Wonderful story, great game (Planescape - Torment (PC))

Member Name: defiler

Product:	Planescape - Torment (PC)
Date:	02/03/01 (38 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great storyline, party members have character, control over how to play your main character

Disadvantages: Lots of text if that bothers you, not the most stable game

When I first saw this game for sale in the shops I was a bit hesitant as to whether or not to buy it, while I had liked baldur's gate I had never finished it and in fact got fairly bored with the game. Within minutes of playing Planescape: Torment however I really got drawn into the story, it was the best I had ever seen in any game for a long time and really kept me interested until the very end. I really hope a sequel is made.

The game centres around a character known as the nameless one, you wake up with no memory of who you are, yet other people seem to know who you are. As you progress through the game you gain more and more memories as well as meet more people who know you, as each memory is unlocked you may gain new abilities or simply gain more insight into your character. I really enjoyed the way that new abilities were unlocked by simply remembering them as it seemed a fairly unique idea.

The game is very text based, the amount you have to read while playing is quite large so people who get bored easily with heavily story-based games will probably get bored of this easily, the combat system isn't the best you will ever have seen either although I personally found it fine.

One of my favourite things about this game was the variety of ways you could actually choose to play the main character, rather than being stuck on a single character class you could easily switch between fighter/mage/thief, you also get more choice over how your character advanced as you advance in level as you get more control over what abilities to improve than you seemed to in baldur's gate or similar games. I also enjoyed the way that any alignment was playable rather than games where being evil is very hard or nearly impossible.

I also found the game more replayable than certain games, there are many paths you can take in certain encounters and the encouragement to go back and try the paths you previously didn't take are good,
the fact that there are less possible party members means that each one seems to have more character and you feel you "know" them far more than I do in most rpg's.

My only complaint would be about the stability, after playing for a while the game seemed to slow down quite a bit, something which I and other people noticed, it also seemed to crash on occasion much like baldur's gate seemed to for me. However this is a minor problem really that is soon ignored.

Overall I would say buy this game and play it as soon as you can, provided you enjoy the storyline you should love the game.

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