Finally finished Tainted Grail, final playtime 45 hours. That's quite a lot for a AA RPG. Not much to say that I haven't before, it's very good. And the ending manages to stick the landing, offering up multiple options with agreeable viewpoints on all of them. The epilogue is surprisingly extensive, and gives a lot of thought about how to do another playthrough. I only unlocked less than half the achievements, and judging by their unlock conditions a lot of them seem to be about hidden stuff you have to go out of your way to seek out.
The game is absolutely plagued at every turn by its biggest flaw, and that's its balancing. Past the halfway point of act 2 at the very latest the game becomes so easy that calling it a cakewalk would be an overstatement of its difficulty. Pretty much everything I just mowed down with a ridiculous crit rate while ducking and weaving around enemy attacks. And I didn't even try to optimize my build, I just picked what suited my playstyle. After a point I stopped even doing stealth archery because barging into every encounter made them go by faster. The generous stamina system, the slo-mo power, and the very strong bonuses you can easily get from the skill trees end up breaking the game in combination. Rewards or new equipment cease to excite, because you're insanely overpowered anyway. It kind of reminds me of a TTRPG campaign where the DM is way too generous with rewards and bonuses, and as a result ends up kind of scrambling to create any kind of challenge.
Not that the numbers or gameplay systems are the only sources of imbalance: the AI is straight up laughable, and flat out broken at times. I ended up cheesing multiple boss fights by just getting the dumb bastards stuck on level geometry, and plinking them to death with a zillion billion arrows. Dodging attacks is mostly ridiculously easy, making defensive skills or armor feel borderline pointless even on the hardest difficulty. When there is actual challenge, mostly in boss fights, it's usually of the frustrating kind: it feels like their movesets are not properly designed for a first person perspective, often coming out with attacks faster than you can react or gauge distance.
The game also majorly loses steam in the third act. It's set pretty exclusively in snowy mountains, which is a very boring environment to traverse for 10 hours. The main storyline screeches to a halt as the game basically just chucks a bunch of sidequests in your lap, and these aren't small sidequests either: they're more like mini-acts of their own with whole casts of characers. They're enjoyable enough, but it's hard to think of a better way to ruin the sense of buildup and escalation. But I suppose it's just something you have to take with a game of this budget.
Like I've said previously, this is a seriously excellent game from a first-timer studio. The core is rock solid, the game's problems lie more with budgetary constraints and things that can be fine-tuned with better QA. This is like a great first album by a rock band: full of energy and passion, clearly rough, but also full of promise that's just begging to be fully cashed in on.
