'Solasta: Crown of the Magister' Review

 I'm angry.

So this is the very first time I'm doing this, but that's only because I've never quite been stabbed in the face quite so soundly by a video game. For the first time ever, I'm going to be doing this review of 'Solasta: Crown of the Magister' without having finished the game. I know: shocker! But to be clear, I very much wanted to finish this game, I dedicated 45 hours to it's main campaign and enjoyed a lot of my time. In fact, I was in the final act and about two or three quests away from starting the final encounter. Then I went to have dinner, the game crashed whilst loading onto the main menu, and when I came back- every single one of my saves were corrupted. I don't think I've pressed that point hard enough, so allow me to unpack that a bit more. I kept nine separate save files that had several hours between them in totally different locations. And they all corrupted. Simultaneously. That is, quite honestly, the worst corruption I've ever experienced in a video game ever. I maintain multiple saves in case of corruption, and to lose nine saves at the same time when I wasn't even engaged into a single save yet... shocking. Utterly, embarrassingly, shocking. 

But I did play the game, extensively before the most ludicrously ridiculous bug ever ignored by a development team ruined my day. (I'm by no means the first person to encounter this bug and I've seen reports dating back over a year and a half.) And though I'm absolutely not starting a new playthrough again just to see my next 40 hours get spontaneously corrupted despite my best effort, I do think I've experienced enough of what the game had to offer to present my opinion today, for everyone. But bear in mind that I'm not going to let that unfortunate circumstance influence my every thought on the game. (But it's definitely going to take it into consideration come results time, just you wait and see.) Alas, this does mean I can't address the full breadth of the story for the main campaign for this game. So take that for what you will.

I was somewhat misled by 'Solasta: Crown of the Magister' when first I saw it. What I anticipated to be a standalone CRPG game gave me pause once I saw one of the difficulty options rather ominously tell me to 'pick this only if you're familiar with the ruleset'. "The Ruleset?" I gawped. "There's a rule set? Nobody told me this!" Concerns flooded my mind as I conjured phantasms of impossibly intricate and impenetrable tomes of rules, lore and sub-rules spawned from some long forgotten Table-Top RPG I'd never heard of. Some 'Solasta' of the deepest antiquity. I tabbed of the game out to scan across wiki whereupon I discovered "Oh. It's just based on DnD 5th edition. Literally the most well known 'ruleset' thanks to the recent DnD explosion. Way to get me worked up over nothing!" Yes, Solasta's dev team, Tactical Adventures, acquired a license from Wizards to use 5th edition rules for their game and they took that allowance as far as they could.

Solasta, at it's heart, is not actually fully realised as a standalone CRPG adventure. Actually it serves as more of a framework whereupon standalone adventures can be built. These is a core campaign and story to the game 'Crown of the Magister', but even playing through the extended narrative as much as I did, I felt more a a sense of that story being an 'introduction' to the sorts of resources available to custom creators out in the world. (Making use of their handy 'Dungeon Creator' toolkit which comes with the game.) The setting is forgettable and very standard, the voice acting is moderate and uninspiring, the narrative progression is obvious and lacks surprise or tension, you can tell that the systems which power the gameplay of Solasta are the stars of the package, and from that perspective, Solasta does hold up it's end of the CRPG promise well.

Fashioned in a turn-based skin, the gameplay of Solasta faithfully translates the classes, spells, and actions of the 5th Edition DnD rule-set to a video game medium with some interesting innovations that occasionally trumps even what Baldur's Gate 3 are currently doing with their take on the same ruleset. (Albeit in some very small ways) Specifically, the 'reaction' system in Solasta allows individual player choice for when a reaction is triggered, preventing the annoying 'waste of a reaction' problem present in Baldur's Gate 3's auto-react system. Combat carries the weight of dice rolls to each decision, and building your character in such a way as to influence those dice rolls with the correct proficiency bonuses is an art familiar to most everyone who partakes in DnD.

In fact, I think Solasta is a bit too faithfully married to the DnD framework in parts. Whereas Baldur's Gate 3 twists and rethinks it's systems in order to make the gameplay more fun in the game they've created, Solasta remains rigid to what the rules say. The game has vertical surfaces you can climb, but there's literally no reason to interact with them without any roll bonuses whatsoever or height advantages whatsoever. Damage AOE effects are tallied at the end of rounds, like the rule book says, which means that certain moves like 'Flaming Sphere' are functionally useless when the AI simply gets in the hits it wants to on your characters and then simply just moves out of the narrow AOE effect without taking any damage whatsoever. Managing how much 'Rations' you have for each trip is somehow a consideration despite the fact that every merchant sells rations for stupidly cheap and you're never going to run low. So what's the point of translating that system in the first place?

The redundancy stretches even to the character creator, wherein the toons you construct are presented with character creation options that have no bearing in the main campaign, as the creator itself will admit. Backgrounds with no related quests, proficiency bonuses to skills that will never be called on, Language checks for cultures that are never met in the game. The only reason they're still available to be picked is because that's how they appear in the DnD handbook, and this game has it's sights on being an engine for player created stories and, I assume, the occasional DLC campaign released by the team. (They already released their second campaign. Not that I'll ever play it. Can't really see the point of risking another forty hour time waste from a broken game.)

With a great selection of races and classes in it's base product, Solasta does provide an expansive suite of play experiences as any faithful CRPG should, although one should be aware that not every base handbook DnD class and race has been implemented. Additional classes have all be added with price tags as DLC, further leaning towards their 'this is an engine more than a game' approach to content production and pricing. However, there is a certain lacking aspect to this game's design, and approach to being an RPG, that many fans of the genre will find disappointing. Though it may be a consequence of their design direction, there's a very rigid line of pre-written, yet player created, playable characters. There are no designed companions, no hand-written backstories and no impactful role playing decisions that shift the face of the story in a major fashion. There are a group of NPCs you create with mild guiding personality traits that slightly shift their attitude in conversations that already have a fixed progression path.

RPGs have almost because synonymous with branching narratives over the years, so seeing a CRPG with a very linear design path feels almost sacrilegious. Not that the world of Solasta feels especially interesting for the player to want to influence it's particulars. It's just a fairly standard 'Post-Cataclysm' set-up with a irredeemably-bad evil race of Lizard people (Huh, is this a Deus Ex adaptation too?) and some vague talk about 'gods' that is handled in a very hands-off fashion by the writers. There's not a significant amount of depth so I'm not personally affronted by the very 'kill the obvious bag guys' set up of the narrative. Dialogue speech checks appear to be used exclusively for avoiding fights here and there, and sometimes those checks don't even fully negate these encounters. Quite simply, the focus of the Solasta development was in making the combat feel right, story feels like an after-thought; and does that combat feel right?

Yes, actually, when it's working as intended the combat feels every bit as fun as it should. The very nature of DnD means that players will have great dynamic potential that really opens up as the player levels expand, and though there's nowhere near the level of dynamism and elemental elasticity that Baldur's Gate 3 works with, Tactical Adventures gave us just enough to keep the gameplay feeling fun throughout the length of their campaign, and even leave room for inventive thinking at times. There are environmental exploits in some locations, such as stalactites that can be shaken to fall on enemies, but the rigid camera often makes it hard to see these outright. And certain AOE attacks like 'Fire Wall' do work on multiple levels of elevation, but an unprepared visual effects engine doesn't always present that. (Be careful about not accidentally burning your own adventurers to a crisp like I did a couple of times.)

My only significant gripe with the combat of Solasta in it's main campaign is the balancing, which fails to really stretch the limits of the player like Baldur's Gate 2 did in it's major moments or like Pathfinder: Kingmaker does every other encounter. I was rarely sweating for any reason other than "This is my fourth fight straight without being able to do a long rest and recharge my spells; what the heck is this level design?" And then there's the random travelling encounters that just feel utterly unbalanced. One such encounter had me fight two adult Remorhaz and one baby, a brutal encounter to be sure; whereas the 'climax' of a 'legendary quest' from a good 5 hours later on, presented me with two baby Remorhaz and one adult. Why is the random encounter objectively more difficult than the 'legendary quest finale' encounter? It just doesn't make sense! I heard there's even a 'Black Dragon' random event, and I hadn't even gotten the chance to fight an actual dragon throughout my entire playthrough, I wonder who made these encounter choices.

In summation, Solasta does a great job in presenting the areas which it attempts to present, providing it's players with solid CRPG turn based combat and a decent amount of gameplay diversity that will take you up to Level 12. (I don't believe their levels travel the whole way up to Twenty.) Everything around the package seems to have suffered from their singular devotion, however. The story of the 'provided campaign' is largely mediocre, the setting is bland, the vocal performances will all pass you by, and even more than a year after launch the game suffers from utterly game destroying bugs like a sudden total data corruption. If it wasn't for that last point, I would just about be able to squeeze a recommendation out on the very narrow basis that you are not looking for anything more than a systematically robust DnD game, but how can I recommend a game you need to play on eggshells for fear that a rogue bug might jump you and ruin everything? You're rolling a D20 everytime you start the game, knowing that a single crit 1 will crash and destroy all your progress! With all that in mind, I can't really give Solasta any higher than a C Grade on my arbitrary rating system, which is dragged back down to a C- because of my personal gripes with having lost 45 hours of work. I think that, bugs non-withstanding, a single knock-out campaign could take advantage of this significantly strong framework and deliver a simply fantastic experience. But until that campaign is made, and Tactical Adventures fix their horrific bugs, Solasta is not a CRPG to rush to amidst the sea of alternatives. Play 'Pathfinder' instead.