankyou for the cutscene skip we needed that.
(mostly)
